Hybrid Documentary and Beyond 1003017142, 9781003017141

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: hybrid documentary and beyond
Part I Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth
1 What are hybrid documentaries?: re-contextualising the hybrid documentary in theoretical contexts, challenging the non-fiction–fiction definition
2 Documentary and the obsession with definitions: identifying the traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents
3 What is the truth?: beyond the non-fiction–fiction blur, using philosophical, ethical frameworks to communicate the truth in hybrid documentary and beyond
Part II Praxis: why make hybrid documentaries?: methodology, ethics and impact
4 A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops
5 Collaboration: exercises, problem-solving, script development, design as metaphor, form as content. The impact of workshops on graduate careers
6 Subjects in hybrid documentaries: casting, collaboration and co-creation. Whose story is it? What happens when hybrid documentaries behave badly and compromise the veracity of the content and integrity of the subjects? Are there checks and balances? Should there be? What are the experiences of participants/subjects of hybrid documentary?
Part III Beyond: contemporary hybrid filmmakers; interviews with contemporary documentary makers working in hybrid documentary forms
7 Explorers: Late 20th-century innovators in form – Errol Morris, Brian Hill
8 Adventurers: 21st-century hybrid documentary makers – Lynette Wallworth, Anna Broinowski, Robert Greene
9 New visions: Acclaimed debut hybrid documentary makers – Payal Kapadia, Kirsten Johnston
Index

Citation preview

Hybrid Documentary and Beyond

Hybrid Documentary and Beyond  explores the theories, production techniques, ethics and impact of hybrid documentaries. Often described as simply a blend of fiction and non-fiction, the author challenges this definition of hybrid documentary through an interrogative examination of not only why and how they are made, but also of their real-world impact upon subjects, filmmakers and audiences. Combining theoretical analysis with real-world case studies and interviews with luminaries in the field she effectively demonstrates that hybrid documentaries can be creatively liberating for all involved and why their appeal and impact are growing globally. Offering a fresh and bold new perspective on hybrid documentary that goes far beyond the existing canon on the subject, this book will be an essential resource for practitioners, scholars and students working in the area of media arts and production, film studies and documentary. Professor Rachel Landers is a filmmaker, author and historian. She is currently Head of Media Arts and Production and Animation Production at The University of Technology, Sydney.

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Breaking Down Joker Violence, Loneliness, Tragedy Edited by Sean Redmond Film, Environment, Comedy Eco-Comedies on the Big Screen Robin L Murray and Joseph K. Heumann Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes Kenneth W. Harrow Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York Cortland Rankin Digital Space and Embodiment in Contemporary Cinema Screening Composite Spaces Jennifer Kirby Emotion Pictures Movies and Feelings Lucy Fischer Gender, Power, and Identity in The Films of Stanley Kubrick Edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Dijana Metlić and Jeremi Szaniawski Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinema Edited by Tony Tracy and Michaela Schrage-Früh Hybrid Documentary and Beyond Rachel Landers For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Hybrid Documentary and Beyond Rachel Landers

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Rachel Landers The right of Rachel Landers to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Landers, Rachel, author. Title: Hybrid documentary and beyond / by Rachel Landers. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge advances in film studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023027421 (print) | LCCN 2023027422 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367861391 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032613277 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003017141 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—Production and direction. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 L36535 2024 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8—dc23/eng/20230821 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027421 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027422 ISBN: 978-0-367-86139-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-61327-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01714-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For D & D (again!)

Contents



Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: hybrid documentary and beyond

1

PART I

Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth3 1 What are hybrid documentaries?: re-contextualising the hybrid documentary in theoretical contexts, challenging the non-fiction–fiction definition

5

2 Documentary and the obsession with definitions: identifying the traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents

31

3 What is the truth?: beyond the non-fiction–fiction blur, using philosophical, ethical frameworks to communicate the truth in hybrid documentary and beyond

75

PART II

Praxis: why make hybrid documentaries?: methodology, ethics and impact95 4 A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops 5 Collaboration: exercises, problem-solving, script development, design as metaphor, form as content. The impact of workshops on graduate careers

97

113

viii  Contents

6 Subjects in hybrid documentaries: casting, collaboration and co-creation. Whose story is it? What ­happens when hybrid documentaries behave badly and ­compromise the veracity of the content and integrity of the subjects? Are there checks and balances? Should there be? What are the experiences of participants/­ subjects of hybrid documentary?

134

PART III

Beyond: contemporary hybrid filmmakers; interviews with contemporary documentary makers working in hybrid documentary forms153 7 Explorers: Late 20th-century innovators in form – Errol Morris, Brian Hill

155

8 Adventurers: 21st-century hybrid documentary makers – Lynette Wallworth, Anna Broinowski, Robert Greene

171

9 New visions: Acclaimed debut hybrid documentary makers – Payal Kapadia, Kirsten Johnston

201

Index214

Acknowledgements

There are many people to thank. First, Suzanne Richardson who commissioned this book on the cusp of the pandemic and was generous and patient throughout, given all that was hurled at us all. My gratitude to my former postgraduate students now not only all grown up but blooming as professional filmmakers and creators. It was a deep pleasure to reconnect through interviews about the experience, and legacy of, the hybrid workshops they participated in a decade ago. My regards to ­Larissa Behrendt, Cassie Charlton, Hollie Fifer, Lucas Li, Joshua Marks, Liz Mc Carthy, Logan Mucha, Rowena Potts, Adam Rosenberg, Jacob Schiotz and Ella Rubeli. I want to particularly thank Margaret McHugh on whose original film school application I  wrote ‘fascinating/passionate art/doco nexus’. Margaret has gone from student to professional filmmaker, collaborator and fellow hybrid documentary lecturer and now academic colleague and dear friend. Her passion for hybrid documentary and kindness in sharing ideas and conversation have been a source of enduring inspiration. I want to express my deep appreciation to Jill Chivers, Frank Aldridge, James Saunders and Sereena Damanhuri for responding to the street casting callouts to become the subjects of a hybrid documentary and then agreeing to discuss their experiences of the process up to ten years later. Filmmakers Errol Morris, Brian Hill, Lynette Wallworth, Anna Broinowski, Robert Greene, Payal Kapadia and Kirsten Johnson were generous and expansive in their interviews and spent an embarrassing amount of time responding to my appallingly messy edits. Often listening back to their voices speak with such erudition and precision about documentary, I’d be shot through with a visceral sense of my universe expanding. Long may they all creatively prosper. Thanks to Fabiola Washburn and Max Bowens for making my trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, complete. Thank you to those who let me talk their ears off about the book and who were not shy about arguing back – particularly Dr  Anna Broinowski and Dudi Rokach, the Artistic Director of the magnificent Antenna Documentary Film Festival. My regards to the University of Technology, Sydney for giving me leave to complete the book and for giving me such a fabulous bunch of boisterous,

x  Acknowledgements smart and bolshie colleagues to work with. To Alex Munt, Greg Ferris, Matt Gidney, Matthew Dabner, Bettina Frankham, Margaret McHugh, Emmeline Dulhunty, Liam Brannigan, Justin Harvey, Deb Szapiro, Deb Cameron, Maurice Giacomini, Pat Grant, Marcus Eckermann and Nick Henderson thanks for holding and expanding the fort while I was away. Media Arts and Production at UTS was a legendary place to learn filmmaking in Australia long before I joined its ranks. In the last week we’ve had one of our older alumni win an Oscar and one of the newer ones be picked out by the New Yorker as one of the most exciting directors of her generation. It’s a wonderful place to work, create, teach and play. My love, adoration and gratitude to Dylan Blowen – he’s had to put up with me and this book longer than anyone – he was always willing to listen and give me the ballast to continue – we have walked an adventurous and complex road through the world of documentary together, proving always that the greatest discovery is always just around the next corner. Finally, my love as always to Dashiell Blowen, my greatest non-fiction accomplishment.

Introduction Hybrid documentary and beyond

Hybrid documentary and beyond When we think of the term ‘hybrid’, the mind can slide and range plucking out examples from the monstrous creations inhabiting the Island of Doctor Moreau to the brilliant, but for a long time ignored, experiments of Gregor Mendel and his humble peas. In hybrid documentary the spectrum can be as broad, from the hideous (swine man!), tricky and disturbing to the simple, transcendent and transformative. At their most effective they can radically impact on our understanding and communication of the truth. But what they are, why we should make them, how and if we should define them and how to generate a set of principles and practices to ignite, inspire, create and execute them, represents a slippery set of questions that I  aim to explore and interrogate through this book. I  do know the answer to one thing – ­making hybrid documentaries can be creatively liberating and intoxicating for all involved, filmmakers, crews, participants and audiences, and their production and appeal are growing globally. As one of my graduate students said – ‘they ring a loud bell’ (Rubeli 2022). Furthermore, the approaches, techniques and intellectual frameworks deployed in hybrid documentary can have a potent effect on the way filmmakers challenge conventional methodologies surrounding the development and production of drama – challenges that have vital ethical implications and expand our understanding of the world and role of documentary and non-fiction content. Purpose of the book It is worth taking a step back to interrogate the question of why research and write about hybrid documentaries in the first place. The answer lies in the fact that they are exploratory, experimental, audacious, bold – they operate at the boundaries of practice and consistently expand the possibilities of that complex and wonderful story world of filmmaking that is documentary. As Nick Fraser, that champion of the form has pointed out, even though most documentary makers are (and have been) both time and resource poor (Winston 2013), there has always been an indefatigable determination amongst DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-1

2  Introduction those involved in the creation of such film works to ever deepen and expand frontiers in screen culture and often our understanding of the world. For me, hybrid documentary lies at the forefront of this practice and have done so since the early 20th century. They matter because they change the way we not only comprehend the world but also ask complex questions of us as audience members about the truth and why it is essential to our humanity. Important as well is the fact that getting to the specifics of this particular practice has critical implications of how we regard ideas, boundaries, theories, ethics and the obligations of documentary itself. For six and a bit years, I was the head of documentary at the national film school in Australia, and I am now head of Media Arts and Production and Animation Production at a university in Sydney. The basic aim is to transmute into text the theoretical and practical knowledge I have developed about innovative approaches to teaching and producing hybrid documentary. The student films produced using these techniques had worldwide breakthrough festival success. The 25 postgraduate student hybrid productions I oversaw appeared in over 300 international festivals. Such techniques can be used by emerging and professional filmmakers alike. These development processes are a combination of theoretical lectures, workshops, exercises, street casting and intensely collaborative production methodology articulated in a format combining theory, examples, practical exercises and development guides. In short, the book is a bit of a hybrid itself of research, theory and practice. These workshops allow students and professionals to deploy hybrid techniques to create cinematic and collaborative solutions in response to nonfiction stories. The filmmakers and, critically, the subjects, find this intense participatory hybrid approach to documentary deeply effective in unlocking potent creative cinematic responses to non-fiction narrative. The book has three parts: Part 1 Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Part 2 Praxis: why make hybrid documentaries?: methodology, ethics and impact Part 3 Beyond: contemporary hybrid filmmakers; interviews with contemporary documentary makers working in hybrid documentary forms Bibliography Fraser, Nick. Foreword. Winston, Brian. (2013). The Documentary Film Book. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: BFI Publishing. Rubeli, Ella. (2022, November 11). Interview. Rachel Landers.

Part I

Overview Hybrid documentary theory and the truth

1 What are hybrid documentaries? Re-contextualising the hybrid documentary in theoretical contexts, challenging the non-fiction–fiction definition

What is meant by the term hybrid when applied to documentary? A ‘hybrid between what and what?’ (Moody 2013). Most film and documentary theorists, critics and commentators state, unproblematically, that a hybrid documentary is a combination of fiction and non-fiction. I don’t agree. This ignores both the realities of documentary production and important ethical and practical issues not least of which is an understanding of the obligations all documentary makers have to the truth and the ethical treatment of the subjects in their film – issues that need to be considered seriously. Despite the impact of breakout hybrid documentary hits on the film festival circuit, there is relatively little published research devoted to the form. Furthermore, there is very little interrogation of the idea that the form is basically a hybrid between documentary and fiction. The assertion is often laid out as self-evident and uncontroversial, and frequently there is little analysis of what this might imply. By fiction do they mean – made up? Untrue? Lies? And if these films are simply a free-for-all mish mash between the two, don’t the latter elements call into question the veracity of former? Is this really what they are? I will argue that a definition based on the non-fiction/fiction dichotomy is reductive1 and that it is more useful to think about the hybrid documentary as being explorations at the frontiers of cinema of inventive and deliberate combinations of form, content and praxis that reach for different ways to articulate deep and unseen, or difficult to see, truths. These films often draw upon a variety of differing philosophical definitions of the truth – the Platonic, the Aristotelean, the Socratic, as well as those explored in contemporary philosophical theory – ideas that will be pursued further in Chapter 3. Hybrid documentaries are often bold experiments in innovative cinematic documentary form and practice. To identify how hybrid documentary is manifest in contemporary documentary theory, it is useful to track how they have been described in recent literature and what examples are cited by scholars and why. As mentioned, for the most part they are presented as documentary films that combine elements of non-fiction and fiction. This predominant fiction/non-fiction definition is strongly influenced by the larger schism, that emerged in the late 1980s, in how documentary was defined coinciding with the birth and boom DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-3

6  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth of contemporary documentary theory. This schism has theorists like Michael Renov (Renov 1993, 2004), Brian Winston (Winston 2000, 2008, 2013) and Bill Nichols (1991, 1994) firmly on the side of blurry boundaries, subjectivity and slippage between fiction and non-fiction that they argue characterises all documentaries, a position deeply influenced by late 20th-century post structuralist and postmodernist suspicions of grand progressive narratives about truth and reality.2 Scholars like Carl Plantinga (Plantinga 1987, 1997, 2016), Trevor Ponech (Ponech 1999) and Noël Carroll (Carroll 2003, 2021) on the other side have devoted considerable analysis, carefully or combatively attempting to dismantle and challenge these stances arguing that documentary can, in best practice, make claims to represent truth, reality, evidence and objectivity. Other academics particularly Stella Bruzzi (2006) and Jane Chapman (2009) have thoughtfully attempted to bridge the chasm – but the gulf remains. For a documentary practitioner like me who came to teaching documentary very late and documentary theory even later, the rupture seems remarkably unproductive, endless and bordering on the sophomoric. It had echoes of conversations I have had with undergraduates who insisted nothing was real and that all documentaries were fictive constructs. Perhaps, because my academic background was as a historian, I found this posturing an odd way to go about comprehending the world which is in fact real. Real like climate change or the holocaust, one’s family, a trip to Disney world, Mount Everest, whales and the massacres of Indigenous communities. Of course, daily, most of us are not crippled with confusion about what is real, clear about our need to distinguish between the truth and what is fictional and know why we don’t like being lied to. Many children when hearing a story for the first time will ask ‘is this a true story’? When most of us watch documentaries, we believe it is a true story, and that involves a basic contract between spectator and maker that the content will be verifiably true. Even more critical is the bedrock of the relationship between documentary maker and subject who are often not renumerated for their involvement and appearance. It’s hard to imagine attempting to build trust with a potential subject or television commissioner using the rhetoric of Michael Renov: As for the statement Derrida attributes to the philosophical tradition – ‘truth declares itself in a structure of fiction’ – it may well be that any presumption of documentary’s relative exclusion from the critical ranks is simply ill-advised. If we substitute ‘non-fiction’ for ‘truth’ in that prescription but give due emphasis to the efficacy of ‘structure’ within the equation, we are left with only a paradoxical formulation, albeit one requiring some qualification. For, it is not that the documentary consists of the structures of filmic fiction (and is, thus parasitic of its cinematic ‘other’) as it is that ‘fictive’ elements insist in documentary as in all film forms. (Renov 1993, p. 10)

What are hybrid documentaries?  7 How would one use this thinking to explain to the parents of a missing child you are hoping to involve in a documentary series about how different agencies search for missing persons? Would you explain that the series was simply a somewhat fictive construct and that, I  the director, would be frequently crossing the fiction/non-fiction divide? Likewise, commissioning editors do need assurances that the commissioned team and the content they produce have some fidelity to the truth and fact checking. In the last few years, the national public broadcaster in Australia has faced a storm of controversy over the veracity of two major documentary series and had to pull them off the air (Meade 2021; Peterson 2021). It is interesting to note that the major documentary theorists who emerged in the 1990s were distinct from those that came before them, in that the former (with the exception of Brian Winston3) did not and do not make documentaries. Unlike Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub, John Grierson, Paul Rotha or Robert Drew, for example, they did not develop their theories, ideology, or definitions about documentary through praxis. Most contemporary documentary theorists reflect on documentaries made by others whereas those that came before often made them themselves. This is an important distinction and one I will return to throughout the chapter as it provokes a critical question . . . what is theory for? One of the things which is essential to ask, is how does academic documentary theory and ideology play out in and contribute to the world of documentary funding, commissioning, making, participating in and watching? I am not hostile to theory, but I am conscious that post structuralism that was so liberating in helping to dismantle edifices in the 1980s and 1990s has become a bit of an edifice itself, out of step, potentially, with recent ideas vital to documentary such as research by praxis, participatory action research, representation and inclusivity. Before we get into the weeds let’s start here, again. What are hybrid documentaries? What are they indeed? Many non-fiction filmmakers even dislike the word documentary as a term to describe their work. As John Grierson quipped, ‘Documentary – a word . . . so ugly nobody will steal it’ (Sussex 1975, p. 3). I agree there are many interpretations of what documentary means, but let’s settle on the word as indicative of a certain type of non-fiction filmmaking. Even amongst those who do accept the word, it is hard enough to find much consensus among contemporary practitioners and theorists about what exactly frames, defines and constitutes a documentary – is it really reality? Are they simply constructed subjective simulacrum? Do they just exist in a fog-bound twilight zone in which, Bill Nichols the behemoth who sits astride contemporary documentary theory asserts, [T]he distinction between fact and fiction blurs when claims about reality get cast as narratives . . . where the world put before us lies between

8  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth one not our own and that very well might be, between a world we may recognise as a fragment of our own and one that may seem fabricated from such fragments, between indexical (authentic) signs of reality and cinematic (invented) interpretations of this reality. (Nichols 1994, p. xi) Or is such a post structuralist-infused analysis shared by other two towering figures who make up a powerful triumvirate presiding over documentary theory, Michael Renov and Brian Winston, self-defeating and deeply flawed, as argued by Noël Carrol, and thus incoherent, unstable and unhelpful. [T]he flaws in contemporary nonfiction film theory show us something about one of the major problems in contemporary film theory in general. For there is a striking tendency for film theorists to repeat the errors of nonfiction film theorists insofar as they derive their preferred philosophical premises from second-hand sources. They do not evolve these premises themselves, but get them from authority figures, whom they paraphrase or have paraphrased for them by second and thirdgeneration authority figures. Film academics typically do not subject these premises to criticism but treat them as infallible axioms to be used deductively in film criticism and theory. There is only one remedy for this sort of intellectual stagnation. Namely: film theorists, especially nonfiction film theorists, must become philosophers themselves, or, at least, learn to think philosophically about their deepest presuppositions. Film theorists need to become interdisciplinary – not in the sense that they simply quote authorities from other fields – but in the sense that they become capable of thinking for themselves in terms of issues addressed by those other fields that are germane to film studies. Nonfiction film theorists need to learn to think philosophically – as well as historically, sociologically, and so on – if the field is to develop beyond its present state of arrogant sloganeering. (Carrol 2003, pp. 188–189) Given such a polarised environment focusing on the whys and wherefores of hybrid documentary to illuminate this particular corner of practice can seem a bit like tilting at windmills. Just to ground the argument in what Carl Plantinga would regard as the ‘pragmatics of non-fiction film’ (Plantinga 1997, p.  6), the types of films we are discussing include early 21st-century examples like Forbidden Lies (2007), Cicada (2008), Rabbit ala Berlin (2009), The Arbor (2010), The Act of Killing (2012), Stories We Tell (2012), The Imposter (2012), Casting JonBenet (2017), Dick Johnson is Dead (2020), The Midnight Gospel (2020), Procession (2021), A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and A Cop Movie (2021). There will always be robust dispute about what is and is not a hybrid

What are hybrid documentaries?  9 documentary, as we will find, along with contention about their respective value. It is also important to acknowledge that the form is not new, and Chapter 2 will examine hybrids from the 20th century, but for now the above stand as relatively solid representatives. How are hybrid documentaries defined and described by recent theorists and commentators? Robert Stam, Ohad Landesman and Tom Roston share a common high regard for hybrid documentary seeing it as representing an exciting new and innovative filmmaking practice. Landesman (who uses the term docufictions to stand for hybrid documentary) describes them as a ‘striking new development in documentary cinema’. For him they are documentaries that ‘simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction’ (Landesman 2015, p. 9). Stam writes ‘that the hybridization of documentary and fiction has been mobilised as a radical aesthetic resource’ (Stam 2016, p. 16), and Roston who is, admittedly, more blogger than academic refers to them as simply ‘awesome’ (Roston 2013). However, the examples each of them cites as illustrations of these hybrid documentary fact and fiction blends are wildly varied and display little consensus. It is here where things get complicated. Tom Roston, (possibly because of his ties to documentary practice though his POV Doc Soup festival blogs) references films that are generally regarded as existing solidly within the documentary orbit (insofar that they would be categorised or marketed as such in say a film festival line-up or by a film distributor), The Act of Killing, Stories We Tell, The Imposter and The Thin Blue Line. However, he also includes films seldom referred to as hybrids such as The Cove (2009) and films that certainly many would regard as sitting outside the boundaries of documentary and better referred to as experimental fictions such as Medium Cool (1969). Roston provides a definition of hybrid documentary that seems to equate ‘fiction’ with what others may characterise as cinematic devices or tools regularly deployed by a huge range of documentary makers for over 100 years. The most basic definition I’d use for a hybrid documentary is a film that weaves together traditional nonfiction filmmaking with traditional fiction filmmaking. That’s it. It’s the offspring of two different elements. So that means a documentary that incorporates techniques such as animation, recreation, intentionally directed sequences, characters who speak from scripts, and so on. (ibid., p. 1) Landesman provides hybrid exemplars as Medium Cool, The Idiots (1998), In this World (2002), 24 City (2008), Ten (2002), Ford Transit (2003), the films of Errol Morris and Michael Moore, Nanook of the North

10  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth (1922), Daughters’ Rite (1980), Sweetgrass (2009) and the films of Pedro Costa as films that ‘invite the viewer to welcome and embrace their aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not so much to dupe, mislead or mock’ as is the case of mockumentary that he sees as ‘flirting with the . . . format of formal hybridity’ but instead ‘offers a different tactic that exists along a fact-fictional continuum’ (Landesman 2015, p. 11). Stam adds an even greater range in his examples of ‘Hybrid Variations on a Documentary Theme’ citing, the documentaries of Agnes Varda, Frederick Wiseman and Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, Padhila’s Onibus 174 (2002), The Act of Killing (2012) but also City of God (2002) and what he describes as historical precedents of hybridity Citizen Kane (1941), Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) and Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (1950). This extremely eclectic corralling of films as examples of hybrid documentary would certainly seem strange to the average practitioner, distributor or commissioner of documentary. For them, many of those cited would be defined as straightforward examples of fiction films that are based on a true story or examples of observational cinema. This grab bag tendency to include whichever film reference fits a particular theorists’ notion about hybridity can also be found in the writing of Zoe Robertson. She, like those authors above, strongly affirms that hybrid documentaries are a mix of facts and fiction. In her analysis, she puts forward The Act of Killing (nominated for best feature documentary at the Academy Awards in 2014) and Boyhood (nominated as best fiction feature in 2015) as consistent exemplars of ‘hybrid documentary film act[ing] simultaneously as a problematic and deeply effective tool for presenting reality’ (Robertson 2016, p. 1). This is despite the fact the former film had the perpetrators of a historical genocide recounting their past actions over the course of the film, and the other is a wholly invented story featuring fictional characters shot over a 12-year period. What is it that Robertson feels binds these seemingly disparate works so closely together? The answer lies in her seeing potent affinities between the fantastical reenactments performed by the members of the Indonesian killing squads and the 12-year production process of Boyhood, which filmed a boy’s physical transformation into adulthood which, in turn, informed elements of the fictional narrative. For Robertson, what makes them so alike is the possibility that one can potentially arrive at a ‘more vibrant understanding of the truth’ when you insert additional or highlight particular elements of a scenario, and distance yourself from cold cut reality . . . Hybrid film becomes a kind of reverse-Dogma style wherein, rather than inundating a fictional narrative with a measure of reality, the real is invigorated by an element of fiction. (ibid., p. 2)

What are hybrid documentaries?  11 Janet Merewether is a theorist writing about hybrid documentary who also makes them (as are Robert Greene and Lorenzo Ferrarini, referenced later). Her very thoughtful analysis of ‘hybridised filmmaking’ includes her own films, the work of Brian Hill, Peter Greenaway, Errol Morris and Dennis O’Rourke. While she regards hybrid documentary as a relatively new phenomenon very much tied to innovative postmodern post-colonial critical thinking, she does reference the work of ‘early innovators’ – Dziga Vertov, Jean Vigo and Jean Rouch – and Chris Marker as employing ‘hybrid techniques’ as part of the lineage. She also provides a more nuanced definition of the relative straightforward documentary/fiction fusion cited earlier. I define the hybrid documentary as a nonfiction film which employs a stylised form of representation of the subjective voice and which may incorporate experimental and self-reflexive modes of production. The hybrid documentary frequently integrates fictional characteristics and formal innovation in performance, design and mise en scène. This mode of production often presents voices from the margins of society, and has been particularly embraced by feminist, queer and avantgarde filmmakers seeking to invert the position of the subject as victim and establish new aesthetic possibilities for the documentary. It may incorporate documentary, media art and performance art practice. (Merewether 2009, p. 2) In Merewether’s practice, she describes integrating ‘observational and fictional sequences to present the private world of the film subject’ (ibid., p. 2). She encourages a blurring of boundaries of fact and fiction by encouraging participants to see themselves less as potentially passive subjects to being performers in their own narrative. In doing so, her intention is ‘to collapse the conventional distinction made between documentary and fiction’ (ibid., p.  2). Merewether derives her ideas of hybridity from definitions found in biological science describing the artificial grafting process involved in crossfertilisation and from post-colonial theorists such as Bhabha (2012) and Werbner and Madood (2015), whose influential theories on cultural hybridity emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s challenging ideas about ‘naturalized’ boundaries, instead, highlighting ideas about ‘liminality’ and ‘in-betweeness’ (Bhabha 2012). Karen D. Hoffman in her analysis of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is perhaps the most uncontroversial of all the academics in her selection of films to elucidate her ideas. These two films are widely regarded as classic examples (again from a practitioner, or commissioner, or programmer stance) of hybrid documentary and are cited in much of the scholarly work discussed here. Like those writers, she favours the form as having a tendency to ‘veer into fantasy and blur the line between fact and fiction’ (Hoffman 2016, p.  517). Similar to Landesman,

12  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth in his somewhat pejorative assertion that these kinds of films are ‘lying to be real’, she argues that hybrids are ‘deceiving into the truth’. For her, both these hybrid documentaries ‘offer filmic deceptions aimed at expressing truth indirectly’ (ibid., p. 518). Like Hoffman, Lorenzo Ferrarini also selects Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing as core examples of ‘Documentary Hybrids’ for which to build his argument about this form of filmmaking ‘that mixes fictional and nonfictional footage without clearly identifying or labelling either’ (Ferrarini 2020, p. 164). Ferrarini, a practitioner like Merewether and Greene, argues that documentary hybrids have ‘only been consolidating as practice during the last two decades [but that] their origins are as old as documentary itself’. Like Merewether, he cites post-colonial contributions on cultural hybridity as the source of his understanding of the term ‘hybrid’ (he does not reference the biological sciences definition) ‘where the impossibility of identifying a dominant component reveals the artificiality of static and essentialist identities’ (ibid., p. 164). He cites Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) as formative hybrid examples primarily because of their ‘dramatized’ scenes (he calls them docufictions) but excludes The Thin Blue Line (1988), which he instead describes as an example of straightforward (and now, what he regards as, common place) dramatised re-enactment. It is Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) that he holds up as a kind of patient zero – ‘the first experiment in documentary hybrids’ because of its overt reflexive and performative practices throughout and the frames within frames (such as the participants coming together to watch themselves on the screen and discuss their impressions) that explicitly ‘questions’ the real. Ferrarini adds to his list of hybrid documentary examples, most of the documentaries (or ‘fabrications’ (ibid., p. 167)) of Werner Herzog; Orson Wells’s F For Fake; the Iranian film The Mirror (1997) and examples of his own films A Migrant’s Tale (2008) and Kalanda – The Knowledge from the Bush (2015). Ferrarini is coming from a position that asserts that non-hybrid films have (or claim/pretend they have) an objectivity that these hybrids eschew, instead celebrating ‘ambiguity’ and subjectivity through their shared ‘refusal to distinguish between fact and fiction’ (ibid., p. 170). Even in this brief overview of the field, it does seem that almost anything goes, as to what can, or can’t, be defined as a hybrid documentary. On the one hand, it seems that any film that references real events could be deemed a hybrid or any film that apes a ‘documentary style’ shaky cam like The Blair Witch Project or the Office. This latter argument belongs to a sort of subset of theorists like Jane Rosco et al. who are preoccupied with elevating mockumentaries into the arena of serious documentary scholarship (Roscoe 2001). On the other hand, former Storyville commissioning editor Nick Fraser in answer to his own questions, ‘Are documentaries a definitively niche form? Should they be thought of as campaigning tools, as just one aspect of the

What are hybrid documentaries?  13 many efforts to improve the world? Do they really change anything?’, states ‘My own conclusions are that [all] documentaries are attractive, sturdy hybrids, capable of survival in adverse circumstances’ (Fraser 2013, p. x). Further complications in our understanding of hybrid documentaries is how this term is interpreted with screen practices that intersect with documentary. In animation, the term ‘hybrid’ has been applied to mixes of 2D and 3D animation in the one work (O’Hailey 2010). ‘Hybrid documentary’ is also used when referencing the mix of animation and documentary content (Skoller 2011). In addition, recent research about interactive documentary and the New Documentary Nexus, ‘hybrid forms’ are described as blends of Nichols modes of representation familiar in linear audiovisual documentary – the poetic, the observational, expository, reflexive, participatory and performative mixed with (amongst other things) essayist genres, theatrical practices, digital journalism, VR, AR and/or multimedia installations (Wiehl 2019, p. 7). It is important to note this scholarship, about these experimental interactive documentary cocktails, contains no assertions that such structural and aesthetic inventiveness are examples of facts bleeding into fiction. It seems that the notion of hybridity despite its relatively straightforward origins in science is in flux. This lack of consensus is in part of what inspired Robert Greene’s provocative British Film Institute article, ‘Die Hybrid Die’ . . . ‘I do not like the term hybrid . . . and I’m here today to try and kill it’4 (Greene 2019, p. 1). As a filmmaker and festival programmer he viewed the label as a ‘marketing term, not unlike “Mumblecore”, [which] might be useful in some vague branding sense, but is ultimately reductive and potentially damaging to the films to which it becomes attached’ (ibid., p. 3). Greene argues that the term hybrid is randomly and unreflectively assigned to ‘formally ambitious documentaries’ many of which have no hybrid tendencies at all, citing examples such as Leviathan and These Birds Walk. Greene recognises that there are some films intent on exploiting the ‘increasingly blurry line between fiction and non-fiction’, but he also feels strongly that there are many more innovative and boundary-pushing documentaries that are not. Greene, like Plantinga, Bruzzi and Carrol before him, suggests that what academics and commentators are referring to as a fiction/non-fiction blur is instead fact-based documentaries exploring, adapting and deploying innovative cinematic, narrative and aesthetic choices in their storytelling. He also issues the warning that lightly tossing out definitions that highlight the ‘blur’ can needlessly distort a documentary’s ‘relationship with reality’. He also argues that these kinds of documentaries have existed since the form’s inception in the early 20th century and are better described as ‘Cinematic Non-Fiction’.5 For Greene, hybrid documentaries of the 21st century are in fact ‘throwbacks. Hybridisation, innovation, heterodoxy and integration have been crucial to the advancement of non-fiction since the beginning’, citing examples made by filmmakers like Rouch, Flaherty, Buñuel, Marker, Ackerman,

14  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Guzman and Watkins (ibid., p. 4). Despite his initial death threats about the term – Greene does capitulate somewhat by concluding that Documentaries are hybrid monsters by their very nature; wild combinations of realities and fictions have undisputedly yielded some of the most inspired cinematic moments in movie history. So, let’s drop the ‘hybrid’ name and get to calling these things movies. (ibid., p. 4) Greene by his conclusion has tied himself up somewhat in a Gordian knot, that in defending the innovations of documentaries they seem, by the end in his analysis, to have no unique or distinguishing qualities which leads to deeper questions. If they are all just movies, why do we use the word documentary, let alone hybrid documentary to frame them? For me, a core part of questioning and renewing the theoretical framework around the development of hybrid documentary is to do with interrogating notions of the truth and asking questions such as: why tell non-fiction stories? Why distinguish between non-fiction and fiction? What is the truth? Why tell the truth? How does one come to it? Why is it important to audiences? What contract exists between them and these films? Why does telling the truth matter and why do we care? Documentary festival programmer, curator and creative director Luke Moody shares some of Greene’s questions about easy and simplistic assumptions about the form but goes much deeper in his critiques. In his wonderfully titled Act normal: hybrid tendencies in documentary film (Moody 2013) Moody, like Greene, argues that many of the references to fictional elements, content or devices apparent in some hybrid documentaries are in fact better described as explorations of cinematic style, form and approach. He also argues convincingly, like Greene, that such explorations are far from new and are embedded in the origins of documentary as a distinct form of filmmaking. For Moody, part of the attention and controversy that hybrid documentaries, like The Act of Killing, were courting in the early 21st century was because of the wave of non-negotiable, ‘fact presenting documentaries films’ that preceded them and not because they were doing something uniquely different in the canon although he, like Merewether, does link their evolution to roots in other creative and academic fields such as performance theory, grotesque and verbatim theatre and the ‘ethical playgrounds’ of Dogma cinema (ibid., p. 2). In as such, he regards hybrid not as a subgenre of documentary but as a ‘mode of tactical filmmaking’. The forms emerging have long lineages and multiple precedents and offer ‘a deconstructed point of view suspended within strategies for finding multiple truths’ (ibid., p.  2). He also regards them as a form of documentary making that is revitalising earlier avant-garde filmmaking with ‘new subjects and meetings of form/content’ (ibid., p.  4). While he believes they share traits – listed later – he cannily avoids lumping

What are hybrid documentaries?  15 them all together and instead looks at ‘simple groupings and genealogies’ of shared methodological trajectories. Not only are they simple he provides extremely clear descriptions that outline how the films work from a practical rather than theoretical point of view thus avoiding some of the incoherencies that the fact/fiction adherents manifest. For example, the description he gives to the grouping, ‘Performing the Archive’ (The Arbor, The Act of Killing) is ‘a means of addressing historic acts, records or media through creative reenactment, interpretation or improvisation’ (ibid., p. 4). Other groupings include ‘The Literate Layer’ (the films of Chris Marker), ‘Intelligent Provocateur’ (Mads Brügger’s Red Chapel, The Ambassador) and ‘Improvised Self’, a ‘method’ of dramatising the self to achieve representational clarity or reveal the fantastic ‘magical’ self (Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach with past references being Flaherty’s Nanook and the work of Jean Rouch). Moody is sceptical about the fact/fiction mash-up assumptions as accounting for the complexity of hybrid documentaries and indeed their intent regarding it as having ‘little digestive reflection’. It was Moody who asked that important question a hybrid between what and what and raised the possibility that this fact/fiction blur is simplistic. While he accepts that perhaps some may operate on the boundaries of fact and fiction, he encourages one to think about what other ‘boundaries do they operate between?’ He offers up a cornucopia of other possible dualities and boundaries that exist between, ‘observation and instigation, life and art, the actual and the possible, translation and interpretation, presence and performance, construction and deconstruction, evidence and hearsay, authorship and plagiarism, meaning and abstraction’ (ibid., p. 2). Moody shares with Hoffman the sense that hybrid documentaries deploy strategies that utilise ‘indirect’ means of finding the truth. For Moody, this does not amount to a strategy of trickery or dishonesty but rather because they are an open form of filmmaking that is responding to a rise of distrust of traditional and mainstream media narratives by encouraging audiences to not simply accept given information or facts but to question and explore ideas to grasp ‘deconstructed points of view’ and ‘multiple truths’. Hoffman argues the inverse. For her this indirect path is a process of deception that echoes Kierkegaard’s invocation of Socrates avoiding of direct communication in favour of forms of communication that encourage audiences and participants to ‘think through the material’ and thus ‘develop their own sense of what is true and determine the significance that truth has for their lives’ (Hoffman 2016, p. 518). While there is a great deal of fascinating territory to explore in these notions of indirection, Hoffman takes a rather relativist and somewhat unnuanced approach to such strategies and decides that the filmmakers of Stories We tell and Act of Killing take each of these hybrid documentaries into fantasy and fact fictions blurs by deliberate acts of deception. However, the examples Hoffman provides to illustrate such duplicitous actions are unconvincing. She writes about Kierkegaard’s invented author stating claims ‘puppet like’ from his creator’s clever mind as examples of the

16  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth deceptive practices in the hybrid documentaries she examines. Yet neither of these films Hoffman analyses has a character that is made up. Hoffman writes about the lack of voice-over in both films as liberating the audience from knowing what to think, failing to note that there are literally thousands of documentaries without voice-over narration and that for many years this stood as a marker (rightly or wrongly6) for ‘quality’ documentaries (many of them observational) that avoided it. Likewise, Hoffman makes assertions about director Sarah Polley’s intent that seem misleading. Polley regards her film as a hybrid, somewhere between a documentary and an experimental film, not a fact and fiction mix. Hoffman asserts that the evidence for Polley pushing the boundaries of documentary into fabrication is when the director refers to her film as an ‘interrogation process’. This simply misconstrues the context in which Polley, in the opening of her film, says this on camera clearly as a joke to the man she calls her father. In answer to Michael Polley’s quip that the way Sarah Polley is filming (two cameras and so on) is ‘not the usual way of doing things’, she replies ‘We told you it was a documentary but it’s actually an interrogation’. This scene is followed by a sequence in which Polley’s older siblings are shown humorously displaying their awkwardness being filmed by their sister as the cameras and lights are set up. The sequence establishes a tone of warmth and connection between all the family members which is clearly not what documentary makers or audiences would describe as ‘interrogatory’ in intent (as one might describe some of the work of documentary maker Nick Broomfield). Hoffman also questions the veracity of the subjects in the film suggesting that they are unreliable narrators and unable to distinguish between truth and lies – c­ ondemned to a ‘dual persona’ because they work as actors, producers and directors. This is despite the fact that at no time do any of these subjects appear as anything more than family members of Polley’s talking with her about the ramifications of a long-held family mystery/secret. For both films, Hoffman views the use of reconstruction and re-enactment as further examples of the ‘use of elements of fiction in the service of nonfictional film’ (Hoffman 2016, p. 530) and that throughout the film The Act of Killing, ‘makes little effort to differentiate fact from fiction’ (ibid., p. 522). Ferrarini also regards the fantastical re-enactments in Oppenheimer’s films as ‘enactive filmmaking’ and Herzogian examples of ‘fabrication and imagination and stylization’ (Ferrarini 2020, p. 167) but adds that they take one beyond the ‘simple idea of mixture of the fact and fiction’ because it does not approach reality as a ‘given’ but a negotiation between parts (ibid., p. 168). Through slightly different analytical lenses Hoffman and Ferrarini come to the conclusion that because of the ambiguity and the blurry negotiations between fact and fiction – hybrid documentaries are producing more complex subjective versions of the truth which are either ‘transcendent’ (Hoffman 2016, p.  533) or ‘poetic and ecstatic’ (Ferrarini 2020, p.  167). A  kind of truer truth. In this they are asserting a superiority of this kind of filmmaking over ‘Direct Cinema’ which mirrors the hierarchical values ascribed to different modes of documentary making championed by Renov, Winston and

What are hybrid documentaries?  17 Nichols – direct cinema at the bottom and reflexive documentary at the top. It also echoes the provocations made by Werner Herzog in his ‘Minnesota Declaration’ in which he criticised what he regarded as the delusional truth claims of ‘verite’ documentary – the ‘truth of accountants’ (collapsing the direct cinema practices of Robert Drew with the reflexive verité praxis of Rouch and Morin) instead favouring using imagination, fabrication and stylisation to achieve an ‘ecstatic truth’ (Herzog 2016). Both Hoffman and Ferrarini ascribe an ambiguity to the construction of hybrid documentary that is at odds to the relatively straightforward and uncontested theses, assertions and conclusion of each documentary. Sarah Polley was correct that her family lineage was problematic when she finds out in the film that Michal Polley is in fact not her biological father. Despite the antics of Anwar Congo and his team of killers at no point is Oppenheimer’s audience presented with the idea that what they did is anything other than utterly heinous. It could be argued that both films are extremely transparent about their means to production and that rather than blurring fact and fiction they signpost clearly what is constructed and what is not. In this context, Ferrarini’s argument that Polley’s revelation in the second half of her film that some (not all) of the archive in her feature documentary is in fact re-enactment is evidence she is refusing to distinguish between what is real and what is made up is problematic. Polley transparently and deliberately at a precise point in the film reveals to the audience that she has constructed many of the super eight scenes using actors playing her parents and her parents’ friends making it clear that it is in fact re-enactment and not archive. She did this, as she herself made clear, to underline the complexity and nuance of memory not to assert that the memories are deliberately fabricated by the participants (Barlow 2013). There’s a big difference between a filmmaker making fictional content and a documentary filmmaker exploring how different people can have different recollections about the same event (this is surely a defining characteristic of The Thin Blue Line) using reenactment to illustrate this point to the audience and the impact this can on real lives. Polley can explore, probe, interrogate and play within the context of her foray into the past, but she is bound by the verifiable facts of the past. The film’s coherency and impact would collapse if we found that her Mother was not dead, in the same way The Thin Blue Line would have little impact if we discover suddenly that Randall Adams was free man when he was interviewed and not on death row for a crime he did not commit. Some things remain inviolate, unnegotiable and necessarily verifiable for the films to retain their internal logic. Neither Polley nor Oppenheimer’s hybrid documentaries are ‘refusing’ to ‘distinguish between fact and fiction’ (Ferrarini 2020, p. 170). On the contrary, the facts of each documentary are the critical bedrock of why these films have such resonance. Polley factually has a dead mother and is uncertain who her biological father is – she wants to find out and does. Oppenheimer is filming a group of men who unambiguously participated in a genocide for which they remain unashamed, unapologetic and unpunished.

18  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Mario Slugan has argued that the idea that re-enactments (stylised or not) in documentaries are ‘fictional representations’ as characterised by Bill Nichols, and the writers above fails to account for the clear contexts in which they are presented as ‘veridical accounts’ thus plausible representations about the events of which they relate and not fictions – the life of Sarah Polley’s mother or the murder of Indonesians. Slugan gives the example of emailing friends a recollection of Donald Trump’s claims in a presidential debate as having the same plausible re-reconstructive elements as those inherent in a re-enactment in which he dresses up and performs Trump’s speech in a wig, films and then sends to his friends. Both acts are ‘plausible reconstruction’ and not fiction. The latter could pervert what happened ‘but this would only make the re-enactment a deliberate misrepresentation and not fiction’ (Slugan 2021, p. 117). The persistence of the blurry boundaries debate Is it possible that part of the preoccupation of documentary theorists analysing the hybrid documentary through the non-fiction/fiction dichotomy is the collapsing of what would be properly regarded as experiments and innovations in aesthetics, form and cinematic structure and style into assertions about definition and intent. It is also inextricably connected to the larger ongoing debate and division amongst contemporary theorists about whether one can ever differentiate documentary/non-fiction from fiction. A  debate that has persisted, at this point, for almost half a century. Five years before the publication of Bill Nichols’s Representing Reality (1991) and seven years before Michael Renov’s Theorising Documentary (1993), Carl Plantinga wrote about the ‘despair’ that film scholars sometimes had as to whether they would ever be able to sufficiently define documentary and be able to distinguish between fiction and documentary. As a result, he argued that ‘much of our theory is shackled by uncertainties and misperceptions’. In the essay ‘Defining Documentary: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Projected Worlds’ (1987), Plantinga was confident he would be able to ‘clear away some misleading assumptions about documentary that must be abandoned’ (Plantinga 1987, p. 44). Alas, decades on, this has not been the case, the disputes about the blurry boundaries of documentary have not only endured but come to dominate much scholarship. The debate is alive and proliferating, one could say even metathesising. David LaRocca’s introduction to The Philosophy of Documentary (2016) is devoted to the debate and what he regards as documentary’s ‘controversial, unsettled state’ and starts with a ‘is he or isn’t he?’ question about the protagonist in Medium Cool (an image of whom somewhat oddly adorns the cover of a book about documentary) – the answer to which (fairly uncomplicatedly) is – no, he’s not a real person, he’s an actor in a fiction film using volatile political locations as a backdrop.

What are hybrid documentaries?  19 The whole of the 2021 Volume 15 of Studies in Documentary Films is devoted to the topic and while there is much nuance and complexity in the various journal articles the debate remains positional and somewhat entrenched. Erika Balsom captured the self-defeating, ‘claustrophobic’ and potentially destructive, illogic dominating the current debates in contemporary documentary theory in her seminal 2017 essay, ‘The Reality Based Community’; Have you heard that reality has collapsed? Post-truth politics, the death of facts, fake news, deep-state conspiracies, paranoia on the rise. Such pronouncements are often feverish objections to a nightmarish condition. Yet inside the echo chamber of twenty-first-century communication, their anxiety-ridden recirculation can exacerbate the very conditions they attempt to describe and decry. In asserting the indiscernibility of fact and fiction, the panicked statement that reality has collapsed at times accomplishes little but furthering the collapse of reality. Proclaiming the unreality of the present lifts the heavy burdens of gravity, belief, and action, effecting a great leveling whereby all statements float by, cloaked in doubt. (Balsom 2017, p. 1) Rather than ‘breathe the stale recirculated air of doubt’ (ibid., p. 5), surely there is a way to describe the difference between films like Nomadland (2020) and The Act of Killing (2012), between Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Stories We Tell (2012) and to chart the critical factors that differentiate Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and Humphrey Jennings’s The Silent Village (1943). It is in these very differences that lie the essential DNA and ethical obligations of all documentaries. One could also ask to what end does this polemic function. Who does the debate serve, and what is its relationship to those who make documentaries or being taught to make documentaries? A recent volume of the Journal of Cinema and Media studies (Vol. 61, No. 9, 2022) focused on Documentary Pedagogy observes the ever-widening and problematic gulf between theory and practice in tertiary environments teaching documentary. Latsis and Lessard note that the specific exigencies of documentary pedagogy in fine arts and media studies context have been given little systematic attention by practitioners, theorists, and historians, at a time when the ethical, material, and environmental underpinnings of the moving image – especially in its rapport to socio-political realities – have never been more pressing. (Latsis and Lessard 2022, p. 1)

20  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth In ‘Approaches to Creative Actuality: Documentary Pedagogy in the Contemporary University Environment’, Atakav and Hand comment that ‘there can often be a tension in the context of higher education when it comes to the creative-critical practice of documentary production’ (Atakav and Hand 2022, p. 1). They argue that while the relationship between practice and theory is ‘paramount’ they also observe the frequent absence of the latter in practical or vocationally orientated tertiary film schools teaching documentary. There is no virtue reiterating the theoretical minutia of the competing sides of what C. Paul Sellors calls the ‘paradox of blurred boundaries that too often haunts discussion of non-fiction film’ (Sellors 2014, p. 120) which are well known to most documentary scholars and well-articulated in texts like Stella Bruzzi’s New Documentary (2nd ed., 2006), Paul Ward’s Margins of Reality (2006) and Jane Chapman’s Issues on Contemporary Documentary (ibid., p. 4). However, it is worth noting having revisited many of these canonical texts representing each side I am struck by how bound they can be by the era in which they are written. Winston, Nichols and Renov were clearly deeply influenced (despite Winston and Renov’s protestations) by post structuralist theories that swept Western humanities campuses (like my own) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were also clearly impacted by the huge bearing a film like The Thin Blue Line had on documentary audiences and practitioners when it burst into cinemas in 1988 and its challenge to the dominance of direct cinema since the early 1960s as the prevailing mode of ‘quality’ documentary.7 What the three theorists have in common is their extraordinary dislike of this style of filmmaking, suspicious of its claims of ‘purity’ and ‘truth’ and the ‘enhanced claims of observational documentary to be offering objective evidence’ (Winston 2013, p. 13). Winston accused direct cinema of weakening the ‘responsibility of the audience making its own judgments’, lording it over and negating all other forms of documentary practice such as reconstruction or being more susceptible to ‘fakery’ and ‘fraud’ (ibid., p. 13). Whether the pioneers and practitioners of direct cinema were in fact all unanimously guilty of the mob-like behaviour of what they were charged – asserting observational film was purest and best form of documentary – is debatable. Film historian David Resha questioned these accusations: [I]s it the case that the Drew Associates had a child-like, potentially harmful naivete about truth, reality, and objectivity in their films? It is important to note that many characterizations of the Drew Associates’ rhetoric are not representative of how the filmmakers discussed their work. Conceptual issues like truth, objectivity, and subjectivity are not a prominent part of the filmmakers’ characterization of their filmmaking. (Resha 2018, p. 32)

What are hybrid documentaries?  21 Resha provides ample evidence of a much more nuanced rhetoric, with direct cinema practitioners like Richard Leacock and Robert Drew, accepting their presence altered the environment and denying the films were either paragons of objectivity or vessels of ‘absolute’ truth (ibid., p. 35).8 The critical pile on of direct cinema also produced the hierarchy of value of Bill Nichols’s ascribed modes of documentary cited earlier (which grew from 4 to 6 between 1991 and 2003 with observational documentary firmly at the bottom and the reflexive mode at the top, the latter being regarded as more transparent in that it revealed elements of its construction therefore being more ‘truthful’ about its subjectivity. Also, he added a chronology of sorts to the modes starting with Exposition 1930s, Observation in the 1960s, Performative in the 1980s. Stella Bruzzi describes this imposition of chronology as Nichols ‘pedalling of a Darwinian model of documentary history’ and that his modes (which are often presented as the way of understanding documentary not one way) were in her view ‘reductive’ and ‘simplistic’ (Bruzzi 2006, p.  3). Bruzzi’s book, focused on the ‘performativity’ of all documentary, was deeply influenced by the wave of box office feature documentary hits she references, like Super Size Me (2004), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Touching the Void (2003), of the early to mid-2000s and the rise of reality TV, and brought a refreshing candour to the non-fiction/fiction debate. She also captured how ahistorical some of Renov, Winston and Nichols’s assertions were in promoting a progressive linear history of documentary in that they failed to account for the fact that ‘early practitioners and theorists were far more relaxed about documentary as a category [and far less preoccupied with the fact/fiction divide] than we as theorists have become’ (ibid., p. 8). Indeed, Paul Rotha’s selection of top 100 documentaries for (1952), with examples as disparate as Coal Face (1935), The Fires Were Started (1943) and Housing Problems (1935), demonstrates what an extraordinary range of approaches to documentary practice coexisted (albeit them being almost entirely made by white men). For Bruzzi, it was intriguing how [in the 21st century] documentary had ‘in various ways returned to its more relaxed roots with dramatisation, performance . . . and narrativization becoming once more predominant’ (Bruzzi 2006, p. 8). Bruzzi squarely challenges Renov, Nichol and Winston’s preoccupation and hand-wringing about whether documentary will ever be able to represent reality authentically, stating [W]hen working with much writing on documentary of the past 20 years it sometimes seems necessary to remind theorists that such a dialectic need not be instinctively treated with distrust. And sometimes it becomes necessary to remind ourselves that reality does exist and that it can be represented without such a representation either invalidating or having to be synonymous with the reality that preceded it. (ibid., p. 5)

22  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth She cites Noël Carroll’s position that there is nothing uniquely suspect in non-fiction filmmaking using subjectivity, editing, selection of material in its construction that makes it distinctly doomed to failure and be an inauthentic representation of reality – any more than a well-researched, subjectively edited and argued history text is. Like Plantinga, she is quick to note that audiences are more than capable of distinguishing non-fiction from fiction and bring a sophisticated understanding to the construction and nature of screen content. As straightforward and praxis orientated as the arguments from Bruzzi are, they, like the arguments from Carrol, Ponech and Plantinga countering the ‘anti realists’, exist somewhat within the paradigm of the debate and function as rebuttals to Renov, Winston and Nichols and do not step away from the divide. The more one side argues the more the other digs in. A divide which hybrid documentaries seems predestined to sit inescapably within this schism. De Rocca notes that even if the debate was cooling down in the mid2010s with an acceptance that many documentaries could make verifiable truth claims, it was hybrid documentaries that kept the boundaries between non-fiction and fiction hideously and irretrievably blurred. Even Carl Plantinga who has done so much to define the term ‘nonfiction’ (Sellors 2014, p. 106), and brought robust analysis answering the ‘reality deniers’,9 concurs that there are these in-between very particular films that are impossible to classify and the distinction between fiction and non-fiction remains ‘fuzzy at best’ (Plantinga 1997, p. 24). It’s unfortunate that the film Plantinga uses as an example of this tendency is Oliver Stone’s JFK – which a few decades on after Plantinga’s citation sits firmly in the world of fiction if not fabulation.10 The cooling down of the debate referred to here is hard to forensically track, but it coincided (made clear in Balsom’s essay) with Brexit, the rise of Trumpian rhetoric surrounding alternative facts, fake news and egregious examples of truth denial such as that by Alex Jones about Sandy Hook where he dismissed the murder of 20 pre-schoolers and six educators as a hoax. Since the early 1990s, it was the ‘reality’ of documentaries and the ability to ‘represent reality’ that was suspect requiring interrogation, and ideas about truth were seldom mentioned by those fixated by promoting ideas of blurry boundaries. There were course scholars who did talk about truth and lies and its relationship to documentary, but it seemed to be somewhat regarded as an unacademic and hopelessly vague concept better avoided. By the mid-2010s the need to take a stand on distinguishing the truth from a lie became urgent, volatile and prescient, and the abstractions of theorists veered towards irrelevance and even irresponsibility both in the real world and in the real world of documentary. This coincided with a growing need for documentary makers to take stock of their practices and their ethics as ideas about the deleterious effects of ‘extractive filmmaking’ (Wissot 2017) on the subjects and communities they filmed and the rise of complex debates about who had the right to tell whose story accompanied by ‘critiques of authorship, representation, safety, inclusion, consent, access and

What are hybrid documentaries?  23 accountability’ (Childress 2020). It became very clear that ideas of the truth became overwhelmingly important to not just the practice, but the ideology and theory of documentary. It also became clear that the theory and praxis cannot be prised apart with any ease. As Scarlett Lewis, a Sandy Hook parent, eloquently put it at Alex Jones’s defamation trial, Truth – truth is so vital to our world. Truth is what we base reality on, and we have to agree on that to have a civil society. (New York Times 2022) A filmmaker and theorist who has been increasingly vocal in this realm is Errol Morris. Morris, possibly more than any other documentary maker, has had his work cited, analysed and critiqued amongst documentary theorists – particularly in the case of The Thin Blue Line. That film came to be regarded amongst the blurry boundary advocates as a seminal postmodern exemplar – a view the filmmaker finds morally repugnant. Linda Williams in her 1993 essay Mirrors Without Memory: Truth, History and the New Documentary regards the film as self-reflexive and displaying a ‘flamboyant auteurism’ which while it appears to ‘Rashomon-like’ abandon the pursuit of the truth actually deploys ‘remarkable engagement with a newer, more contingent, relative postmodern truth – a truth which, far from being abandoned, still operates powerfully as the receding horizon of the documentary tradition’. Instead of careening between idealistic faith in documentary truth and cynical recourse to fiction, we do better to define documentary not as an essence of truth but as a set of strategies designed to choose from among a horizon of relative and contingent truths. The advantage, and the difficulty, of the definition is that it holds onto the concept of the real – indeed of a ‘real’ at all even in the face of tendencies to assimilate documentary entirely into the rules and norms of fiction . . . it is precisely Morris’s refusal to fix the final truth, to go on seeking reverberations and repetitions that, I argue, gives this film its exceptional power of the truth. (Williams 1993, p. 14) Morris regards this interpretation of the film as absurd – ‘have they seen it?’ (IV Errol Morris 2022) – adamant that it’s obvious that in the film he pursues one absolute and unwavering truth – proving that Randall Adams is an innocent man. Morris’s recent works the series Wormwood (2016) and American Dharma (2018) make it clear how much he disagrees with Williams’s descriptions of his work and how utterly seriously he regards the implications of the loss or corruption of truth upon individuals, the body politic or as the defining purpose of a documentary. His erudite philosophical treatise The Ashtray (2018) further offers a rigorously argued and sustained attack on the incoherencies of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific

24  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Revolutions (1962) – a canonical work riddled with notions of postmodern relativism. As Professor Joshua Cohen of Stanford Law school describes it; ‘Morris explores his animating philosophical commitments about truth, reality and knowledge. He presents his outlook in sharp opposition to ideas about relativism’. Distinguished Professor Saul Kripke of Princeton applauds ‘Morris’ commitment to find out the truth. This time about truth itself’. The in-depth interview with Morris at the end of the book makes it clear that these arguments apply directly to critiquing the blurry boundaries theories of Nichols, Winston and Renov. A way out of the schism Is there a way to regard documentary that steps outside the fact/fiction debate that also accounts and includes critical sociopolitical and ethical considerations? C. Paul Sellors, in his article What in the World Distinguishes Fiction From nonfiction Film? (2014), offers a bracingly straightforward, logical and common-sense approach. He starts from the position that something cannot be itself and its negation at the same time and since ‘nothing in the actual world can be both what it is and its negation the boundary between world of fiction and non-fiction cannot be blurred’ (Sellors 2014, p.  108). Like Greene, Moody, Plantinga and Carroll, he asserts that what many academics are describing as fictional elements of documentaries are in fact cinematic explorations of aesthetics and representation. If qualities such as style, rhetoric, ideologies, narrative forms, tropes, or indeterminate classifications were capable of making nonfiction somewhat fictional, then both the concepts of fiction and nonfiction would make little sense, and so would attempts to make sense of the world through nonfiction films. (ibid., p. 106) Sellors, critically, argues that non-fiction films have ‘truth claims’ in the way that fiction films do not – ‘my central thesis is that fiction and non-fiction films differ in where objects, individuals, actions, and events referred to in a film have truth-value’ (ibid., p. 107). Using philosophical theories of actuality forged by Robert M. Adams in the 1970s, Sellors demonstrates how non-fiction films refer to the ‘furniture of the actual world’ and fictional films to the ‘fictional furniture of fictional worlds’. What is so effective about this line of reasoning is that Sellors can establish that even those films – in this case what I would define as a hybrid films – that appear to many theorists to be adrift in the fuzzy/blurry fiction/non-fiction boundary – are not. Using the example of Tracy Moffat’s Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and comparing it to All the Presidents’ Men (1976) he asserts that there may be fuzziness in aesthetic or verisimilitude ‘but these are not relevant criteria that distinguish fiction and non-fiction’. Nice Coloured Girls, despite its theatrical sets and

What are hybrid documentaries?  25 invented scenes, asserts an ‘account of historical and contemporary relations between Aboriginal women in Australia and white men. It’s direct reference is the actual world’ (ibid., p. 114). Furthermore, Moffat’s intent is not fictive. In contrast, All the President’s Men while closely linked to the journalists factual account is a fictionalised adaptation that invents scenarios and dialogue and are guided and shaped by the screenwriter’s fictive intent. Sellors accepts that a documentary can be terrible, unethical, inaccurate or come to contain overturned facts but that this doesn’t mean they are fictions. ‘Theories in physics and historical accounts do not become fictional when they are disproven; they are just wrong. Films are no different’ (ibid., p. 112). What is so liberating about Sellors’ hard line boundary approach is that Nice Coloured Girls for all its invention and experimentation can butt heads with the fictional film Samson and Delilah (2009) (which uses non-actors and real settings) at the boundary, but the former cannot cross over because of its intent, obligations and ties to the actual world. Also liberating is that Sellors unshackles documentary from the burden of having to prove its indexical relationship to reality that has infused so much of the fiction/non-fiction debate/divide. Film is often presumed to have an obligation to provide direct evidence of the world’s material surface. But the world is also full of ideas, ambitions, aspirations, and imaginations, all beyond the material veneer of reality and the reach of the camera. Animations, models, and reenactments enable filmmakers to refer directly to such aspects of the world, bringing a depth to nonfiction films difficult to achieve otherwise. By characterizing nonfiction as the logical negation of fiction I aim not just to resolve the paradox of blurred boundaries . . . but also to indicate what makes nonfiction, and its distinction with fiction, so significant. . . . Fictional worlds, through the inclusion of alien properties, can never obtain, and are therefore never about the world in the way nonfictions are. Regardless how accurate or inaccurate nonfiction film may be, it is about us and the rich diversity of existence. (ibid., p. 120) Those who argue that the hybrid documentary is a fusion of non-fiction and fiction generate two additional major issues. The first is an understanding of hybridity itself. Hybridisation does not necessarily imply the splicing of opposites. Mendel was after all propagating and blending varieties of peas, not bees and peas. Even the hybrid monsters of Dr Moreau are all mammals. It is also curious that Merewether and Ferrarini use examples from postcolonial theorists on cultural hybridity as advocating a definition of hybridity that conjoins the opposites of fact and fiction. This in fact would be advocating for a highly binary pairing which would seem at odds with these theorists’ pioneering work and dislike of binary distinctions and indeed contrary to the

26  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth importance they place on how critical and urgent their notions of cultural hybridity are in relation to real-world injustice, intolerance and exclusion. The second issue is a definition that allows that hybrid non-fiction documentary, through the deployment of certain cinematic choices, simply enters the fictive world, erodes the critical ethical and moral principles that bind together and constrain all documentaries – their obligation to tell the truth. As asserted earlier, such a dichotomy requires additional ‘digestive reflection’ in an era of growing misinformation, along with the corresponding rising ethical implications for filmmakers and how such theories play out in real-world and real production contexts. Given that hybrid documentary practices are on the rise in the documentary landscape, there is a need to evaluate and reconsider what does it mean for documentary films to borrow fictional tropes and vice versa. There is a need for reassessment as to how hybrid documentaries are defined and made. Definitions that cannot be articulated without deep considerations of their relationship to ethics. Luke Moody makes the point that hybrid documentary ‘contributes to the possibility of film opening an ongoing dialogue between subject and audience’ (Moody 2013, p. 11). As such he believes there is a greater level of trust and transparency and potentially ‘a new code of conduct’ required between the filmmaker, subject and audience. ‘Ultimately responsibility of the filmmaker grants the movement into new forms of documentary cinema experience and with this move the burden and stakes for the filmmaker increase’ (ibid., p. 11). That is not to say that hybrid documentaries are incapable of unethical or questionable practices (Mads Brügger comes to mind) rather that they have a higher fidelity and obligation to the truth because they are trying to articulate complex intellectual, visual and emotional ideas through metaphor, reflection and nuance and that challenge entrenched, conventional and predetermined ways of seeing. So, if hybrid documentaries are not these non-fiction/fiction mash-ups, how can they be (and should they be) defined? Notes 1 This simplistic binary definition lacks the nuance that Cultural Hybridity theorists like Homi K. Bhabha were exploring (Bhabha 2012). 2 Renov defends charges that his work skews towards the postmodern in his book The Subject of Documentary (Renov 2004), see Chapter 8, p. 137. as does Winston in Claiming the Real, see Chapter 36, pp. 226–233. (Winston 2008). 3 I am referring here specifically to major figures in contemporary documentary theory like Renov, Plantinga, Nichols, Ponech, Bruzzi and Carrol. Winston worked as a documentary writer in the United Kingdom prior to moving into documentary theory. I  recognise that there are many scholars contributing to debates within documentary theory who are also practitioners. 4 There is an interview with Robert Greene at the end of the book in which he clarifies and adds depth to his position. Robert Greene. (2022, December 19). Interview. Rachel Landers.

What are hybrid documentaries?  27 5 This term ‘Creative Non-Fiction’ is the favoured term for hybrid and experimental documentaries in the recent Seventh ebook 2022 publication Subjective Realities: The Art of Creative Non-Fiction Film (Greene is a contributor) although much of what the authors and filmmakers describes as their practice would work within Grierson’s stretchy catch all 1933 definition ‘The creative treatment of actuality’. (Smith and Heeney 2022). 6 Stella Bruzzi writes in detail about this in Chapter 2, Narration: the film and its voice. New Documentary, pp. 47–72. (Bruzzi 2006). 7 Errol Morris will make it clear in his interview at the end of the book that characterising The Thin Blue Line as a postmodern documentary is a complete misunderstanding of the intent of the film which was to prove the innocence of a man on death row convicted of murder. Errol Morris. (2022, December 12). Interview. Rachel Landers. 8 The interviews with Direct Cinema pioneers in Levin’s 1971 book also seem to contradict these assertions they were making claims about ‘objective evidence’. 9 The expression ‘reality deniers’ is taken from Errol Morris’ sustained attack on Thomas Kuhn and post structuralism in his book Errol Morris, The Ashtray: Or the Man Who Denied Reality, YBP Print DDA (Morris 2018). 10 An excellent comparative analysis of JFK and The Thin Blue Line through the prism of both sides of the documentary theory schism (Nichols, Winston, Renov vs Carroll etc.) is in Stephen Rowley, Two Murders in Dallas: Documentary, Reality, and Dubious Truths – Sterow (Rowley 2003). ‘That some such conclusions may be more questionable than others does not eliminate the fundamental point that non-fiction makes claim to such a truth in a way that fiction does not’.

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28  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Ekinci, B. T. (2017). A Hybrid Documentary Genre: Animated Documentary and the Analysis of Waltz with Bashir (2008) Movie. CINEJ Cinema Journal 6 (1): 4–24. https://doi.org/10.5195/CINEJ.2017.144. Ellis, J. (2021). How Documentaries Mark Themselves Out from Fiction: A GenreBased Approach. Studies in Documentary Film 15 (2): 140–50. https://doi.org/10. 1080/17503280.2021.1923144. Ferrarini, L. (2020). Documentary Hybrids. In P. Vannini (Ed.). The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video (pp.  164–72). Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429196997-18. Fraser, N. (2013). Why Documentary Matters. Foreword. In B. Winston (Ed.). The Documentary Film Book. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: BFI Publishing. Green, K. (Director). (2017). Casting JonBenet. Forensic Films. Greene, R. (2016, Updated 2019, September  25). Die, Hybrid! Die! Sight  & Sound. British Film Institute. Accessed May  2, 2022. https://www2.bfi.org.uk/ news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/unfiction/die-hybrid-die. Greene, R. (Director). (2021). Procession. 4th Row Films. Herzog, W. (2016). The Minnesota Declaration. In D. LaRocca (Ed.). The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (pp. 379–80). Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Book, Rowman & Littlefield. Hoffman, K. (2016). Deceiving Into the Truth. The Indirect Cinema of Stories We Tell and the Act of Killing. In D. LaRocca (Ed.). The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (pp. 517–36). Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Book, Rowman & Littlefield. Jennings, H. (Director). (1943). The Silent Village. Crown Film Unit. Johnson, K. (Director). (2020). Dick Johnson Is Dead. Big Mouth Productions. Kapadia, P. (Director). (2021). A Night of Knowing Nothing. Petit Chaos. Konopka, B. (Director). (2009). Rabbit a la Berlin. Icarus Films. Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landesman, O. (2015). Lying to Be Real: The Aesthetics of Ambiguity in Docufictions. In D. Marcus  & S. Kara (Eds.). Contemporary Documentary (pp.  9–25). London; New York: Routledge. LaRocca, D. (2016). Introduction. Representative Qualities and Questions of Documentary. In D. LaRocca (Ed.). The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (pp. 1–54). Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lanham: Lexington Books. LaRocca, D. (Ed.). (2016). The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. Latsis, D. & Lessard, B. (2022). Introduction: Documentary Pedagogy: A Burgeoning Field. The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61 (9). https://doi.org/10.3998/ jcms.18261332.0061.901. Layton, B. (Director). (2012). The Imposter. 24 Seven Productions. Levin, G. Roy. (1971). Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews With Film Makers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Lewis, S. (2022, August 8). I Want You to Hear This: A Sandy Hook Mother Confronts Alex Jones. The New York Times.

What are hybrid documentaries?  29 Meade, A. (2021, August 29). Independent Review Criticises ABC’s Luna Park Ghost Train Fire Series Over Neville Wran Claim. The Guardian, sec. Media. www.­ theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/30/independent-review-criticises-abcs-lunapark-ghost-train-fire-series-over-neville-wran-claim. Merewether, J. (2009). Shaping the Real: Directorial Imagination and the Visualisation of Evidence in the Hybrid Documentary. Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 6 (3). Moody, L. (2013, July  2). Act Normal: Hybrid Tendencies in Documentary Film. 11 Polaroids. Journal of Film, Sound & Art. https://11polaroids.com/2013/07/02/ act-normal-hybrid-tendencies-in-documentary-film/. Morris, E. (Director). (1988). The Thin Blue Line. Miramax. Morris, E. (Director). (2016). Wormwood. Netflix. Morris, E. (Director). (2018). American Dharma. Fourth Floor Productions. Morris, E. (2018). The Ashtray: Or the Man Who Denied Reality. YBP Print DDA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, E. (2022, December 12). Interview. Rachel Landers. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (1994). Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. O’Hailey, T. (2010). Hybrid Animation: Integrating 2D and 3D Assets. Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Oppenheimer, J. (Director). (2012). The Act of Killing. Final Cut for Real. Peterson, J. (2021, September  29). ABC’s Juanita  Nielsen Documentary Removed from IView as the Network Investigates Possible Inaccuracies. Daily Mail Online. www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10039297/ABCs-Juanita-Nielsen-docu mentary-removed-iView.html. Plantinga, C. (1987). Defining Documentary: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Projected Worlds. Persistence of Vision 5: 44–54. Plantinga, C. (2016). The Limits of Appropriation: Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/NonFiction Film Distinction. In D. LaRocca (Ed.). The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (pp.  113–124). Lanham: Lexington Books. Plantinga, C. R. (1997). Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge Studies in Film. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Polley, S. (Director). (2012). Stories We Tell. National Film Board of Canada. Ponech, T. (1999). What Is Non-Fiction Cinema?: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Renov, M. (Ed.). (1993). Theorizing Documentary. AFI Film Readers. New York: Routledge. Renov, M. (Ed.). (2004). The Subject of Documentary. Visible Evidence; v. 16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Resha, D. (2018, October). Selling Direct Cinema: Robert Drew and the Rhetoric of Reality. Film History 30: 32–50. https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.30.3.02. Robertson, Z. (2016, April 19). Hybrid Film. POV Magazine. https://povmagazine. com/hybrid-film/. Roscoe, J. (2001). Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: University Press.

30  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Rossellini, R. (Director). (1948). Germany Year Zero. Produzione Salvo D’Angelo and Tevere Film. Roston, T. (2013, October  7). Establishing the Hybrid Documentary Canon. Doc Soup | POV Blog | PBS. http://archive.pov.org/blog/docsoup/2013/10/establishingthe-hybrid-documentary-canon/. Rotha, P. (1952). Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality. 3rd ed. London: Faber. Rowley, S. (2003, June 3). Two Murders in Dallas: Documentary, Reality, and Dubious Truths – Sterow. Urban Panning, Film etc. www.sterow.com/?p=318. Ruizpalacious, A. (Director). (2021). A Cop Movie. No Ficción. Sellors, C. P. (2014). What in the World Distinguishes Fiction From Nonficton Film? Film and Philosophy 18: 105–23. Skoller, J. (2011). Introduction to the Special Issue Making It (Un)Real: Contemporary Theories and Practices in Documentary Animation. Animation 6 (3): 207–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847711422496. Slugan, M. (2021). Textualism, Extratextualism, and the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction in Documentary Studies. Studies in Documentary Film 15 (2): 114–26. http:// doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142. Smith, O.  & Heeney, A. (2022). Subjective Realities: The Art of Creative NonFiction. Toronto: Seventh Row. Stam, Robert. (2016, July). Hybrid Variations on a Documentary Theme. Rebeca – Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual 2: 15–36. https://doi. org/10.22475/rebeca.v2n2.307. Sussex, Elizabeth. (1975). The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thornton, W. (Director). (2009). Samson and Delilah. Scarlett Pictures. Ward, P. (2005). Documentary: The Margins of Reality. Short Cuts (London, England). London: Wallflower. Ward, P. (Director). (2020). The Midnight Gospel. Netflix. Werbner, P. & Modood, T. (2015). Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic & P ­ rofessional. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1912925. Wiehl, A. (2019). The “New” Documentary Nexus: Networked/Networking in Interactive Assemblages. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Williams, L. (1993). Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary. Film Quarterly (Archive) 46 (3): 9–21. Winston, B. (2000). Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. London, England: British Film Institute. Winston, B. (2008). Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. 2nd ed., Rev. and Updated ed. London: BFI. Winston, B. (2013). The Documentary Film Book. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: BFI Publishing. Wissot, L. (2017, September 28). Whose Story?: Five Doc-Makers on (Avoiding) Extractive Filmmaking. International Documentary Association. www.documentary. org/feature/whose-story-five-doc-makers-avoiding-extractive-filmmaking. Zhao, C. (Director). (2020). Nomadland. Highwayman. Hear/Say Productions. Cor Cordium Productions.

2 Documentary and the obsession with definitions Identifying the traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents

The chapter is in two sections. The first section looks at the era that provided the conditions to incubate hybrid documentary and the way documentary itself was defined, framed and described. The second section identifies eight traits of the hybrid documentary and examines early manifestations of the hybrid documentary from the 20th century. In particular, I look in depth at Humphrey Jennings’s The Silent Village (1943) from pre-production, production and post-production through to distribution and reception, identifying it as possibly the first fully articulated manifestation of the form. I identify and explore the tendencies and traits of other hybrid documentaries that followed Jennings’s classic, such as Chronicle of a Summer (1961), The War Game (1965), Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Drinking for England (1998) demonstrating what it is about that make them hybrid documentaries, not blurry, and classic antecedents of the form in the 21st century. Section 1. Examining the historical era that incubated hybrid documentary and the way documentary was defined, framed and described The hybrid documentary incubator

To see how the forerunners of hybrid documentary evolved and what traits characterised them, we need to go on a lengthy segue into the environment and period that I  will argue helped to nurture and forge the hybrid documentary. This period loosely spans from the early 1920s to the 1940s when experimentation and play were the predominant defining features of leading documentary and non-fiction filmmakers. As Stella Bruzzi noted Many antecedents of the modern documentary were not so haunted by issues of bias, performance and authorial inflection. . . . Grierson, the Soviets, Paul Rotha and other early practitioners and theorists were far more relaxed about documentary as a category than we as theorists have become. (Bruzzi 2006, p. 8) DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-4

32  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth It is self-evident to note that much of the practice was shot through with colonial and racial presumptions, educative and propagandistic goals and limited to a selective group of privileged white men who had their names above the line (notwithstanding the ingenious contributions and inventions of Esfir Shub, Elivetta Shitlova, Ruby and Edith Grierson, Diana Pine and others). Uniformity among makers aside, there was a surprising amount of diversity of form, invention, along with joy and dare I  say fun to be had both practically and ideologically that is often absent in what Brian Winston describes as ‘the trenches of [contemporary] film theory’ (Winston 2008, p. 233). Winston’s use of war imagery to capture the state of play of the late 20thand early 21st-century ‘epistemological conflict’ is telling. Documentary as far as he is concerned is engaged in a ‘war’ in which disputes about theory are ‘one front in the battle for documentary’. He warns of ‘another theatre in this war where the battle is even more threatening’ this being the ‘vexed’ ethical principles we have inherited from the Grierson tradition. Such catastrophising does tend to compel one to re-examine the production landscape and the accompanying pronouncements about definitions at a time when documentary was in its infancy and being made, discussed and debated passionately by people who had come out of one real war and were headed for another. There are lessons to be found. While Stella Bruzzi applied the following quote to contemporary documentary makers – much of what she writes could be aptly applied (with the caveat that there was little distinction between a theorist and a practitioner in this period) to those who were engaged in exploring, expanding and inventing the form. It can legitimately be argued that filmmakers themselves (and their audiences) have, much more readily than most theorists, accepted documentary’s inability to give an undistorted, purely reflective picture of reality. Several different sorts of non-fiction film have now emerged that propose a complex documentary truth arising from an insurmountable compromise between subject and recording, suggesting in turn that it is this very juncture between reality and filmmaker that is at the heart of any documentary. (Bruzzi 2006, p. 9) Having tried to step away from the straitjacket and ‘conceptual confusion’ of the fiction/non-fiction, documentary debate preoccupying contemporary documentary theorists it may seem paradoxical to embark on a discussion of definitions as they pertain to documentary and specifically to hybrid documentary. Surely in attempting to nail things down one will run into the same ‘is it or isn’t it fiction?’ issues when trying to explain in detail what these things are and how they function. This is not the aim of the chapter, rather it is to highlight the mania that documentary

Documentary and the obsession with definitions  33 makers and documentary theorists have had for generating definitions from the late 19th century onwards. If nothing else, it is to remind us that this mania carries with it an implicit warning against trying to fix things too hard. It also seeks to highlight what kinds of definitions have staying power and why. The chapter is in essence an interrogation of why indeed definitions for documentary are important and have far-ranging industrial, social and potentially ethical consequences. These sorts of consequences are rarely acknowledged by academic documentary theorists when they continue to assert that all documentaries (including hybrids) are quasi fictions because they involve construction, editing, authorship, point of view, subjectivity and so on. These assertions could be aimed at all forms of journalism, history and non-fiction writing and science (including climate change science), and one can end up in the subjectivist nightmare of Carl Plantinga’s parable about Michael the student who failed his research paper on the history of space travel because he applied all the relativistic documentary theories (that there was no difference between fiction and non-fiction) he had learnt in his film theory class and decided to include references to Darth Vader and 2001: A Space Odyssey in his history essay (Plantinga 2016). Ample evidence for the obsession for definitions can be found in Dan Geva’s first volume of an intended three-volume set titled A Philosophical History of Documentary (2021) collating and analysing around one hundred definitions of documentary that have appeared over three centuries. Geva’s forensically detailed study demonstrates amply, through the prism of philosophical enquiry, that there appears to be a seemingly inexhaustible well from which to apply meaning, classifications and delineations to this form of film making. I thoroughly concur that his enterprise, celebrating the everevolving state of play, ideas and arguments about documentary, is a rich source for determining the ethical and moral value of documentary in relationship with the world and is more rewarding and enriching than attempts to shut down discussions about definitions. Geva’s thesis is as follows: I propose that the recurring act of defining documentary across time serves both as an indexical and as a symbolic sign of documentariness’s innate ethical virtue, which has been thus far understudied through the lens of its recurring set of definitional attempts. By using the word ‘virtue’, I  wish to draw the reader’s attention once again to one of this study’s greatest sources of inspiration: Aristotle. After all, the skeptical reader ought to have asked by now: ‘Does documentariness have a virtue in the first place?’ As I shall argue repeatedly throughout this three-volume set, Aristotle’s moral philosophy and its innate connectivity to human conduct across its technical, theoretical, and ethical dimensions strongly allude to this book’s premise that documentary and documentariness can justly be argued to have ethical virtues and

34  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth that it is worthwhile to reflect upon them and pursue the quest for such an ethical meaning. (Geva 2021, p. 5) Geva’s endeavour is an important theoretical and philosophical pursuit; however, I do empathise with the ‘renowned documentary maker’ Geva cites as making the crowd-pleasing pronouncement at an unnamed academic conference that documentary needs to get beyond a fixation with definitions and face, ‘head on, its real challenges’ of which there are many (ibid., p. 6). While Geva views this as a defensive stance connected to concerns about documentary’s ‘ontological immaturity’ and a clamping down of scholarly enterprise, his approach, of laying out one definition after another in separate chronologically ordered chapters (Volume 1 spans from 1895 to 1959), does have the impact of detaching these definitions from real-world contexts and consequences which are critical to understanding how documentary praxis can be impacted by them – definitions do not exist outside and sociopolitical and industrial reality. In laying out the nature and traits of hybrid documentary (as it is for documentary in general) it is vital to examine the historical contexts that forged them and how audiences perceived and received these films. Because of this, I am more interested in exploring attributes, practices and tendencies than prescribing formulas and manifestos for hybrid documentary. A good reason for not pursing a rigid set of parameters along with connecting how definitions function in real-world contexts can be found in the following real-life instructive tale. When the definition of documentary went to court – a cautionary (non-fiction) tale

In 2011, the definition of documentary went to court in Australia – twice. In both cases, first in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and then in the Full Federal Court the finding was that the term documentary was ‘uncertain, ambiguous and obscure’ (Screen Australia Media Release 2012). How this extraordinary narrative unfolded goes to the core of how precarious ideas, from a legal, generalist and specialist point of view, of what constitutes a documentary are. The saga that ran over several years, underscores why the Australian Film Industry (like other countries with government funding schemes for screen production) with its mix of federal and state screen agency subsidy and commercial imperatives, provides such a fascinating research environment to analyse hybrid documentary and documentary in general. There can be few film industry ecosystems that could throw up such a startling and I believe unparalleled example of a protracted (if somewhat absurd) and revelatory, legal interrogation of the question ‘what is a documentary?’ One of the distinctive factors about the Australian documentary industry is that since the mid-1970s on there has been federal and state government

Documentary and the obsession with definitions  35 funding available for the development and production of documentary by independent filmmakers. Prior to that there were government-run institutions that produced in-house documentary content. While the amount and nature of the funding have varied greatly, as have the type of agencies allocating the funds, for the most part, Australia, like many other Commonwealth countries, has provided subsidy and investment for the creation of national screen content. As it pertained to documentary it was the now well-known and oftquoted snippet ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ from John Grierson’s 1933 essay ‘The Documentary Producer’ published in Cinema Quarterly that served as the core descriptor/definition in content guidelines from the early 1940s onwards. In 2004, these guidelines were updated by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), primarily because of the rise of ‘factual’ and ‘reality’ programmes on broadcast television. Under the heading ‘Defining Documentary’ was the statement ‘Documentary program means a program that is a creative treatment of actuality other than a news, current affairs, sports coverage, magazine, infotainment or light entertainment programmes (Game shows, Talk shows, Variety shows)’ (Documentary Guidelines ABA. Commonwealth of Australia 2004). The ABA guidelines provided a further ten pages of detailed explanation with a range of production examples as to why they did or did not comply with this definition. It was a relatively flexible and nuanced set of parameters, and it was acknowledged that both documentary and the other programme types listed are all forms of ‘factual’ programming that exist on a ‘continuum’ and are subject to changes in style and popularity. Within documentary itself there can be various genres from observational to fully scripted and ‘hybrids which combine re-enactments and interviews’1 (Screen Australia 2012). The guidelines were to function in parallel with the Australian Content Standard which provided minimum annual hourly content quotas to commercial broadcasters that they had to produce in order to be compliant and retain their licence. In 2004, there were two national and three commercial broadcasters with the latter being required to commission and broadcast a minimum of 20 hours of Australian documentary programming annually. The public broadcasters the ABC and SBS were exempt from Australian content quotas and were instead regulated by their respective charters. Compliance was also contingent on the ACMA and ABA guidelines ‘a creative treatment of actuality other than news’ etc., being applied. Australian independent documentary makers relied on these quotas for their livelihood. In 2007, everything changed and would land the definition of documentary in court four years later. A summary of the main points of this complex case is as follows. On 1 July 2007, the Australian Government introduced The Producer Offset (a tax rebate) on Qualifying Australian Production Expenditure (QAPE) to benefit Australian producers raising finance for production. In short, a screen project could get a significant rebate on the costs of goods and services

36  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth used in the project. Feature films received a 40% rebate on QAPE, and television drama and documentary received a 20% rebate. The impact on all three sectors, feature films, television drama and documentary, was immediate and led to a significant upswing in production. Besides the stipulation that all qualifying projects had Significant Australian Content (SAC), met minimum expenditure thresholds, minimum format lengths and met requirements for commercial broadcast/exhibition/distribution, there were no definitions provided as to what each of these categories represented. In the case of feature films and television drama, the definition, for the most part, seemed selfevident, but documentary practitioners flagged problems from the outset. The primary concern was that the Australian Taxation Office had not adopted the documentary guidelines (with Grierson’s definition) contained in the Australian Content Standards set by the Australian Broadcasting Authority detailed earlier. These guidelines had been used by all Australian film-funding agencies and broadcasters up until the introduction of the offset legislation in 2007. With the introduction of the offset in 2007, these pre-existing guidelines were not linked to the QAPE rebate, and it created a financing environment in which all bets were off. Suddenly, it was possible to have anything counted as a documentary – (game shows, talk shows and so on). Between 2007 and 2010, 252 applications for final Producer Offset certificates were received ‘in respect of programs which sought certification as documentaries’. Of these, 248 were approved and issued with a final certificate ‘representing a total amount of $44,266,140’ (Media Release 2012). The state of play reached a state of crisis in 2010 when four programmes were refused certification and thus the rebate on the grounds that the programmes were not documentaries and the producer of one of these programmes Lush House (2009) decided to contest the ruling in court. During the two court cases and the appeals, it became evident that Grierson’s by-then octogenarian definition of documentary ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ came in for a particular battering and was dismissed out of hand by two separate judges as being completely unhelpful with resolving the issues before the courts. This had unnerving impact on the national documentary community as the definition itself had been enshrined in some form or other in Australian Government Screen policy since World War II. At stake in this case was considerable amounts of money and for some, the integrity of the industry itself. In this case, the film content that set the cat amongst the pigeons was not even close to the complexities inherent in contemporary hybrid documentary but a fairly modest low-budget quasiobservational 10×24 minutes series about cleaning one’s domicile titled Lush House hosted by the cleaning ‘guru’ Shannon Lush. A  series, purists and trial experts labelled as ‘infotainment’, to which one of the presiding judges Justice Downes retorted – in what can only be regarded as a slap down to the monumental works of Ken Burns –, ‘learning how to order and clean a house and remove stains and unwanted marks and smells may be of more practical

Documentary and the obsession with definitions  37 use to more people than learning about the cause of the American Civil War’ (Downes 2011, p. 14). Finding in favour of the Lush House producers – that the programme was entitled to the producers’ offset rebate – Downes stated that he acknowledged that Grierson’s definition had gathered a degree of ‘currency’ over time, however he found the term actuality ‘inelegant’ and that the definition had not been widely adopted by dictionaries. At issue for him was the word ‘documentary as an ordinary English word and to look at the characteristics of Lush House which, may attract or deny its application’ (Downes 2011, p. 6). Sweeping away decades of fervent debate amongst documentary practitioners and theorists, he stated that ‘the meaning of ordinary English words is matter for the court or tribunal hearing. It is not for industry experts’ (ibid., p. 6). He accused these ‘experts’ of throwing about ‘made-up expressions of recent origin’ like ‘reality program’, ‘infotainment’ and ‘makeover program’ and that using descriptions/definitions (like Grierson’s) ‘whose meaning is just as uncertain, is more inclined to divert that to assist’ (ibid., p. 7). Downes went on to cite an array of legal precedents (all taxation cases) in which ‘courts have warned against the dangers of paraphrasing’ (ibid., p.  7) and that while Grierson’s definition within the ABA guidelines was recognised, Downes raised the possibility that it was no longer relevant and could be discarded as it was not ‘akin’ to a statutory definition in an ‘industry subject to constant change’ (ibid., p. 14). Screen Australia appealed the findings and took the case to the full Federal Court which in turn dismissed the appeal. This ejection of Grierson as the default definition of documentary is something that theorist Brian Winston, and to a slightly lesser extent theorist Bill Nichols, had been advocating for years. Winston had long and loudly asserted that Grierson’s definition was hamstringing documentary practice, was authorial, prejudiced, patronising and generating unethical practices particularly in facilitating and promoting the poor treatment of subjects/ participants. Nichols accused Grierson theories of documentary approximating ‘neoconservative political theory’ resembling ‘more virulent forms of totalitarianism2’ (Nichols 2001, p. 581). In the second edition of Claiming the Real Winston stated It is hard to see how Grierson’s theoretical foundations for the documentary can survive. Indeed, the collapse of Grierson theory might well be upon us. . . . [and that its possible] to envisage a greater proliferation of documentary forms so the vibrancy of what is on the screen is sustained and even increased but on a different post Grierson foundation. (Winston, p. 3) The book’s sustained attack on Grierson over hundreds of pages (not unlike Winston’s attacks on direct cinema) is shot through with a certainty that the definition can be sloughed off like a snakeskin leaving a brave new future of diverse documentary forms, definitions and voices to take over – with the

38  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth last line of the book announcing ‘The age of post – Grierson documentary is upon us’ (ibid., p. 290). In the case of Australia, the reality was . . . Not. Quite. Yet. Winston’s understanding of Grierson’s influence seems to be somewhat like Geva’s, who by placing Grierson’s definition side by side with analysis of the definitions of documentary/non-fiction of Vertov, Shub, Flaherty, Rotha et al. – characterises it as something that can be contained and compartmentalised rather than an amorphous, stretchy, adaptable set of ideas that could serve the interests of quite radically different groups3 (Williams and Druick 2014). In a lecture for undergraduates, I once created a visual timeline of the ‘Hydra’ like qualities of Grierson’s definition that spread from continent to continent, from the UK to Canada, Australia, India, (often through colonial Commonwealth film institutions) from the late 1930s onwards, often seeded by a personal visit from either himself or an acolyte. Coined the ‘The Grierson Effect’, it is brilliantly analysed and tracked in detail in the 2014 book of the same title. The book captures something that both Geva and Winston overlooked. To understand the Grierson effect as it has circulated and taken shape worldwide entails reconsidering Grierson himself as a motivating factor for valorising the means of making, circulating and watching documentary cinema. In particular, his emphasis on the connection between film, propaganda education and citizenship was enormously influential. While there have been numerous historical and biographical accounts of Grierson and his ideas, there has been less attention to and examination of the infinitely more intricate and multifarious Grierson effect: how Grierson (the person) and ‘Griersonian’ (the set of ideas) interacted with local conditions and forces to help bring about legitimising frameworks for documentary and educational film production and circulations. (Williams and Druick 2014, p. 3) A great demonstration of this ‘effect’ is when Screen Australia decided not to continue any avenues of appeal against the successful Lush House ruling for EME Productions despite the furore the case caused within the documentary filmmaking community (Dooley 2012). Instead, the federal screen agency lobbied the federal government directly to include the old definition of documentary in the Offset taxation legislation. A year or so later, Grierson was back and ‘become law’ with the amending legislation receiving Royal Assent, 28 June 2013. Subsection 376–25 (1) of the Income Tax Assessment 1997, as amended, now states: A film is a documentary if the film is a creative treatment of actuality, having regard to: (a) the extent and purpose of any contrived situation featured in the film: and

Documentary and the obsession with definitions  39 (b) the extent to which the film explores an idea or a theme; and (c) the extent to which the film has an overall narrative structure; and (d) any other relevant matters Subsection 376–25 (2) further clarifies that a film is not a documentary if it is an ‘infotainment or lifestyle’ (defined by reference to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992) or a film with typical features of a magazine style program . . . The amendments are consistent with the Documentary Guidelines applied by the. . . . ACMA . . . thus seen as restoring the original understanding of the word ‘documentary’ in the context of the Producer offset. (Media Release. Screen Australia 2013) The legislation was explicitly introduced as a result of the Lush House case. It remains the ‘legal’ definition for documentary in Australia today. Whether one accepts what is regarded as Grierson’s definition of documentary or considers it, like Winston and Nichols, as a malevolent force, two things are essential to acknowledge. First is its sheer staying power and ubiquity and second the importance of comprehending the environment, context, production landscape from which it emerged and the need to observe the five words ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ within the 991-word document, from which they are taken, along with the national and global documentary movement that spawned it. This is important because it is within this crucible of meaning that hybrid documentary films emerged. As noted, the documentary landscape of the early- to mid-20th century was a broad church of diversity, invention and exploration in terms of content if not content makers. While the practitioners involved could disagree about definition, technique and politics, they were a relatively small global community and aware and relatively tolerant of each other’s filmmaking idiosyncrasies and styles – ­Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will being a notable exception being both admired and reviled at the same time.4 The Grierson definition origin story

Grierson’s treatise in which the critical phrase occurs is a somewhat shambolic, occasionally funny, discourse about the role of the documentary producer and how this differs from a fiction film producer. It is not presented as a manifesto about precisely what a documentary is or is not or how it should be defined. On the contrary, it is quite a circumspect and speculative ­rumination – some of which sounds slightly pompous to 21st-century ears. In Grierson’s view, The Documentary producer is not always serving commercial interests, as, at times, he5 may be serving the interests of those focussed on educating the public or advancing national propaganda. The documentary producer’s primary obligation is to assist the directors working for him

40  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth to bring the (potentially dull) content and participants ‘alive’ . . . only one thing gives the producer importance: the fact that he makes directors and, through directors, makes art. It is the only thing worth an artist’s making: money not excepted. Directors can be no larger than the producer allows them to be, and their films no bigger (except by noble accident) than his own imagination permits. Handling, as he may do, men of different outlooks, different temperaments, he must often, like Chesterton’s Knight, ride off in all directions. (Grierson, The Documentary Producer 1933, p. 8) Grierson’s essay is notable for how production orientated the instructions are, the lack of division between theory and practice and how variable the output can be in a film form that he believes is still evolving. ‘Documentary, or the creative treatment of actuality, is a new art with no such background in the story and the stage as the studio so glibly possess’. He adds the caveat that, ‘theory is important, experiment is important; and every development of technique or new mastery of theme has to be brought quickly into criticism. In that respect it is well that the producer should be a theorist: teaching and creating a style; stamping it, in greater or less degree, on all the work for which he is responsible’. (ibid., p. 8) The essay ends with a lengthy section about the delicate balancing act a documentary producer has to pull off being a ‘knee-wife’ to the sponsors/funders/ commissioners of propaganda and education who may be both demanding, overbearing and have no knowledge of what’s involved, and thus ‘it is well that a producer should know how to talk soothingly to children and idiots’. The other side of the balancing act is working with the artists’ temperament and experiments of a director attempting to get to the ‘sticking point’ of a subject. Grierson advises patience and persistence once, twice or three times but counsels ‘do not experiment to Biblical Proportion’. If it’s still not working, either the director is ingenious beyond the scope of the producer’s imagination or you’re a bad producer for picking a bad director. He signs off with the missive – if it’s not working fire him or fire yourself, ‘according to your conscience’ (ibid., p. 9). This open, free-ranging discussion needs also to be perceived in context to the other articles that appeared over short but very vibrant life (1932–1935) of the film magazine Cinema Quarterly. Contributors included John Grierson, Basil Wright, and Alberto Cavalcanti, and the magazine was a vital site of intersecting voices from the nascent British Documentary movement. The emphasis was on exploring innovation and experimentation, and its editorials

Documentary and the obsession with definitions  41 encouraged debate and argument amongst practitioners. Reading the contributions of those working or commenting on documentary in the first half of the 1930s, it is impossible to agree with the assertions of McDonald and Cousins that ‘The British documentary movement of the 1930s was the selfconscious creation of a single determined individual: John Grierson’ (Macdonald and Cousins 1996). This interpretation seems to be much more the result of the almost 70 years of the ‘Grierson effect’ than the reality of the era. For example, the statement contradicts the stated aims of the ‘Independent Filmmakers Association’ of which Grierson was a member launched in 1933 and published in Cinema Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 1. There are six other advisors listed besides Grierson, including Paul Rotha, Basil Wright and Stuart Legg, and they emphasise that the association will promote and facilitate the ‘cooperative’ efforts of members’.6 The advisors also offered ‘Professional Advice, Reviews of members films, film exchange and summer school’. The Association worked under the mantra ‘Documentary, Experimental, Educational’. What was also notable was the emphasis that both the magazine and the Association placed on supporting and informing the efforts of the wouldbe amateur filmmaker creating, what was referred to in a non-pejorative way as, a ‘sub-standard’ production. In the same volume an article titled ‘A Working Plan For Sub-Standard’ provided a kind of global snapshot of contemporary documentary practice in the West to assist amateur film societies and amateur filmmakers work out what to make and how to make it.7 The article is written under the collective authorship of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (EMBFU).8 This lack of an authorial stamp is echoed in how expansively documentary of the period was described to the amateur enthusiast. The latter was instructed that there was not one but three main schools or divisions of documentary work. The first was the ‘popular journalistic’ or newsreel school. The second school ‘is a much deeper affair’ – ‘the Flaherty school’, which was primarily concerned with the ‘exotic’ but also storytelling and narrative. The third group was wildly varied and included Vertov and Turin from Russia, Ruttman from Germany, Ivens in Holland and the EMB and Rotha in the UK. While all their films were described as dealing entirely with ‘industrial and modern material’ and that ‘all the films [were] financed under educational and propaganda auspices – their output or “method of treatment varies. It is sometimes impressionistic, sometimes symphonic, sometimes analytical”, avoiding the personal story and the discursive’ (Cinema Quarterly. Vol. 1, No. 2, 1933, p. 23). While No. 2 and No. 3 were regarded as more complex, all three were accepted as part of the evolving ‘new art’. The public was encouraged to master the theories of all three schools, and the best practice would then follow from this ‘academic grounding’. It was also observed that while those that foot the bill want propaganda that did not mean it couldn’t be powerful and truthful art, noting ‘it is good to remember that Leonardo, Michelangelo and El Greco were all paid propagandists’ (ibid., p. 24). In the 1933 Winter Edition, Paul Rotha further outlined how very broad the ideas and practice of documentary were in his essay ‘The Function of the

42  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Director: 1. The Documentary Director’. In his view, a documentary could use trained actors and a stage set or not. Any ‘technical artifice’ was allowable to gain its ‘effect on the spectator’ (Cinema Quarterly. Vol. 2, No. 2, 1933, p. 78). The use of either dramatisation in documentary with trained actors (like Coal Face) or the rehearsed performance of non-actors (Nanook, Man of Arran, Night Mail) was both commonplace and unproblematic, and these approaches were not seen to be radically different (or better or worse) than documentaries with less intervention, shot on location, like Joris Ivens’s Rain. They were also not readily confused with fiction films of the period.9 For Rotha, Documentary defines not subject or style, but approach. . . . To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention.10 (Rotha 1933, p. 78) Like the EMBFU, Rotha divided the practice up into courses or schools. For him there were just two. Seeking content at the ends of the earth like Flaherty or focusing on sociological issues in the community like Grierson. He didn’t favour one course over the other stating ‘the choice is personal’ (ibid., p. 78). The published material relating to the documentary in Cinema Quarterly (1932–1935) was united by discussion about the potential of the form ‘the right to theorise, [and] the right to experiment’ (ibid., p. 79). In articles and essays and reviews over the three years of publication covering poetic documentary; actors in documentary; documentary stage design; documentary ethics; the ‘evasions’ of Robert Flaherty in making the Man of Aran and the propaganda manifesto of Joseph Goebbels, there were constant references to the form’s ‘infancy’ and the need to support innovation, fluidity and momentum in practice and style and its distinctiveness to the commercial fiction film industry. There was a strong sense in this era that those engaged in documentary production were participating in ‘laboratory of experiments’ (Read 1933, p. 18). This is reflected in the preface of filmmaker Paul Rotha’s seminal 1935 text Documentary film: the use of the film medium to interpret creatively and in social terms the life of the people as it exists in reality (Rotha 1952). Rotha described the ‘method of filmmaking – that which we have called “documentary” [was] something still being built as the first real attempt to use cinema for purposes other than entertainment’ (ibid., p. 25). Like his contemporaries Legg and Cavalcanti, he argued that its purpose was in service to the community and, unlike fascism, that served the individual ‘the proper duty of cinema (in terms of Reality) is to be the work of the community for the community’ (Cinema Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 3, Spring 1934, p. 168). Albert Cavalanti, the Brazilian filmmaker who was invited to the UK by Grierson in the early 1930s, captured the play and adventurousness that had

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  43 fuelled the global documentary movement from the early 20th century on which included experimenters like Esfir Shub ‘inventing’ the archive documentary film with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) and Vertov’s 1924 Kino Eye he subtitled – ‘THE FIRST. non-fiction film thing. Without a Script. Without Actors. Outside a Studio’. These practitioners did not represent a cohesive unit and could be riven by conflict and dislike of each other’s work, but they were somewhat liberated (even while they funded by government and institutional propaganda entities) from a sense of institutional and ideological orthodoxy.11 In the 1950s, reflecting on this era, Cavalcanti published 14 ‘don’ts’ for documentary makers concluding with No. 14. ‘Don’t lose the opportunity to experiment: documentary achieved prestige through experimentation. Without experimentation, the documentary loses its value. Without experimentation, the documentary would cease to exist’ (Cavalcanti 1952). The broad consensus of the practitioners appears to be that they regarded themselves as fiercely distinct from those working in fiction. While the burgeoning documentary form may make use of narrative structures and dramatisation, this did not make them fictions. Thomas Davis contextualised this stance within a broader late-modernism movement and noted that The creative treatment of actuality: the staying power of Grierson’s famous phrase attests more to its allure than its clarity. There are several good histories of documentary, and nearly all of them dutifully recite Grierson’s definition. Most, however, don’t acknowledge that the concept of documentary evolved over a period of years, often in an antagonistic and dialectical relationship with other types of cinema. The nascent ‘documentary’ cut its teeth against the fantasies and excess of Hollywood, the perceived aestheticism of some modernist and avantgarde films, and the politicized cinema of the Soviet Union. (Davis 2015) Into this landscape entered British film director Humphrey Jennings who, along with an essential set of co-creators and collaborators, would make one of the most enduring, impactful and fully evolved hybrid documentaries of the 20th century, The Silent Village (1943). Section 2. Eight traits of the hybrid documentary and early manifestations of the hybrid documentary from the 20th century Humphrey Jennings. The Silent Village (1943). A hybrid documentary prototype

This film encapsulated all the critical ‘best practice’ traits of hybrid documentary in both its ‘means to production’ and the clarity behind the theoretical and ideological strategies supporting and shaping it. Nothing about

44  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth the making of the film was haphazard. It was and is a precise and deliberate experiment of hybridisation. While Jennings was credited as the director and producer, it is critical to emphasise that this was not the work of an auteur, indeed I will argue that such an approach could run counter to some of the principles that can make hybrid documentaries have such a distinct impression on audiences. It is also important to note there were documentaries that preceded The Silent Village that have elements of hybridity – In the Land of the Headhunters (1914), Nanook of the North (1922), Land Without Bread (1933), Coal Face (1935), but they do not have the same unequivocal fidelity to the form. This fidelity to form means that all aspects of the film from idea to funding, to development, pre-production, production, post-production, distribution and reception supply an excellent template to explore subsequent exemplars and provide a foundational model for praxis. The legacy of Humphrey Jennings – filmmaker, painter, poet, writer – veers over time from being almost completely forgotten (Jennings and ­Jackson 1993) to being lionised as a genius. He was first sanctified by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as ‘the only real poet the British cinema has produced’ (Macdonald and Cousins 1996, p. 153) and then belittled and dismissed by Grierson in the 1970s. Jennings was a minor poet. I don’t think he was a great poet. He was a minor poet. How do I feel about his work? I’ll tell you how I feel about his work. Jennings was a very stilted person. He was not a very coordinated person physically, and I find his films reflect that.12 (Sussex 1975, p. 100) After Jennings tumbled again into obscurity in the late 20th century, he was rediscovered and canonised over in the 21st century13 and more recently re-contextualised with more gradation within the British Documentary Movement in Martin Stollery’s excellent overview of changing perceptions of Jennings’s career, the aptly titled Only Context (Stollery 2013). A  critical factor in this wildly oscillating position in the history of documentary is his accidental death at 43 while scouting locations in Greece 1950. His death coincided with an abrupt decline in documentary production in the UK, when the well-funded government propaganda units shut down after World War II. In some ways, his death became a sort of symbol of what was widely regarded, and now somewhat disputed (Russell and Taylor 2010), as the fall of British Documentary14 (Sussex 1975) after its halcyon era of the early 1930s to mid-1940s. His name is featured prominently in the list of dead filmmakers that concludes Rotha’s sombre foreword to the third edition of Documentary Film published in 1952. Unlike the ebullient optimism at the start of the 1935 edition, it is a despondent read. If I myself have been away from documentary making these last four years it is not because of any lack of faith. Rather it is because access

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  45 to means of production of worthwhile measure has been elusive. Having a fine and loyal unit disbanded because of economic pressures . . . there was no point in continuing in circumstances too heavily geared in opposition15. (Rotha 1952, p. 39) Jennings is mourned along with Flaherty, Eisenstein, Damien Parer and ‘the many cameramen of whatever nation whose names we do not know but who were killed in the holocaust’ (ibid., p. 39). The specifics of Jennings’s praxis can be hard to extract given the lofty eulogised company he was placed in by Rotha (along with the discreditation of his output 20 years later by the ‘founder’ of the British Documentary Movement), but it is essential to examine his work within the production realities in which they emerged and not the saintly, auteur-like exceptionalism and cult-like status he acquired over time. Jennings’s first film work came when he was employed by the Film Unit of the General Post Office with John Grierson at the helm in the mid-1930s. The Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (which employed Grierson and produced Drifters and Industrial Britain) had closed 1933 and Sir Stephen Tallents, who was appointed as the public relations officer at the GPO, took the EMB film unit team and library with him to his new organisation. The GPO Film Unit would then be reorganised into the Crown Film Unit at the start of World War II. The period 1934–1945 was an era of well-funded, ambitious and diverse documentary production output, ‘little else had the aesthetic novelty and political charge of the 1930s’ (Davis, p.  28), with a plethora of talented young filmmakers being mentored and trained. Filmmaker Basil Wright stated ‘you can say that the documentary movement in the thirties was as free as anything you can think of . . . you see. It was a question of snatching at opportunity’ (Sussex 1975, p. 54). Wright asserted no one could define the ‘word documentary satisfactorily, because it’s a certain approach to the use of cinema on, shall we say the social side of the community. That’s all’ (ibid., p. 54). In the 1930s, risk, experiment and the cultivation of emerging talent were the prevailing ethos of the documentary community, ‘these things only happen(ed) because of Documentary’ (ibid., p. 54). This experimental zeal was also bolstered by the documentary movement’s close connections to the luminaries of British intelligentsia. World Film News, which had taken over Cinema Quarterly as one of the key publications of the documentary film movement . . . The names [of contributors and supporters] read like a who’s who of modernism and the avantgarde: S. M. Eisenstein, T. S. Eliot, André Gide, Fritz Lang, Henry Moore, László Moholy-Nagy, and G. W. Pabst all find their way into this rather distinguished cast. (Davis 2015, p. 27)

46  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth It was in this creative boom, amidst this creative company, that experienced filmmaker Albert Cavalcanti recognised a ‘brilliance’ in Jennings (as he did in Len Lye) something he associated with Jennings’s background (like Lye’s) as a painter. Jennings started making simple instructional shorts, and when Cavalcanti took over the GPO film Unit from Grierson in 1937 Cavalcanti encouraged Jennings to make more ambitious productions such as Spare Time (1939). Part of Jennings’s contemporary iconic status was the range, not only of his documentary content – the symphonic Listen to Britain (1942), the highly rehearsed and re-enacted Fires were Started (1943) starring real fireman playing fireman during the blitz and Diary for Timothy (1945) a speculative poem for a post-war generation written by E.M. Forster in 1945 – but also the range of his intellectual and creative pursuits. In addition to his painting and creative writing, he was working on his monograph Pandemonium (published posthumously) about the history of the industrialisation of Britain, and he was one of the founders in 1937 of the Mass Observation Movement.16 He was also an ‘energetic’ member of the British surrealist group (with a personal link to Breton and Eluard) and helped organise the British surrealist exhibition of 193617 (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. xi). All these interests and experiences converged in the making of The Silent Village in 1943. Set in a Welsh mining town during the war, the documentary simultaneously relates the daily realities of the inhabitants of Cwmgiedd and tells (as enacted by them) the story of the Nazi annihilation of the inhabitants of a similar town, Lidice, in Czechoslovakia in June  1942. The violence was precipitated by the Liddiccians’ supposed involvement in the assassination of the local Nazi deputy protector. As a potent act of fascist brutality, the Nazis then incinerated the village and destroyed all traces of its existence wiping it from the face of the earth – a message to others who may resist their occupation. What is fascinating about this film is that it is the only one in Jennings’s prodigious filmography that he has both a director and a producer credit (Stollery 2013, p. 409). In a production sense, and without detracting from the key creative contributions of his collaborators (particularly the editor Stewart McAllister), it is the only work in his career which he unequivocally helmed. Stollery’s recent re-contextualisation of Jennings’s work in relation to the British Documentary Movement argues it would therefore be his only film (like those of Paul Rotha’s) that can fruitfully be analysed in relation to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the author as producer. In this approach to authorship, the key consideration becomes not the perceived quality of a work of art or issues of representation, but rather the author’s position within the relations of production and his or her efforts to change rather than serve the ‘apparatus’. (ibid., p. 408)

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  47 It is also a work which, despite its extraordinary success upon release, along with its radical innovation in documentary form, was seldom mentioned as a significant achievement for the next six decades. This is despite recent scholarship based on a range of primary evidence demonstrating that ‘in terms of his intellectual and artistic aims [Jennings] probably ranked The Silent Village as his greatest achievement’ (Logan 2011). In 1954, Lindsay Anderson regarded it as an anomaly and set it apart from Jennings’s wartime ‘masterpieces’, Words for Battle (1941), Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were started (1943) and a Diary for Timothy (1945). If anything, he considered The Silent Village as evidence that Jennings would have failed as a fiction feature director, ‘for all the fond simplicity with which he sets his scene, the necessary sense of conflict and suffering is missed in his over-refined, under-dramatized treatment of the essential situation’ (Macdonald and Cousins 1996, p. 159). It is not included in Rotha’s 1952 ‘list of One Hundred Important Documentary Films’18 (Rotha 1952, pp. 359–80). In the chapter War and the Peak of achievement, in which the paragons of the British Documentary Movement Grierson, Rotha, Dalrymple, Wright et al., recount – in the mid-1970s – the glory days it doesn’t get a single mention in the chapter or the entire book (Sussex 1975). When the film resurfaces in scholarship in the late 1990s, it has been rebranded with the presumptions of post structuralist-inflected contemporary theory. In the introduction to Anderson’s Only Connect, republished in the 1996 collection Imagining Reality, Macdonald and Cousins make the unsubstantiated and incorrect comment that ‘Jennings films (including The Silent Village) were all tightly scripted, and blend verité footage with reconstruction often blurring the line between documentary and fiction’ (Macdonald and Cousins 1996, p. 159). This is odd given it directly contradicts statements in the Anderson text it introduces – ‘Jennings’s films are all documentaries, all made firmly within the frame-work of the British Documentary Movement’ (ibid., p. 153). In the same vein, Brian Winston, more a Jennings aficionado than a Grierson fan, simply removed The Silent Village and Fires Were Started from the documentary back catalogue, asserting both films ‘were scripted fiction, like the Saving of Bill Blewitt, [and] maintained their documentary connection only because they used non-actors going through supposedly historically determined (and, of course, because they were produced by documentary film units)’ (Winston 2008, p. 117). This stance contradicts contemporaneous evidence that neither film had a ‘script’ that any fiction screenwriter or director would recognise, and there were at least two earlier very similar narrative documentaries by other filmmakers produced by the Crown Film Unit that were regarded as documentaries19 as were The Silent Village and Fires Were Started. The basis of Brian Winston’s arguments about these two films seems to be that they didn’t align to his ideas about what documentary was and is supposed to be. It also ignores the fact Jennings himself viewed all his work and particularly The Silent Village as explicitly as documentaries and not fictions (he disliked most World War II

48  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth fiction films)20 as did the subjects involved and the audiences who first received them. More recently, scholars have come to identify the distinctiveness of The Silent Village as a ‘key wartime production’ (Stollery 2013, p. 409) and as having profoundly unique (I will argue hybrid) cinematic qualities. Masashi Hoshino describes the film as a ‘dystopian propaganda film set in a Welsh village invaded by Nazi Germany (Hoshino 2020, p. 133) which representing the high point of [Jennings] aesthetics and political achievements’ (ibid., p. 146). Hoshino views the film as a moment in which ‘the unreachable democratic ideal is momentarily glimpsed in the gap’ (ibid., p. 145) between Ranciere’s ‘film-fables’: the Aritsotelian ‘fable’ ‘of dramatic action and cinema’s “fable” of egalitarian treatment of passive images’ (ibid., p. 133). Although Hoshino unproblematically promulgates the 1990s notion that work is predominantly a fact/fiction splice, he accepts that most of the participants, the audience and the critics of 1943 did not regard it as such and thought of it very much as a fact-based documentary (ibid., pp. 146–47). The hybrid traits of The Silent Village Traits versus definition

The next section focuses on identifying the critical traits and the production aspects of The Silent Village that make it a classic prototype for hybrid documentary. In using the concept of traits rather than attempting to lock off a definition, I am borrowing/stealing from Luke Moody’s eloquently and poetically phrased ‘Traits of hybrid documentary’ in his ‘act normal’ essay (Moody 2013). Moody’s attempt to ‘identify some shared and unique, outstanding characteristics’ was fuelled by a wish to connect what he perceived as ‘the increasing complexity of [contemporary] documentary cinema’ with ‘a rise in critical engagement that acknowledges difficult images and questions the responsibility of the filmmaker’ (ibid., p.  12). Moody’s identified ‘traits’ in hybrid documentary were as follows: The self is performed, therefore can be directed The political can be playful Ethics are flexible: They begin with the filmmaker Form is content History is live A film is a documentary of its own production (Jacques Rivette) The director is responsible Imagination belongs to the reality it is born into The screen is pandemic, the stage omnipresent No facts are separable from their fabrication Trust is the basis of truth (ibid., p. 12)

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  49 While I  agree with many, but not all, of the ideas and sentiments behind Moody’s traits, they are also quite esoteric and present challenges for a filmmaker who may want to reproduce or explore a hybrid methodology based on them. As this is a book preoccupied as much with praxis as by ideas, we need to look at the blueprints for the architecture of hybrid documentary. Hence, my version of identified traits are going to be much more particular and material. Hybrid trait 1

• Takes two or more distinct and identifiable structures/properties/ ideas/‘characters’ (in the scientific sense) and deliberately combines them to make a distinct, new third entity. • Incorporates both the scientific and the cultural understanding of hybridity. • As in the scientific understanding of hybridity ‘If two plants that are constantly different in one or more characters are united through fertilization, the characters in common are transmitted unchanged to the hybrids and their progeny, as numerous experiments have shown; each pair of differing characters, however, unites in the hybrid to form a new character that generally is subject to variation in the progeny’ (Abbott and Fairbanks 2016, p. 408). • While contemporary theories of cultural hybridity cross many disciplines and can be intensely complex, contested and in flux, what is indisputable is a collective commitment to challenging negative historical connotations and associations connected to hybridity particularly the essentialism and racist, colonial assumptions embedded in ideas of racial mixing and cultural (read white and Western) hegemony. In documentary hybrids, therefore, one ‘character’ (in Mendelian sense) is not superior to the other, but the combination can have a potent impact challenging orthodox preconceptions. In The Silent Village the hybridity is clear. The story of the June 1942 Nazi murder of all the men from the Czechoslovakian mining village of Lidice along with the forced deportation to concentration camps of all the women, the fostering out of the children and subsequent physical eradication of the town is transposed to, and enacted by, the inhabitants of, the Welsh mining village of Cymgiedd in 1943. The latter do not pretend to be Czech nor do they slavishly and mimetically represent the former. There are multiple references (geographical, historical, cultural, economic and political) embedded in the narrative specific only to the Welsh and not the Czech villagers. The audience is expected to comprehend and receive how each story operates simultaneously and in parallel to make a new meaning. It forms a new ‘character’. In a documentary work with a primary aim to resurrect the reality and spirit of a deliberately eliminated village, it is ironic the ‘author’ of the ingenious idea to make a hybrid film intertwining the experiences of the Czech

50  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth and Welsh working class under fascism, is absent in the finished screen work and receives absolutely no credit or individual acknowledgement. When the news of the Nazi atrocities at Lidice, ostensibly a reprisal for the assassination of Deputy Protector Reinhard Heydrich, were broadcast to the world, an exiled Czech poet Victor Fischel living in London came up with the proposal and sent it to the Crown Film Unit. The idea for the film (which evolved in production) was remarkably complete and specific resembling what we may nowadays refer to as a pitch log line, replete with an emotional hook and the central conflict and a plot in which the hybridity of the approach is embedded. ‘A village in Bohemia: the First draft for a short film in Lidice’. The synopsis begins: ‘This is the small village of Lidice somewhere in Czechoslovakia, and this is a small village of X in Wales. It was not so long ago that those villages were exactly like one another’. Jennings goes on to explain that ‘from . . . [Fischel’s] draft develop[ed] the idea of a short picture paralleling these two villages and showing the differences of their two fates’ (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 67). The letter was sent to Jennings for comment which was both immediate and enthusiastic, ‘I thought it was one of the most brilliant ideas for a short film that we’d ever come across’ (ibid., p. 67). This sentiment was shared by the Ministry of Information, and preparatory work was sanctioned straight away. The primary evidence detailing this period of pre-production makes it clear that while the idea was regarded as vivid and timely, it was not thought of as some fiction/documentary blend (as will be argued from the 1990s on) nor, while clearly innovative, as an extreme ideological or stylistic outlier from the other documentaries being made at the time in the UK. Jennings was absolutely determined that the film would be made abiding by scrupulous ethical (and indeed inclusive) standards and commitment to the truth of both Lidice and the Welsh village and villagers who would be asked to bear witness for them. The thing to do was to find this village, that is to say, not the village of Lidice but the village of X. We had in our minds X – a village in Wales, and this village we wanted to be an actual village: we didn’t want to reconstruct it in the studio and we didn’t want to take bits of several villages and put them together. We wanted – as it was explained to me – to find a village in Wales which was predestined to play the part of Lidice, and we proposed to ask for the cooperation of everybody there in the making of this picture: they were to represent Lidice. And I thought when we had found a village, we could talk to them and got their ideas on it then we could start writing the script but not do it the other way around. (ibid., pp. 67–68) Hybrid trait 2

• The subjects have authority and authorial power. This shapes both the narrative and reception. The best practice follows non-extractive,

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  51 non-authoritative, collaborative principles – evident in its means of production. Determining the right location for the production of The Silent Village was not an aesthetic exercise. The process whereby Jennings and crew set about finding it also had to be done in the right way. Rather than go on a ‘picturesque’ scouting tour, Jennings sought guidance from the South Wales Miners Federation and its President, Arthur Horner. The advice was to seek lesserknown parts of Wales that were much more ‘Welsh-speaking’ and that did have some physical similarities to Lidice. Horner advised that they needed to not seek a particular village but ‘think of it in terms of people’ (ibid., p. 69) and sent them out to meet a miners agent called D.D. Evans who lived in the culturally vibrant town of Ystradglnlais. Evans or D.D. (Dai Dan) was described by Jennings as ‘ “Tolstoyan”, a person of great enthusiasm and tremendous physical strength’ with blue chips embedded in his face from a lifetime of cutting coal, who came to be the ‘central spirit of the organization’ (ibid., p. 69). D.D. immediately not only grasped the idea of the documentary but also became the critical driving force for forging it into a production reality through his extensive local knowledge and networks. While the village of Cwmgiedd was stumbled upon somewhat by accident, it was Evans who identified its fierce political independence (the entire village population had been pacifists in World War I) as a good match and facilitated the access. While Jennings was worrying about cooperation and gaining the villagers’ agreement, Evans was well on his way to setting up a public meeting with the locals. By the time Jennings returned to London the next day to update the Crown Film Unit and Ministry of Information – the villagers (briefed by D.D.) had already sent a letter to Victor Fischel at the Czech Ministry of Information saying that they were deeply honoured ‘at having been chosen to re-enact the splendid story of your people’s wondrous resistance’ it was signed by D.G. Williams ‘on behalf of the Provisional Film Committee’ (ibid., p.  71). Jennings’s boss quipped if he didn’t get back to Wales soon, they would be making the film without him. By the time he returned, Evans had set up the public meeting which over 100 individuals attended representing the village and local organisations. Jennings warned them of the vicissitudes of film-making, explaining that the glacial pace of film production would wear on their nerves after months, but they nonetheless unanimously passed a vote of confidence in making the production. The level of cooperation, consultation and co-creation from that point on was exhaustive and unprecedented and wouldn’t be emulated again so extensively until Chronicle of a Summer and Peter Watkins Culloden and The War Game. From the 100 attendees a film committee of 12 was elected. Jennings and the crew would go to the committee for introductions, advice, feedback and help on the script. Jennings and the crew all billeted with the miners and their families throughout as there was no other accommodation, so the experience was immersive and inclusive. While much recent scholarship along with some of Jennings’s contemporaneous commentary21 (Jennings

52  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth and Jackson 1993) makes the process of getting the Cwmgieddians’ to participate appear effortless, Phillip Logan’s meticulously researched chapter on production realities and broader sociological and historical context of the film reveals a more complex situation that required intense, consistent and constant cooperation and negotiation (Logan 2011, p. 277). The committee and the crew would meet once or twice a week so the latter could give production reports on the current version of the script which would be read out to the committee for criticism. There were further sub-committees, cultural bodies and local expert organisations sort out for specific access and advice, the Deacon’s office for all chapel scenes, the Pit Lodge Committee for scenes down the mines, the school for the scenes of village children in the classroom. Hybrid trait 3

• The audience is conscious of the hybrid process/conceit/construction. Their participation and recognition become intrinsic to receiving the meaning including the hybridity of the work. As a result, a multivalent narrative is forged. Many contemporary written descriptions of The Silent Village describe how the first third of the film seems completely straightforward. Biographers Beattie and Jackson portray the opening scenes as innocuous ‘pretties’. ‘For much of the it first reel, The Silent Village might be easily mistaken for an unusually well-composed travelogue sponsored by the Welsh Tourist Board’ (Jackson 2004, p.  273). Both fail to capture the importance of critical opening information given to the audience to orientate their reception to the unfolding sequences. Three seconds in, the title card comes up accompanied by a trumpet blast overlaying a mid-shot of a turbulent, rocky river-bed.22 ‘THE SILENT VILLAGE’: ‘The story of the men of Lidice who lit in Fascist darkness a lamp that shall never be put out’. The next two cards inform the audience about the means of production, first ‘Produced by the Crown Film Unit’ and then ‘With the collaboration of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The South Wales Miners Federation and the people of the Swansea and Dulais valleys’. The crew credits then follow with Jennings, having a single Director/Producer card, trailed by the names of the key crew member.23 The final graphic card of the introduction over the shot of the river reads ‘The village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia was a valley of miners. This film in their honour was made in a similar Welsh mining community – the village of Cwmgiedd’. All these cards take almost 1 minute and 10 seconds opening of a film that has a total duration of 34 minutes. They unambiguously tell the audience they will be watching a film of conjoined, hybridised realities that the collaborations are both signified and significant, and they are required to participate in connecting these two realities and grasp much of the film’s intent to get a deeper truth. Even if one knew nothing of the brutalities of Lidice (which most of the contemporary audience would have) – there is

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  53 enough information conveyed at the outset to ensure that the so-called travelogue scenes that follow can be watched only with a sense of anticipatory dread. These signs of Welsh village life from mine pits, to church, to babies and children on laps, to pub, to children at school that are depicted over seven minutes will probably very soon face a threat, as had the inhabitants of Lidice, from the fascist darkness. Jennings talked about a desire to communicate a double image in depicting simultaneously the ‘wicked conditions’ of the miner’s working reality alongside their self-created honest, loving cultured practical socialism by photographing them as ‘honestly as possible’ in his words not ‘theatrically’ like How Green was my Valley and not ‘too poverty stricken like Grapes of Wrath’24 (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 62). He was also creating a double image in the audience’s mind both weaving together and superimposing the realities of Lidice and Wales. It was an idea he wanted to convey rather than events, the ideas which must have led to the final situation; the idea of a mining community in no matter what part of the world, the idea of fascism, the idea of a struggle between the two, the idea of the obliteration of a community.25 (Logan 2011, p. 224) To achieve this, Jennings created a cognitive disruption in the audience which is not so much a result of the familiar notion of cognitive dissonance (holding two opposing ideas simultaneously) but a cognitive resonance in which the action of hybridity increases the impact on the audience who is being asked to both empathise with the ‘other’ and recognise themselves. In some ways, the process of hybridity has affinities to notions espoused in Hegelian speculative thinking (Haas 2021, pp. 213–39). The production methodology demonstrated the deliberation and intent behind achieving this effect. While Jennings would refer to the actions of the Welsh villagers as re-enacting the eradication of Lidice, the term, as it was applied by him in making of The Silent Village bears little resemblance to the way the term is used now (actors playing historical figures). Working closely and intimately with the villagers, Jennings and the crew were able to capture the doubleness in performance. Jennings had been clear that what the Cwmgieddians were doing in front of the camera ‘wasn’t in fact acting’ (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p.  72), it was something far deeper and more complex. ‘They were playing themselves and themselves as the people of Lidice – that is to say, making an imaginary transformation of themselves which I must say they did supremely well’ (ibid., p. 72). Because of the intimacy and the immersive preparatory practices between cast and crew during the pre-production, Jennings realised that something multifaced and unique emerged. Jennings needed ‘more than the confidence of the people down here’ (ibid., p. 75). He and the crew were required to seek the direction of

54  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth the ‘performance’ from those involved – seeking answers as to how the locals would behave under the circumstance of the shooting of the men and taking the children from the women. The production team had to understand the Cwmgieddians’ point of view which in turn enhanced the hybrid reality. One of the most potent examples of overt hybridity of enactment that the audience is asked to absorb in the film comes towards the end after the assassination of the Nazi Deputy Reich Protector by the community (22 minutes 33 seconds). An announcement is made by the German authorities (in English with a German accent) over the radio, that ‘all the villagers over 15 years of age in the local protectorate must report for registration at the local police headquarters’. The ‘overlay’ of this audio is a series of scenes depicting locals siting in their homes listening quietly to their radio (one man is holding a piglet!). The announcement goes on to say that all those who are unregistered will be shot. In the following scene, a line of villagers are seen registering with the police. Despite the framing that we are in a Nazi-occupied Lidice reality, one by one the Cwmgieddians give their own Welsh names and actual occupations to the unseen oppressors. The audience accepts that the action is what happened to the Lidicians, but it is Cwmgieddians who personalise the reaction, in this scene they played themselves as themselves exactly . . . as a result . . . we were able to portray not only what life was like in Wales . . . at the present moment, but what life was like – their lives, reactions would be like if they were placed in the situation that the people of Lidice were placed in. (ibid., p. 74) Hoshino’s comment that in this the ‘villagers become sort of double agents of fiction and documentary’ is incoherent (Hoshino 2020, p.  149). The emotion inherent in the Welsh locals’ personalised defiance as they symbolically enact the Lidicians obeying Nazi orders, works viscerally because both things are true – two documentary truths enmeshed and visible. A multivalent narrative. Hybrid trait 4

• For the process to work well a higher fidelity to the truth and verifiable facts is required. While Jennings was explicit, he had no intention of asking the people of Cwmgiedd to ‘pretend they were Czech’ nor that the village of Cwmgiedd ‘to be the village of Lidice’ there were innumerable elements of the film of which an absolute commitment to the facts and the truth of the actual 1942 massacre had to be meticulously upheld. Of great importance was that all the announcements and proclamations from the Nazis in the film were identical

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  55 to the original documents from Lidice. While there were tiny tweaks replacing single words for context, that is, Czechoslovakia for Wales, Cwmgiedd for Lidice and so on, there was an acknowledgement that these archives could not be otherwise altered in any way and had to be ‘perfectly accurately monitored’ (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 75) and used verbatim. Jennings recognised that the surreal logical horror in these artefacts would be otherwise lost if altered. As he observed, they do say the most astonishing and hair-raising things; we have not invented any of them. They will announce, for example, the shooting of half a dozen people higher up the valley – then in the same breath make an appeal for the German Red Cross. (ibid., p. 75) Other unalterable aspects were the fidelity to the lived reality of the inhabitants of Cwmgiedd, the mining Welsh community and to ‘Lidice itself’– ‘that was important we didn’t want to be an inch out’ (Logan 2011, p. 227). With regard to the latter there was wide consultation with the Czech community and consulate exiled in England and anti-Nazi refugees ‘who know the mentality of the Nazi’s and the mentality of Nazi propaganda’. For the former the elaborate and exhaustive interactive consultation process was imperative to render an authentic and specific portrayal of Cwmgiedd that not only they themselves would recognise but would communicate a detailed and Welsh narrative reality within the documentary (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 75).26 Hybrid trait 5

• The Hybrid process creates a refracted rather than reflected view. The narrative often becomes a parable and allegory. Works with metaphor, speculation and/or a conceit. Platonic – Allegory of the Cave – not Aristotelian – observation/classification. Notwithstanding Lindsay Anderson’s criticism of the way the conflict is depicted in The Silent Village, Jennings and the team were clear from the outset that any attempt to depict the Nazi violence mimetically would result in ‘simply another horrifying story of a massacre’ and thus betray the intent of the film to relate the reaction of ‘nice, ordinary people’ to fascism (ibid., p. 73). Instead, the decision was to ‘not show any Germans’, something Jennings admitted was no easy task in making a film about a country under German occupation. The documentary was an ‘imaginative’ rather than ‘realistic’ picture using iconic, symbolic objects along with innovative soundscapes to represent the Nazi invasion and oppression. Thus, the film was able to communicate the idea that the horror of fascism was its omniscience (occupying not just Lidice but potentially the world) and importantly

56  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth facilitate the hybridity and multi narratives of the story. While in the finished work Jennings did depict a few figures dressed as Nazis, they were always faceless – disembodied – like the Nazi proclamations that emanated throughout from a giant loudspeaker at the top of a car driving through the village. The refracted view of Lidice also creates the space for the specific political, sociological and cultural realities of Welsh mining communities during war to be revealed. The film deliberately avoided idealising the physical realities of the men down the pit. When we first encounter them, they are both filthy and tired and buoyant and supportive – with an unsentimental but intimate scene of one miner scrubbing another’s back after he gets soap in his eyes. While much of the first half of the film is in unsubtitled Welsh Gaelic, there is a key scene around six minutes in English in which a ‘Special meeting’ is held amongst miners’ agents and representatives to discuss the ‘increase in Silicosis in this this area’. The men are proactive and assertively talking about a delegate they have sent to learn more about the disease – they refer to each other as comrade. This is an issue and socialist ideology specific to the reality of Cwmgiedd not Lidice. The unsubtitled Welsh that the villagers speak through the film until they are forbidden to do so by the Nazis (about midway) served multiple narrative lines. Given a broader audience will not understand what is being said – the exotic language can evoke the sense of Lidicians speaking Czech, but it is also a powerful signifier of Welsh independence, working-class autonomy and Cwmgieddian socialism holding strong against any potential oppressor, including the English. I am mindful of Martin Stollery’s warnings about the tendency amongst some recent Marxist-influenced academics to over ascribe radical socialist subtexts to the War films made by the British Documentary Movement (Stollery 2013, pp.  406–7), but in The Silent Village there are scenes that hard to receive in any other way. In the scene immediately after the resistance attack and assassination of the Protector (also depicted with great symbolic economy) set in the local school room, the teacher instructs the children in a lesson about the Conquest of Wales, ‘It started in the reign of William the 1st. Having conquered all England, he turned his attention to Wales’. The lesson in English (after Welsh has been outlawed by the Reich earlier in the film) is clearly an act of defiance of the villagers representing Lidice against the fascist boot but also an assertion about Welsh autonomy and independence from the English. Throughout the film the socialist politics and solidarity of the Cwmgiedd miners and the families are overt. Logan provides ample primary evidence that mining communities during World War II were in frequent conflict with the Labour ministries over pay, productivity, control and ownership of the industry and that conditions had deteriorated since the start of war, and these issues resonated strongly. The scene in which the miners decide to strike against the imposed Nazi rule to disband their unions has strong echoes of English pressure on miners’ unions during wartime. The climax of the film when the

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  57 villagers are accused of collaborating with the ‘circle of suspects’ and required to produce the assassins into the hands of the secret state police by 12 o’clock midnight ends with the villagers’ refusal to obey. The men of the village sing in Welsh as they line up to be shot, the women are led away, as the children, under the gaze of a sole Nazi, form a snaking line getting into the back of a truck. It is both a powerful sequence depicting the resistance of the allies ‘People’s War’, but it is also a homage to the communist principles embedded in the village of Cwmgiedd in 1943. This is also apparent in the Epilogue when the Czech/Welsh hybridity transforms into a reflexive meta commentary by the Cwmgieddians. After the sequence depicting the eradication of Lidice a card comes up ‘That is what the Nazis did to the village – the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia. But that is not the end of the story’. We then cut to the local children we have just seen walking to the truck playing in the schoolyard. We next see the women who were being sent to concentration camps and the men lining up to be slaughtered suddenly back in Cwmgiedd reading about the fate of Lidice villagers. A fate they have just enacted. In the present, the Cwmgieddians both react with horror and mourn what has just happened to the Lidicians and by extension themselves. It’s an extraordinary moment of duality made specific in the closing oration by one of the local leaders. Jennings had been under some pressure to cast the Welsh miners in the conclusion as a sort of heroic workers of the world stoking the capitalist engine. He avoided this generic representation through the associated imagery of the oration.27 No comrades. The Nazis are wrong. The name of the community has not been obliterated. The name of the community has been immortalised it lives in the hearts of the miners the world over. The Nazis only want slave labour and the miners refuse to become slave labour. That is why they murdered our comrades in Lidice. That is why we stand in the forefront of resistance today, because we have the power, the knowledge, the understanding to hasten the coming of victory. To liberate oppressed humanity and make certain that there shall be no more Lidice’s and then the men of Lidice will not have died in vain. (The Silent Village 1943) As Logan observes in this oration, The flavour of international socialism and working class solidarity, survives. The rejection of slave labour and the position of the miners ‘at the forefront of resistance’ can easily be read by those on the left as relating to the miners as ‘the vanguard of the working class’ locked in the struggle with international capital ‘to liberate oppressed humanity’. (Logan 238)

58  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Hybrid trait 6

• If one were to classify them according to Nichol’s modes, they are often performative and reflexive but can and often incorporate all modes – observational, poetic, expository, participatory – blending and experimentation is the norm. The hierarchy of value Nichols ascribed to his modes is both absent and meaningless in the creation and comprehension of the work. The Silent Village uses all these modes, blending them seamlessly throughout the documentary. The blending calls into question the continued ubiquity of Nichol’s modes as a classification system along with its implicit hierarchy of values accorded to those modes. Might there be other more productive ways to describe elements of the work (improvisational, cinematic, experimental, enacted, interactive, immersive, allegoric, surreal, philosophic, fantastic) that encourages experimentation in the form and thinking about the form rather than reducing it to a set of ill-fitting modes or parts? Hybrid trait 7

• The ethics and practice of making the film and the relationship between subject/s and filmmaker become a critical part of the reception of the hybrid documentary. This trait is somewhat akin to the higher fidelity to the truth required in trait number 4. The hybridity of the film and the means of production become key factors in how the finished work is distributed and received, and thus the means of production including the ethics of production are going to come under greater scrutiny. Much of the publicity surrounding the release of The Silent Village was focused on how the documentary was made with a detailed discussion about the cooperative and co-creative principles and practices. The Picture Post Magazine article ‘A Welsh Village Makes a Film in Honour of Czech Lidice’ July 1943 and the BBC Production ‘Radio Talk: The Silent Village’ May 1943 focused in great detail on the villagers’ agency and authorship in the making of the documentary. Stollery notes that Picture Post article featured only a single image of Jennings (along with assistant director Diane Pine) out of 15 and focused instead on how the villagers were responsible for multiple aspects of the final narrative and production. Jennings was acutely aware that damaging the ‘contract’ of cooperation, co-creation, trust and mutual respect established through production would have been catastrophic personally and professionally. He became particularly perturbed during the final edit that he may betray all involved. Jennings had had a recent and particularly harrowing experience in post-production on Fires Were Started with an entire committee of film overlords (including

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  59 funders and distributors) demanding and getting a complete recut of the film. He contemplated resigning but, Against that there was the fate of the Lidice picture – by now far more important to me than the Fire one – and important not just to me but for the miners of South Wales and as a real handshake with the working-class which we have not achieved before. (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 77) He was sickened by what he felt was an inevitable flexing of power from the elites of the Ministry of Information upon the effectively powerless community with whom he had made the film, believing ‘that precisely what had happened with the Fire film was likely to happen to the Lidice one – if not worse’ (ibid., p.  77). Jennings immediately let the villagers know his concerns, and he sought advice, as he had from the beginning from D.D., who ‘after all had been fighting these battles with the bosses for the last twentyfive years’. Dai replied in writing in what Jennings described as an ‘astonishing and magnificent document’. A sentiment which I whole-heartedly agree. It’s a document that should be read by any filmmaker facing hostile demands from the powers that be in an edit that threatens to ‘maul’ one’s creative efforts. Dai began by saying that miners have known this sort of pressure for most of a century and miners, unlike artists or filmmakers, face death every day yet are completely divorced from the product – the ‘final outcome of our collective labours – Coal’. Instead, they focus on ‘the standard of life we are able to wrench from our masters’. Conversely, he recognised that filmmakers have a ‘deep interest in the final product of your collective labour’ – ‘you produce a thing that can express your own personalities’ hence the fear that it will be ‘mutilated’ (ibid., p. 77). This frustration is no new thing. You will find it in every aspect of the productive, social and aesthetic relations in this society. What of the thousands of scientific workers that meet it on every corner. What of the hundreds of artists that meet it in the same way. In fact every man meets it in some form or other in his particular mode of expressing himself. Strangely enough, the people who grow most in stature are these that meet it on the greatest number of occasions. Therefore Humphrey, whatever your feelings of intensity on the matter you should not leave Pinewood. You would only be leaving the scene of the battle . . . it is quite possible that Directors will endeavour to cut out altogether films that tends to show this old world as it is, but despite their heavy hand of censorship, men will express their creative ability, just as working class women make miniature palaces of hovels. (ibid., pp. 77–78)

60  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth This advice enabled Jennings to renegotiate the ‘massacre’ that had been ordered on Fires for a more reasonable recut. As for The Silent Village his fears were premature – it breezed, unchanged, through post-production screenings and was finished ‘without any cuts or horrors I am glad to say’ (ibid., p. 81). He had shown rough cuts to leading left-wing commentors who praised it unreservedly (Logan 2011, pp. 238–9). The final cut was picked up immediately for distribution. ‘Jennings had simultaneously satisfied the demands of four potentially competing constituencies: the left-wing critic, the production values of the professional film maker, the distributor and the demands of the Ministry’ (ibid., p. 239). The most important approval came from the villagers themselves when Jennings and the crew took the film down for a private screening before release. He described this experience as ‘blindingly moving . . . achieving the thing long-wished for – that of showing the people themselves – and being able to say “look at what we have done for you” – “We have not betrayed you” ’ (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p.  81). This was more than a display of documentary ethical practice at its best. Without the imprimatur of the subjects it is unlikely that the film would have been the astonishing success it became. Hybrid trait 8

• Using cinematic techniques such as dramatisation or narrativisation does not make hybrid documentaries fictions. The line between non-­fiction and fiction is not blurry – if it blurs, the hybrid documentary will fail, becoming incoherent and break its contract with the audience. As demonstrated, there is ample evidence that dramatisation and narrativisation were just part of the toolkit available to documentary makers of this era, and they did not regard their deployment as tipping their work over into fiction. Choosing to work in this way as did Cavalcanti, Flaherty and Jennings was for them just part of the documentary spectrum that was the creative treatment of the actuality. So much of the recasting of these documentaries as fiction or documentary/fiction blurry blends by some contemporary documentary theorists has much to do by the narrowing of the diversity of documentary style, the dominance of direct cinema and move away from experimentation being the norm rather than the exception from the 1960s onwards. That said even in the 1970s, Richard Barsam in his book NonFiction Film Theory and Criticism, an anthology of significant writing about non-fiction from 1932 to 1973, was unproblematically asserting that the distinguishing characteristics of the nonfiction film are readily discernable. The nonfiction film dramatises the factual rather than the fictional situation. The nonfiction filmmaker focuses his personal vision

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  61 and his camera on actual situations – persons, processes, events and attempts to render a creative interpretation of them. (Barsam 1976, p. 14) So much of documentary up to and including the output in World War II had less to do with the ‘discourses of sobriety’ (Nichols 1991, p.  3) and more to do with Grierson’s less well-known comments stating that while most people think of documentary films as worthy educative treatise on social problems. ‘For me it’s something more magical. It is a visual art which conveys a sense of beauty about the ordinary world on your doorstep’ (Davis 2015, p. 35). Jennings did not regard The Silent Village as occupying a different set of principles to other documentaries he directed and certainly would not have regarded it as a fiction. Jennings often expressed his dislike of fiction films made during World War II particularly those from Hollywood he described as ‘terrible – either slow and dreary – . . . with all the faults that English pictures are supposed to have – or else the flimsiest flag waving nonsense’ (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 64) and viewed his work as distinct from this output. He criticised the 1942 smash hit Mrs Miniver (Goebbels’s favourite piece of propaganda28) as failing to represent (as did newsreels) the sorts of herculean daily labour that he witnessed in the women of Cwmgiedd – in their service to family, to community and the war. For him, women like Mrs  Hopkins with whom he billeted whilst in production in Wales, and described as ‘an average worker today’, was not represented in screen depictions of knitting circles or the good works of the Royal Voluntary Service in generic war films. Instead, it was the 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. grind of cleaning, washing, shopping and cooking for her family and two others in need. This ‘women’s work’ is depicted in The Silent Village and given a great deal of screen time and complements the work of the men in the mines. Most significant is the fact the film was received by audiences and critics as a documentary. The release date was timed to coincide with the first anniversary of the Lidice massacre, and the widespread praise for the film was almost unanimous. Logan’s comprehensive archival research collating reviews and writing about the film reception in 1943 demonstrates that it was repeatedly described as a documentary and as excellent propaganda from the Crown Film Unit. Mining representative Arthur Horner disagreed with the latter description arguing in the Daily Worker that it was ‘not propaganda at all’ but something more ‘splendid’ and would immortalise the memory of Lidice. It was praised by Frank Capra (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 81) and said by Punch to be a better film than Fritz Lang’s Hollywood fiction Hangmen Also Die. Its status as a documentary was further cemented when it won The National Board of Review Award for Best Documentary film in 1943 alongside Desert Victory, Capra’s Prelude to War and The Battle for Russia and the very hybrid-like Saludos Amigos from Walt Disney.

62  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Other 20th-century classic hybrid documentary antecedents

These eight traits of hybrid documentary can be identified in the films Chronicle of a Summer (1961), The War Game (1965), Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Drinking for England (1998). Each of the filmmakers was deliberately experimenting with form pursuing bold explorations and blends of cinematic language and content which had a higher fidelity to the truth because they were trying to articulate complex intellectual, visual and emotional ideas through metaphor, reflection and nuance and that challenged entrenched, conventional and predetermined ways of seeing. More Platonic than Aristotelian – a different philosophical way of illuminating powerful truths. While each has unique production pathways and hybridised different ‘characters’ (in the biological sense), they also had much in common. In each, the director’s and their creative teams set out deliberately to generate compelling and richly creative non-fiction films that experimented radically with methodology. Each encountered stark challenges and obstacles. In order to communicate, illuminate and viscerally elicit the complex ideas and emotions inherent in each of these non-fiction projects they needed to experiment with unlikely and hitherto seldom-explored amalgamations in documentary. It is important to note that while each of these hybrid creators may have had issues with and criticism for their contemporaneous screen industries and counterparts, they did recognise it was the documentary form they were expanding not that of narrative fiction. Examining how the films were constructed, funded, distributed and received provides ample evidence that these films were not simply borrowing traits from narrative fiction. Chronicle of a summer 1961

The first minute of the post-1961 version of Chronicle of a Summer opens with an ebullient touche´ preface emphasising how the film’s innovations shone brightly and distinctly amidst the pantheon of cinema realist fiction classics that came before. A card comes up that reads ‘Cannes 1961’ over a black-and-white still of the French Harbour city. The next card announces, ‘This film won the international Critics Prize awarded at this year’s Cannes Film Festival’ (1.36 Criterion Collection). The sequence then highlights previous winners De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951), Tati’s Monsiour Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) and Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers (1959), before rolling straight into the opening scenes depicting a 1960 Parisian summer morning. The audience is informed immediately, as they were in The Silent Village, about how the film is constructed, this time with narration in lieu of subtitles. ‘The film was made without actors but lived by men and women who devoted some of their time to a novel experiment of film-truth (cinema verite)’. This is then followed by a scene where

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  63 we see it being constructed with directors Morin and Rouch and subject/film production associate Marceline Loridan discussing how the making of the film will be approached. In Morin’s 1985 essay ‘Chronicle of a Film’ (with footnotes from Rouch) detailing the concepts and background of the making of the film, Morin was explicit that it was rooted in documentary practice and history. While he argued that it was neither a fictional film nor a documentary (Morin 1985, p. 6) but an ‘experiment in cinematographic interrogation’ the ‘experiment’ drew its inspirations from Flaherty, Vertov, Rouch’s West African ethnographic films and the documentary films On the Bowery (1956) and We are the Lambeth Boys (1959). He had first conceived of the idea of cinema verité alongside Rouch when they both sat on the jury of the first ethnographic and sociological film festival Festival di Poploi in the late 1950s at which both these latter documentaries had screened. Morin agreed that fictional films could attain ‘profound truths’ but he argued there is one truth which cannot be captured by fictional films and that is the authenticity of life as it is lived29 . . . Cinema cannot penetrate the depth of daily life as it is really lived. (Morin 1985, p. 4) The hybrid construction of Chronicle of a Summer is intentional and overt. Jean Rouch, the experienced ethnographic filmmaker, and sociologist and prominent French intellectual Edgar Morin decided to work together combining their methodologies to create a new cinema of truth turning their combined gaze on a ‘tribe’ of Parisians. It became a hybrid documentary in which form and content were inextricably linked and ignited a fundamentally different way of both capturing and seeing the present. By using new technology to frame developing events, Rouch and Morin capture two profound transformations. On the one hand, they offer precious images of a nation moving from postwar promise to postcolonial reality. On the other, they position their portrait as the first example of a new form. It is not simply France that is changing here, it is the medium itself: though like-minded attempts at filming contemporary life were taking place around the world at that time, it was Rouch and Morin’s idea, cinéma-vérité, that allowed those experiments to converge and become visible. In France, the changes this new form ushered in – changes that had as much to do with ideas as they did with cameras and microphones – were an essential part of the passage from the New Wave fifties to the radical engagements that took shape around May ’68. (Di Iorio 2013, pp. 1–2)

64  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Throughout the film the two approaches were juxtaposed and smashed together creating a series of collisions that result in potent revelations about contemporary France. Sam Di Iorio describes how utterly distinct were the points of view of Rouch and Morin. The series of static semi-structured confessional ‘sessions/conversations’ either one on one or in pairs or dinner/ lunch table groups were led and provoked by Morin as ‘alternatively analyst, Priest, and spectator’ (ibid., p. 3) in the pursuit of what he described as, ‘commensality – that is, that in the course of excellent meals washed down with good wines, we will entertain a certain number of people from different backgrounds, solicited for the film’. Abutting and/or interwoven with these scenes is the glorious, mobile, handheld coverage of subjects working, dancing, dressing, waking up (the walking camera – ‘pedovision’) which was the work of Rouch and Canadian cinematographer Michel Brault. Topics of personal failures in love, careers and life aspirations segue into heady group conversations about the Algerian war, colonial oppression in the Congo, interracial marriage and the Holocaust to be followed by a dreamy and almost surreal holiday sequence in the South of France. The hybridity deployed in Chronicle engendered an unpredictability in the emerging material that the directors could not, and ultimately would not, control. In this, the making of the film hews close to the experiences that multiple contemporary hybrid documentary directors will comment on (in Chapters 5, 8 and 9) in which the hybrid elements will take on their own nature that may go counter to a director’s original intention. The director has to let go of authorial control and let the process, which will often – an indeed ideally – become driven by the subjects, run in its course. Exacerbating this phenomenon was the growing tension between Morin and Rouch and the difficulties in codirecting both encountered throughout production. In 1969, Rouch described it as his first and last collaboration, ‘it’s too difficult’ (Levin 1971, p. 143), and Morin details the fraught nature of their work together throughout the eight months of production and post-production in minute detail throughout his essay. Despite this, both seem to recognise that this was possibly what led to the film’s extraordinary impact on audiences and filmmakers. For, Morin who talked about the film ‘slipping away from us’ (Morin, p. 26), this loss of control meant ‘whether or not we wanted it so this film is a hybrid, a jumble, and all the errors of judgement have in common the desire to attached the label [sociological] to this enterprise and confront it with this label’ (ibid., p. 27) . . . earlier explaining ‘this film is a hybrid, and this hybridness is as much the cause of its infirmity as of its interrogative virtue’ (ibid., p. 26). These ‘errors of judgement’ and ‘infirmities’ come to a head when Morin and Rouch play back key scenes to the main subjects bringing them together for a collective appraisal and filming their reactions. Morin asserted that he envisioned this would be the natural end of the grand summer experiment, ‘A big final scene where the scales would fall and consciousness would be awakened, where we would take a new “oath of the tennis court” to construct

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  65 a new life’ (ibid., p.  29). Instead, protagonists criticise the way each other appeared in the footage – either too true (and raw) or in the opinion of some too hammy or exaggerated and many of the artfully calibrated connections and ‘burgeoning relationships’ became ‘sabotaged by ill will and insincerity’ (ibid., p. 1). The result was so unexpected the scene was originally left out of the film, but as time passed and a tortuous editing period commenced, Morin and Rouch came to recognise that the subjects and the audience were entitled to their own opinions about the footage and the process whether it was not what they anticipated or wanted. Finally, they shot a supplementary scene at the Musee de l’Homme in which Rouch and Morin are filmed talking about these unanticipated reactions and interrogating what had happened, asking each other whether they had failed or discovered something vital and new. Di Iorio described this as emerging from ‘the desire to democratize interpretation [which] anticipates antiauthoritarian sentiments that animated the late sixties’ (Di Iorio 2013, p. 10). Tempering everything and seldom written about was a remarkable sense of obligation the directors had to both the truth and the duty of care of the subjects that directly sprung from the film’s ‘hybridness’. In interviews years after the film was released, Jean Rouch would make what one might come to regard as a Herzogian provocation describing ‘cinema verité’ as a ‘cinema of lies that depends on the art of lies’ (Levin 1971, p. 135). Moments later he would clarify, explaining the many subjective decisions a director makes were countered by the Vertovian assertion that the camera eye was more ‘perspicacious and accurate than the human eye’. That not only did the camera eye ‘have an infallible memory’, cinema verité would be better called ‘cinema – sincerity’. That is, one is building an inviolable contract about evidence with the audience ‘this is what I saw, I didn’t fake it, this is what happened . . . I didn’t change anyone’s behaviour. I looked at what happened with my subjective eye and this is what I believe took place’ (Levin, p. 135). Morin felt the ‘experiment’ revealed that there is no given truth that can simply be deftly plucked, without withering it (this is, at the most, spontaneity). Truth cannot escape contradictions since there are truths of the unconscious and truths of the conscious mind; these two truths contradict each other . . . . The truth is long suffering. (Morin 1985, p. 29) Both kept in close contact with the subjects for years after the film. Eight years after it was finished Rouch told Levin that ‘I’m continually in contact with them’. Morin spent years helping the auto worker Angelo develop his career. Furthermore, both Morin and Rouch supported Marceline, Mary Lou, Regis Dabray and Jean Pierre to establish themselves in the film industry. How the subjects were depicted and how these depictions would be

66  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth interpreted by a global audience haunted them both. This was despite the fact that no one really was the worse off for the experience – the director’s sense of ‘failure’ was more nuanced, ‘All of them regret the film only showed a one-sided view of themselves. They feel they are richer, more complex than their images on film. This is obviously true’ (Morin 1985, p. 22). The early to mid-1960s was a fertile and diverse era of documentary experimentation spawning the early works of direct cinema and cinema verité along with the ingenious hybrid documentary films of Peter Watkins. His Culloden (1964) reimagined the crushing defeat of the Scottish Jacobite uprising of 1745 as an event witnessed by a bevy of verité/observational filmmakers on site capturing and reporting on the action as war correspondents. The brilliant re-enactment led to him conceiving the even more audacious, ambitious and confronting 1965 The War Game notoriously banned for 20 years by its commissioner the BBC. The hybrid film brings together a speculative what-if scenario of the impact a nuclear bomb in the UK built out of meticulous research based on the rapid proliferation of these weapons in the West. Rather than simply rely on traditional ‘talking head’ experts to discuss what they thought the probability and consequences of a nuclear explosion might be, Watkins decided instead to create a massive live-action enactment of what would happen if the nuclear bombs went off in Britain. He staged the enactment using non-actors who were selected from communities who would be the direct recipients of such a catastrophe. If Watkins used experts, it was within the frame of the same projected reality – that the event had occurred – and they would lend authority to realities of the ensuing horrors. Watkins was driven by wanting to make visceral and give voice to an imperative reality about which the public had little or no knowledge. As Watkins put it, ‘there is a dearth of literature available to the public about the Third World War’ (Rosenthal and Corner 2005, p. 7). He wanted to fill this silence with a clanging public warning and needed to discover a form that would serve the seriousness and urgency of what he wanted to communicate. In contemporary literature (from Wikipedia to Bill Nichols), the film is frequently referred to as a docudrama, but this is a misnomer and does a disservice to both its experimental and inventive fusion of non-fiction forms and approaches. Nor does it capture how it was conceived of at the time by the subjects or the filmmaker and importantly how it was received by the public. Trevor Ponech observes how often the term docudrama is haphazardly and inaccurately thrown about: The term ‘docudrama’, like others that are often used interchangeably – ‘drama documentary’, ‘fact-based fiction’, ‘faction’, ‘documentary fiction’ – already has some unfortunate associations that make it difficult to use with precision. To begin with, there is certainly no consensus as to whether docudrama is fiction or non-fiction. Some people use the word to refer to basically fictional works, whereas other commentators

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  67 understand it to be a basically documentary mode. Yet both parties collude with one another insofar as they tend to subscribe to the same misconceptions regarding the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. (Ponech 1999, p. 167) Ponech asserts that illocutionary hybrids such as The War Game (1965) are ‘not unclassifiable. Rather, they are to be grouped according to the kind of plans that produce them. Nor does hybridity necessarily mean that a work does not essentially belong within a single category’ (Ponech, p. 158). Watkins was clear about what he was making with the cards at the end of film describing what the audience has just seen as ‘a documentary film’ (Ponech, p.  158). It was marketed as a documentary, reviewed as a documentary (Variety/Empire), banned as a documentary and won best documentary at the 1966 Academy Awards. Its ‘primary’ purpose was to be received as a documentary not a fiction. For Ponech, ‘The War Game contains a fictional documentary, but overall is itself an actual one’ (ibid., p. 168). While this is a neat summation it fails to capture the extraordinary lengths Watkins would go to generate immersive and empathetic environments for his non-actors to play themselves and produce genuine emotional responses to research-based situations Watkins described for them. He was not asking them to play a role or pretend to be someone else. They were asked to participate and to co-create. What comes through is the desire as a person to express themselves: and when you make my sort of film, you find yourself unexpectedly tapping this. It’s a collective ‘thing’ plus what you say to them before you start . . . something like ‘you’re going to be a nurse and I want you to think about holding a child, and its dying . . . I try and essentially to let them come out with it themselves’. (Levin, p. 118) Like Jennings, the consultation with the subjects was extensive, exhaustive and inclusive. Watkins would have mass meetings for hundreds of locals drawn from amateur drama groups, unions, community groups. He would talk about the concept for two or three hours particularly emphasising why I was making the film. I try and get them involved in the subject and to understand its importance. I try and get them to understand its connection with them as human beings and what might be the worth of the collective experience of making the film on the subject. (Levin, p. 117) He would then meet each of them individually and draw them deeply into the realities of the subject and process of production. He was conscious that as unpaid non-professionals one needed to be respectful of their time and

68  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth other commitments – what would hold them to the project was trust and their belief in the importance of the subject. As Watkins so beautifully put it, ‘What matters is getting people involved in a human experience or emotion and letting it develop and flower in the particular way you need’ (Levin, p. 118). Watkins like Jennings and Morin and Rouch would let his subjects take the lead. One sequence was completely based on the reactions of the cast – in this case a group of ‘housewives from Gravesend’ responding to a set of impromptu questions about Carbon 14 and whether the UK should retaliate if attacked. Watkins did not tell them what to say and used their unsolicited answers playing themselves. He regarded those responses as ‘perhaps the biggest inditement in the entire film of the way we are conducting our society and the lack of common public knowledge of the things that effect humanity’ (Levin, p. 119). Nice Coloured Girls (1987) may seem an outlier in this collection of 20th-century examples of hybrid documentary films. It uses actors and studio sets to tell a modern-day tale of three assertive Indigenous women cruising through a red-light district in Sydney on a night out. They pick up a ‘Captain’ (an inebriated white man), get him to buy them drinks, then steal his wallet and escape with delight. This acted urban narrative is counterpointed with text from 1788 colonial male first-person encounters with Indigenous women with sound effects of the Harbour and the bush and Indigenous languages. The verbatim text becomes narrated by an upper-class English voice clearly establishing the patriarchal colonial view of Aboriginal women as both temptress and other. As the women enter the studio set nightclub, other verbatim text from contemporary Indigenous women appears on screen, describing picking up the ‘Captains’, and that the term is what their Mothers and Grandmothers called these white men. There are cuts back and forth to late 18th-century paintings and drawings depicting Australian colonial ‘first encounters’. It is these actual/factual elements, the verbatim transcripts and voice-over and the colonial artefacts, that are inverted and distorted amidst the hyper realist dramatic scenes that hold it to the ‘furniture of the world’ and fuel its power as a non-fiction parable of audacious and hitherto unacknowledged and unseen Indigenous power. The film was contemporaneously described as experimental, but what explicably makes it sit comfortably within a hybrid documentary framework is Moffat’s process and deliberate intent to develop a new cinematic form and language to challenge stereotypes of earlier screen depictions of Aboriginal women and to communicate something both provocative and original. Moffat was motivated by how unrepresentative depictions of black women were in both narrative fiction and documentaries made by white people. ‘I really wanted to avoid the cliches and didacticism of earlier films about my people. The last thing I wanted was the usual groans, “Hear we

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  69 go again another predictable documentary about Aborigines” ’ (Moffat IV 1988, p. 1). In realist fiction such as Bruce Beresford’s The Fringe Dwellers (1986), she felt that the representations were unrealistically positive and a ‘glossy view’ (Moffat IV, p. 148). What neither of them did was reflect her and her communities’ lived experience or a perspective that Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay describes as ‘coming from the shore’ (Gauthier 2015, p. 284). It was by manipulating combinations of tropes, tendencies and preoccupations coming from both realist drama in the form of ‘enactments’ and documentary – particularly ethnographic documentary – that enabled Moffat to ‘re-define’, ‘re-interpret’ and ‘re-write’, colonial and contemporary notions of Aboriginal women as either ‘Covent Garden strumpets’ or straightforward victims of exploitation (French 2000, p. 3). Nice Coloured Girls is shot from the female protagonist’s point of view, ‘a revolutionary strategy as it constructs a complete reversal of the gaze’ allowing the female characters to ‘take back control of their own bodies’ (Gauthier 2015, p. 286). Working with a hybrid methodology Moffat can literally smash the frame (as a black hand does to a European engraving of Aboriginals on the harbour) to re-frame the past. It goes beyond the simple binaries that dominated screen representations that preceded it – black/white, male/female, predator/victim, coloniser/oppressed. Moffat instead ‘deftly brings together Indigenous women’s ways of knowing, being, and doing, with a colonialist narrative that is also demonstrative of this to draw the viewer to the usually ignored and silent topic of Indigenous women’s femininity, sexuality and power’ (Sullivan 2021, p. 2). In doing so, Moffat generates a new trait that is often distinct in contemporary hybrid documentary. The empowerment of the subject giving them both authority and authorship and obliterating their status as victim that can be the result of mimetic documentary styles. This empowerment of subjects is also found in the praxis of English director Brian Hill. Chapter 7 includes a lengthy and detailed interview with Brian Hill about his praxis with particular emphasis on the making of Drinking for England a seminal film not only in his career (where his hybrids transform into documentary musicals) but as a particular forerunner of the hybrid documentaries of the 21st century. His hybrid documentary Drinking for England (1998) took the recorded verbatim experiences of participants’ interactions with, and addictions to, alcohol and had them transformed into verse by poet (now UK poet laureate) Simon Armitage then given back to the subjects to perform. Mixed with observational footage and interviews, the documentary elevates the subjects to the role of co-creators. Fusing the complex, messy and often (but not always) dark relationships each subject has with alcohol with the performed poetic distillations generates a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (distancing) not just in the audience but also for the subject who is both themselves and conscious observer of themselves simultaneously.

70  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Hill’s transformative relationship with his subjects, shifting them from victim to creator, is perfectly articulated by Brian Winston albeit with an attack, once again, on Grierson.30 Hill has also taken the poetic tradition a stage further, advancing on Peter Symes’s recovery of the use of verse; In Hill’s films, poet Simon Armitage has written not spoken poetry but the lyrics for songs. The results of this, what we may call a ‘documusical’ (Paget and Roscoe 2006), have been extraordinary. Having essayed specially written songs in Drinking for England (1998), where, given the subject, interviewees bursting into song might not be considered entirely out of place, Hill’s first full-scale astonishing singing documentary was Feltham Sings (2002) set in a young offenders’ institution. Here the prisoners sing, but not as in Titicut Follies where a revue is presented as a species of degradation. In Feltham Sings, the songs are the product of a collaboration between the prisoners and Armitage to give an insight into their mindsets that conventional interviews would be hard­pressed to achieve. Hill has repeated the technique with porn stars (Pornography: The Musical 2003) and adult women prisoners (Songbirds 2005) with exactly similar results. In the documusical, the Griersonian victim discovers, this time quite literally, a voice. (Winston 2008, p. 283) Notes 1 Another version of the use of hybrid! 2 Bill Nichols. (2001, Summer). Documentary Film and the Modernist AvantGarde. Critical Inquiry 27 (4): 581. Thomas Davis notes in The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia that while Nichols is correct to ‘restore’ the connection between the ‘role of avant-garde aesthetics to the history of documentary’. However, he argues convincingly that ‘Nichols . . . misreads the relationship of politics and aesthetics underwriting Grierson’s theories and practices’ (Davis 2015, p. 30). 3 ‘Griersonian justifications have been enlisted to support projects by people and groups with radically different political organisations – from colonial agents and nationalists to liberation film-makers’ (Williams and Druick 2014, p. 3). 4 Its impact on American fiction director’s co-opted into making documentaries for the US government during World War II is charted in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Harris 2014). Rotha includes in his top100 films in the 1952 volume (Rotha 1952, p. 377). 5 Occasionally, a she – as in the Empire Marketing Board’s Evelyn Spice, the only female director. 6 Independent Filmmakers Association. (2013, April  23). Documentary. Experimental Educational. Cinema Quarterly. Cinema St  Andrews (blog), 68. https:// cinemastandrews.org.uk/archive/cinema-quarterly/. 7 EMBFU. (1933). A Working Plan for the Substandard. Cinema Quarterly 1 (2): 19–25. 8 While Grierson led the EMB Film Unit, he was not named as an author.

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  71 9 Compare this with the controversy that erupted when the term docudrama was used to describe the 1980 film Death of a Princess. A film which despite its assertions of being evidence based was a complete scripted fiction based on an unreliable and unverified ‘true story’ (Said 1981). 10 Rotha. The Function of the Director (Rotha 1933, p. 78). Other essays contained occasional dissenting views about documentary such as that by producer H. Bruce Woolf. Woolfe argued that not all non-fiction films are documentaries and that a documentary can contain fiction and still be a documentary. He noted that that Rotha disagreed but added that they respected each other’s opinion. H. Bruce Woolfe. Commercial Documentary. (Woolfe 1933, pp. 96–100). 11 With the caveat that they were variously contained or constrained by those sponsors paying the bill. 12 This is an astonishingly callous aside by Grierson given the circumstances of Jennings’s death (Sussex 1975, p. 100). 13 Keven Macdonald. (Director). (2000). The Man Who Listened to Britain. Humphrey Jennings. 14 Hence the title (The Rise and Fall of British Documentary) (Sussex 1975). 15 In a postscript Rotha laments the 1952 closing down of the Crown Film Unit and Central Office of Information’s non-theatrical distribution and exhibition services by the Conservative Government in Britain (Rotha 1952, p. 39). 16 The Mass Observation Movement was a research project that ran from 1937 to the mid-1960s at the University of Sussex. The focus was on recording everyday life and reactions to events (such as the abdication of Edward VIII and the coronation of George VI in 1937) through hundreds of volunteers capturing observations via diaries or questionaries. It was founded by three former Cambridge University students – Jennings, anthropologist Tom Harrison and poet Charles Madge. The Mass Observation Archive. www.massobs.org.uk/ 17 Jackson is excellent at articulating how surrealism informed many of Jennings’s films (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. xi). 18 ‘(being a personal selection by the three authors)’, Rotha, Road and Griffith, pp. 359–380. A Diary for Timothy, Listen to Britain, Fires were Started make the list (Rotha 1952, pp. 359–380). 19 As evidence, see the primary written materials that formed the production building blocks for Jennings’s documentaries. They look very much like the truncated indicative documents of a contemporary documentary treatment and not at all like a fiction film script (Jennings and Jackson 1993, pp. 17–55). Also (Stollery 2013, p. 397). 20 In 1942, Jennings complained about the output of Hollywood movies ‘picture after picture terrible’ (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 64). 21 Radio Talk. The Silent Village. Transcript Broadcast BBC Home Service 26 May 1943 (Jennings and Jackson 1993, pp. 67–75). 22 Cwmgiedd means turbulent river. 23 Photography – H.E. Fowle, Film Editor – Stewart McAllister, Sound Jock May and Assistant Director – Diana Pine. 24 Letter to Cecily Jennings. 10 September 1942 (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 62). It is worth watching a few moments of each of these fiction films to clarify how distinct they are from the documentary intent of The Silent Village. 25 Jennings, Manchester University Press, pp. 92–9. Topical Talk: ‘British War Films’ Broadcast, April 26, 1943. BBC Archive. Script File T679/680. Jennings’s emphasis (Logan 2011, p. 224). 26 In a letter to his wife Cecily while living in the village with the villagers he describes witnessing scenes of daily life that will end up depicted identically in the finished film (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 75).

72  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth 27 A letter from Jennings to his wife Cecily during production made it clear that Jennings’s support of the local’s political and ideological way of life was neither sentimental nor a view from above. He describes to her that he is working in a mining village on the reconstruction of the Lidice story. ‘but more important really than that is being close to the community itself and living and working inside it (Jennings lived with a Miner and his wife for 2 and half month), for what is everyday. I really never thought to live to see the honest Christian and Communist principles daily acted on as a matter of course by a large number of British – I won’t say English – people living together.’ (Jennings and Jackson 1993, p. 62) 28 Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote that Mrs Miniver shows the destiny of a family during the current war, and its refined powerful propagandistic tendency has up to now only been dreamed of. There is not a single angry word spoken against Germany; nevertheless the anti-German ­tendency is perfectly accomplished. (Macdonald 2015) 29 Given how much is written about the original distinctions between direct cinema and cinema verite, it is interesting to observe how similar this is to Robert Drews’s ‘manifesto’ to capture ‘life as it was lived’. 30 Grierson alone is not responsible for the status of a subject in the history of documentary.

Bibliography Abbott, S.  & Fairbanks, D. J. (2016). Experiments on Plant Hybrids by Gregor ­Mendel. Genetics 204 (2): 407–22. https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.116.195198. Anderson, L. (1996). “Only Connect”: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings. In K. Macdonald & M. Cousins (Eds.). Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documentary (pp. 151–60). London: Faber and Faber. Australian Broadcasting Authority. (2004). Interpretation of ‘Documentary’ for the Australian Content Standard Australian Broadcasting Authority Sydney. Sydney: Australian Government. Barsam, R. M. (1976). Nonfiction Film, Theory and Criticism. A Dutton Paperback Original. New York: E.P. Dutton. Beattie, K. (2010). Humphrey Jennings. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bruzzi, S. (2006). New Documentary. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge. Cavalcanti, A. (1952). Fourteen Don’ts by Can-Do Filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti. https://silentshari.wordpress.com/?s=cavalcanti. Cinema Quarterly. (1933–35/2013). Cinema St  Andrews (blog). https://cinemastan drews.org.uk/archive/cinema-quarterly/. Davis, T. (2015). The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail. action?docID=4012153. Dooley, K. (2012). Endangered Species: The Auteur Documentarian. RealTime Arts – Magazine 108. Downes, J. (2011). Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Decision and Reasons for Decision [2011] AATA 439. Re EME Productions No. 1 Pty Ltd. Applicant. And Screen Australia. Respondent. Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia.

The traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents  73 EMBFU. (1933). A  Working Plan for the Substandard. Cinema Quarterly 1 (2): 19–25. French, L. (2000, April). An Analysis of Nice Coloured Girls. Senses of Cinema 5. www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/australian-cinema-5/nice/. Gauthier, J. L. (2015). Embodying Change: Cinematic Representations of Indigenous Women’s Bodies, a Cross-Cultural Comparison. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 11 (3): 283–98. https://doi.org/10.1386/macp.11.3.283_1. Geva, D. (2021). A Philosophical History of Documentary, 1895–1959. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79466-8. Grierson, J. (1933). The Documentary Producer. Cinema Quarterly 1 (2): 8. Haas, A. (2021). Hegel’s Speculative Sentence. Philosophy  & Rhetoric 54 (3): 213–39. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.3.0213. Harris, M. (2014). Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. New York: The Penguin Press. Hill, B. (Director). (1998). Drinking for England. Century Films. Hoshino, M. (2020). Humphrey Jennings’s ‘Film Fables’: Democracy and Image in The Silent Village. Modernist Cultures 15 (2): 133–54. https://doi.org/10.3366/ mod.2020.0286. Independent Filmmakers Association. (1933). Documentary. Experimental Educational. Cinema Quarterly 1 (2). Iorio, S. D. (2013, February 25). Chronicle of a Summer: Truth and Consequences. The Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com/current/posts/2674-chronicle-of-asummer-truth-and-consequences. Jackson, K. (2004). Humphrey Jennings. London: Pan Macmillan. Jennings, H. (Director). (1943). The Silent Village. Crown Film Unit. Jennings, H. & Jackson, K. (1993). The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader. Manchester: Carcanet. La Rocca, D. (Ed.). (2016). The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. Lanham: Lexington Books. Legg, S. & Cavalcanti, A. (1934, Spring). Ethics for Movie. Cinema Quarterly 2 (3). Levin, G. R. (1971). Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film Makers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Logan, P. C. (2011). Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A  ReAssessment: A  Re-Assessment. Abingdon: Taylor  & Francis Group. http://ebook central.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=679238. Macdonald, F. (2015, February 10). Mrs Minever: The Film That Goebbels Feared. BBC Culture. www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150209-the-film-that-goebbels-feared. Macdonald, K. (Director). (2000). Humphrey Jennings. The Man Who Listened to Britain. Figment TV Productions. Macdonald, K.  & Cousins, M. (1996). Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documentary. London: Faber and Faber. Moffat, T. (Director). (1987). Nice Coloured Girls. Women’s Film Fund. Australian Film Commission. Moffatt, T. (1988). Changing Images: An Interview with Tracey Moffatt. Kunapipi 10 (1). https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol10/iss1/13. Moody, L. (2013, July  2). Act Normal: Hybrid Tendencies in Documentary Film. 11 Polaroids. Journal of Film, Sound & Art 2. Morin, E. (1985). Chronicle of a Film. Studies in Visual Communication 11 (1): 4–29. https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol11/iss1/3.

74  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Morin, E. & Rouch, J. (Directors). (1987). Chronicle of a Summer. Argos Films. National Board of Review. (1943). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Board_ of_Review_Award_for_Best_Documentary_Film. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (2001). Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde. Critical Inquiry 27 (4): 580–610. Plantinga, C. (2016). The Limits of Appropriation: Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction. In D. La Rocca (Ed.). The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (pp. 113–24). Lanham: Lexington Books. Ponech, T. (1999). What Is Non-Fiction Cinema?: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Read, H. (1933). Experiments in Counterpoint. Cinema Quarterly 3 (1). Rosenthal, A. & Corner, J. (Eds.). (2005). New Challenges for Documentary. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Rotha, P. (1933, Winter). The Function of the Director. Cinema Quarterly 2 (2): 78–9. Rotha, P. (1952). Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality. 3rd ed. London: Faber. Russell, P. & Taylor, J. P. (2010). Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in PostWar Britain. A BFI Book. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Said, E. W. (1981). Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books. Screen Australia. (2007). Producer Offset Rules 2007 (As Amended) 2007. Screen Australia. Screen Australia. (2012, March  8). Media Release. Public Statement: Lush House Decision. Screen Australia. Shub, E. (Director). (1927). The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. https://www.imdb. com/title/tt0018246/. Stollery, M. (2013). Only Context: Canonising Humphrey Jennings/Conceptualising British Documentary Film History. Journal of British Cinema and Television 10 (3): 395–414. Sullivan, C. T. (2021). Pussy Power: A  Contemporaneous View of Indigenous Women and Their Role in Sex Work. Genealogy 5 (3): 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/ genealogy5030065. Sussex, E. (1975). The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vertov, D. (Director). (1924). Kino Eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino-Eye. Watkins, P. (Director). (1965). The War Game. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_War_Game. Williams, D.  & Druick, Z. (2014). The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement. Cultural Histories of Cinema. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Winston, B. (2008). Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. 2nd ed., Rev. and Updated ed. London: BFI. Woolfe, B. H. (1933). Commercial Documentary. Cinema Quarterly 2 (2): 96–100.

3 What is the truth? Beyond the non-fiction–fiction blur, using philosophical, ethical frameworks to communicate the truth in hybrid documentary and beyond The chapter posits that no matter how inventive or innovative the form of hybrid documentary, the inherent value of this approach is its relationship to the truth. For example, the value and extraordinary global impact of the hybrid documentary feature film The Act of Killing (2012) would simply vanish if it was revealed that the acts of killing it depicts had never occurred in history or that the protagonist Anwar was not a homicidal and unapologetic mass murderer involved in the 1965 Indonesian genocide but an amateur actor from Tahiti. Likewise, the cinema audience of the hybrid documentary Dreams of a Life (2011) would be understandably outraged if they discovered that 38-year-old Joyce Vincent, the subject of the film who died alone in her London bedsit and whose remains were discovered only three years later by chance, was a construct of the director’s mind hoping to illustrate the isolation of urban life. There is an important and, I would argue, inviolate divide between fiction based on history and documentary using cinematic devices to explore and uncover the truth about the past. What constrains us are issues of trust, ethics, transparency and obligations to both subject and audience. These are not to be tossed aside lightly. It is far more productive to measure hybrid documentary through the prism of historical and contemporary philosophical explorations of ethics and the truth than through an unproblematic notion of mixing the real and the made-up. Documentary ethics There are two main ways that most contemporary documentary theorists respond to the issue of ethics in documentary. The first is to ignore it, the second is to alarm and warn (and at times catastrophise). Brian Winston asserts in his book Lies, Damned Lies and Documentary that up until 1976, ethics simply wasn’t a topic of serious study and remained absent in critical discussions about the form1 (Winston 2000, p. 155). Alternatively, from the late 1990s onwards there were several alarmist publications in which documentary makers were put on notice for their ‘artistic immorality’ and dubious truth claims about unmediated reality, delusions about informed consent and self-serving arguments about social impact and serving the greater good. DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-5

76  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth The most extreme moral panics came in the form of passionate personal missives against the sins of individual filmmakers from highly influential commentators or theorists. One was from former Storyville Commissioner Nick Fraser attacking the hybrid documentary The Act of Killing referring to it as ‘a high-minded snuff movie’ – one that was, in his view, ‘bizarrely’ and inappropriately defended by executive producer Errol Morris, who compared its stylistic decisions to Hamlet’s theatrical ‘trickery’ in the deployment of actors to reveal the underbelly of Denmark’s corruption (Fraser 2014). Another came from Bill Nichols, who was so outraged and appalled and filled with revulsion over Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure (2008), which featured the guards who had documented their assaults on prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he felt compelled to set aside his usual scaffold of academic discourse and address the matter in an open letter (albeit a letter first presented in an academic context (Nichols 2016, pp. 181–190). Nichols provided three reasons fuelling his physical and ideological repugnance watching the film. First was the ‘painfully limited perspective of the guards’ that was de-contextualised and isolated from the larger military complex in which they were involved and that Morris presented them as victims of US-sanctioned institutionalised violence and torture in the ‘War on Terror’ rather than the ‘bad apples’ the Bush administration had cast them as. Second, the stylised re-enactments which Nichols felt fetishised the acts of torture and lacked a ‘moral centre’. The third reason was the ‘complete absence of the voices of the Iraqi detainees’ (ibid., p. 187). Interestingly, Nichols had no such concerns about The Act of Killing (2012), so reviled by Fraser, which he admired and robustly defended. In that documentary, it was the lack of remorse from the killers (whom Nichols concurs ‘tortured and killed far more people than [the SOP] guards ever did’ (ibid., p. 189) that makes that film morally acceptable. One assumes that the re-enactments, in which these killers play out their past crimes through the prism of various Hollywood genres (gangster, horror, romance) that clearly created distress in the real people cast as victims in these vignettes, failed to create any moral concern for Nichols along with the complete absence of the voices of the Indonesian targets of the 1965/1966 genocide.2 Nor did Nichols address criticism of the film by Indonesians or academics (Cribb 2014) who critiqued it as having the same de-contextualised ahistorical focus on sociopathic protagonists and not the regime that supported it and that the film was given an ethical pass because it was a non-Western narrative3 (Moody 2013). At a time when a growing body of detailed research on the killings has made clear that the army played a pivotal role in the massacres, The Act of Killing puts back on the agenda the Orientalist notion that Indonesians slaughtered each other with casual self-indulgence because they did not value human life. (Cribb 2014)

What is the truth?  77 Interestingly – just to add to variations of perceptions of ethical practice in documentary – it was Fraser who commissioned (and defended) Dennis O Rourke’s controversial documentary Cunnamulla (2000) a decade earlier – a film that would definitely fall into Brian Winston’s excoriating and well-argued criticisms about documentary makers failing to obtain genuine informed consent4 published around the same time the film was released.5 The point of highlighting these disparate opinions is to demonstrate how many (although certainly not all) discussions about ethics in documentary come down to exactly that – opinions predicated on examples of films they regard as behaving reprehensively. Winston and Nichols display this tendency when they lay out their caveats and concern about documentary practice through the analysis of ‘bad apples’. The list can vary but tends to always include The Connection (1996) (fake observational footage), Mighty Times: The Children’s March (2004) (fake archive/unflagged re-enactments), Roger & Me (1989) (fake timeline), The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) (fake consent and generally morally repugnant). Important to observe as well is that films that are cited as ethically superior like Born into Brothels (2004), which Nichols describes as ‘a brilliant demonstration of how the ethical responsibility of the filmmaker can become the subject of the film itself’, (Nichols 2016, p. 159.) have, overtime, become highly criticised as extractive exercises displaying white saviour tendencies and leaving the children of sex workers in far worse conditions than it found them (Banerjee 2005). Both writers seem to indicate that some crisis is afoot and that documentary makers are in dire need of advice about how to behave. In the late 1990s, Brian Winston was on high alert about what he described as a time in which it was ‘increasingly dangerous to be a documentary maker’. This was not about threats to life, limb, employment, safety or incomes of filmmakers but rather a matrix of threats from everything from regulators eroding freedom of speech, attacks (by Noël Carrol) on ‘post-modernist sophistications [by Renov, Winston, Nichols et al] about the slippery nature of the image’ (Winston 2008, p. 9), to filmmakers deluding themselves with Griersonian-infused arguments about serving the greater good, informed consent and contracts with audiences. So much, as always, of Winston’s arguments hinge on two things. First, his overinflated view of the influence of direct cinema on all documentary practice leading to ‘common and increasingly vexed . . . everyday subterfuges inevitably used because in the very nature of the case the camera cannot simply deliver unmediated reproduction of the truth’ (ibid., p, 132). Second, his intense dislike of the Grierson definition of documentary ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ asserting again and again that it is questionable that there is any actuality left, after creative intervention. Nichols is a little more tempered in his approach, but he did feel in the early 2000s that it was critical to ask the question in his chapter Documentary Ethics: Doing the Right Thing, ‘Can we establish standards for an ethical documentary practice? He framed this by using the bad behaviour of Mighty

78  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Times: The Children’s March indistinguishably merging re-enactments with historical footage as an inciting incident for his explorations along with stating (without providing evidence) that while anthropology, law, medicine, journalism and television networks have definitive ethical codes of conduct – this is ‘something documentary filmmakers as a whole have seldom explored, let alone adopted’ (Nichols 2016, p.  154). He also asserts, again without providing evidence, that ‘most film schools do not offer courses in ethics as such’ even though, ‘few documentary makers can practice their craft for long without experiencing ethical quandaries in need of solution’ (ibid., p. 155). One gets the overwhelming sense reading these texts that both authors seem to assume that issues about ethics, the truth, trust, informed consent, power, obligations to participants and so on haven’t occurred to or at least been taken seriously by documentary makers or those that teach documentary, past or present. While neither Nichols nor Winston believes that either a legally enforced or standardised code of conduct is the solution to the variety of ‘vexed’ dilemmas facing practitioners, they do offer advice. Winston comes up with an ethical risk assessment ‘to determine the extent of the difficulties or dangers involved in recruiting a person to their project’ (Winston 2008, p. 158) along with adopting principles of duty of care ‘in informing participants about possible outcomes’. Nichols is even broader in his advice – for him a foundational level of documentary ethics would address, The need to respect dignity and earn the trust of subjects and viewers alike, as well as acknowledge the struggle for power and the right to represent a distinct perspective are at issue. This foundation does not produce ‘Do this. Do that’ dogma but instead acknowledges that questions of ethics remain situated in an evolving historical context. What is to be done is a question to answer in the particular moment, using basic guidelines rather than rules. These guidelines will vary in relation to individual motives, institutional goals, and historical contexts. (Nichols 2016, p. 163) Much of the advice proffered seems to be basic common sense and common decency which is, I  would and will argue, widely deployed amongst most documentary practitioners. To substantiate this assertion one can consider the focus on ‘bad apples’ that scaffolds much commentary on documentary ethics, demonstrates that the cited films tend to be relatively isolated and extreme cases and not connected to accusations of systematic bad practice and to be frank, not altogether that serious. In none of the documentaries case studies of maleficence cited in the publications earlier does anyone die, suffer assault, physical harm or have their lives irrevocably destroyed. I am not trying to minimise the bad practices and unethical behaviour of independent documentary makers which of course exists, nor to say there aren’t examples of terrible conduct and treatment of subjects, but over all these cases do seem to pale in comparison to the recent revelations about the horrors

What is the truth?  79 that powerful fiction film and entertainment industry players inflicted on performers and subordinates. An industry that Bill Nichols seemed to imply was safer because, for example, actors (unlike real people) can ‘establish a well-defined contractual relationship’ (ibid., p. 155) with a filmmaker. Documentary disgraces also seem minor next to the actions of media players such as Roger Aisles, Harvey Weinstein and others or the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. Given the scale of the global output of documentary makers over the years, it is extraordinary there are relatively few accusations of unethical practitioner behaviour. Documentary makers’ comparative obscurity in the media industry, lack of power, lack of global influence, their relatively small-scale isolated company structures and that many do not pay subjects for participation means the currency most are dealing with is trust – a currency they need to fiercely protect or lose their means to production and ability to earn a living. Of course, this does not protect either participant/subject or filmmaker from harm or compromise when they, as is often the case, are in a contractual relationship with a commissioner, broadcaster, distributor who wield the ultimate power over the final content. In addition, while there may have not been widespread explicit discussions about ethics by academics or documentary makers prior to the 1990s, there doesn’t seem to be substantial evidence to imply, as Brian Winston does in Claiming the real II that it was a ‘repressed topic in the documentary debate’ (Winston 2008, p. 234). For the most part the oeuvre that is contemporary documentary theory does not really gather momentum until the early 1990s so it is hardly surprising that ethics doesn’t become a major focus till the end of the 20th century. As for practitioners it is clear in the last chapter that documentary makers like Humphrey Jennings, Peter Watkins, Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, Tracey Moffat and Brian Hill cared deeply about the subjects in their films and were committed to, and thought deeply about, the practical and ethical obligations in their duty of care to them. The interviews in Roy Levin’s 1971 Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Filmmakers, which includes Basil Wright, Lindsay Anderson, DA Pennebaker, Jean Rouch and Frederick Wiseman – demonstrate that all were engaged in a broad range of nuanced and complex reflection about the work they undertook (Levin 1971). Some like Wright were persuaded by Grierson that the films they made as part of the British Documentary Movement should be fuelled by a desire to ‘change social conditions’ (ibid., p. 37), whereas Wiseman disavowed this false altruism arguing ‘my films are socially conscious but are not, at least from my point of view, trying to sell any particular ideology’ (ibid., p.  315). Wiseman spoke assertively about the subjectivity of his work (and the ‘bullshit’ of objectivity (ibid., p. 321) yet also engaged deeply with the ethical implications of his films on participants. In discussing a scene in Law and Order (1969) in which a prostitute was choked by a police officer, he confirmed that he had her consent to screen the scene but admitted that the ‘ethical problem is there too, but it’s a complicated

80  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth one’ (ibid., p. 321). For Wiseman, it was a matter of weighing up an individual’s (technical, legal, moral and ethical) rights with the public right to know (in this case about police brutality). While he argued that individual rights were often tempered by limitations imposed by people abiding by the rules of the society they inhabit (taxes, traffic lights) thus ‘not a new issue’, he also accepted that documentary was at the time ‘a new technology that raises the issue in a new form. It’s a very sticky issue. But it’s something I have thought about a great deal’ (ibid., p. 321). Not exactly the kind of commentary one would expect if the subject of ethics was a ‘repressed topic’. What is invaluable about Brian Winston’s analysis of ethics in contemporary documentary practice is his passionate full-blooded attack at what he regards as the self-interested and misguided ideas that most documentary makers have about informed consent, the public’s right to know and the social impact of their work. Much of what he asserts requires serious consideration particularly his arguments about the ability of minors (even with parental/guardian permission) to consent at all. For him, most documentaries past and present buy into the ‘myth’ of informed consent without acknowledging the frequent power imbalance between filmmaker and subject, the prurient obsession with ‘victims’ and the frequent justifications from practitioners about dubious participant representations on the screen that such depictions serve the greater good and have the potential to instigate social change. In Winston’s view, this is both misguided, unsubstantiated and naïve. The fact remains that the number of documentaries that have had any demonstratable effect is very small. For a form that for the better part of a century has justified its practices by claiming social amelioration as its objective, this constitutes pretty slim pickings.6 In the long term, vague appeals to the public interest and the ‘consent defence’ are dangerous for factual filmmakers. Such ideas leave them primed to exploit the powerless and vulnerable to being manipulated by the powerful and the deviant. Worst of all these facile concepts, debase, in the name of free expression, both the right to speak and the right to hear. This is quite understandable because, undercut by the demands of free expression ethics, finally offers very little guidance to the media in general or the documentarist in general. (Winston 2008, p. 260) Winston lays a lot of blame for these practitioner delusions directly at the feet of John Grierson and his agenda that documentary serves in the ‘betterment’ of society – an accusation that seems a little extreme as does his arguments that once we enter a post-Griersonian epoch in which we abandon truth and virtue claims about documentary there will be a great blossoming. There is no question that Grierson and his predominantly white male colleagues were skimmed from the elite echelons of society and pretty much focused

What is the truth?  81 their gaze on the less privileged, but then the same could be said for a large number of people who attended university in the 20th century. Just because it favoured the privileged in the past doesn’t imply we should abandon the entire structure of tertiary education. Brian Winston genuinely believed that documentary was facing catastrophe in 1995, when Claiming the Real was first published and then again in 2008 when a revised second edition came out. Along with the ethical quandaries cited here and his bad apple examples in Lies, Damned Lies and Documentary, he was also deeply concerned about the shift from film to digital cameras at the turn of the century which he believed would further erode ‘the evidentiary base of photographic image making’ (ibid., p. 289). He was particularly defensive about Stella Bruzzi’s assertion in her monograph New Documentary (2006) that his position about an imminent wave of ‘marauding fakery’ was an ‘overstatement’ and ‘somewhat hysterical’. Winston doubled down stating, ‘but is not that exactly what is happening with the ever more frequent and increasingly (dare one say) hysterical tumults about documentary in the public sphere? And note, these do not even yet focus on the possibilities of digital manipulations’ (Winston, p. 289). I know many documentary scholars had a great deal of respect for Brian Winston, and his death in 2022 was widely mourned in the academy as the passing of a great force in documentary intellectual discourse. Indeed, this is why I engage so much with his work in this chapter because it is ubiquitous and highly influential amongst both documentary academics and emerging filmmakers within the tertiary system. That said, I  struggle to identify the evidence to back up his fears. Many regarded the mid-2000s as a golden age for cinema release feature documentary, and low-cost digital cameras democratised documentary practice a great deal more than abandoning Grierson’s ‘creative treatment of actuality’ would have – making it accessible to a far broader and more diverse range of people. A film like the Sundance winning 5 Broken Cameras (2011) was feasible only because it was made with consumer camcorders and not Arris. For Winston, documentary could survive into the 21st century only if it abandoned ‘the Griersonian legitimatisation of it’. So ‘severe’ was the ‘concatenation’ of factors (digital cameras, Grierson’s influence, lies about consent and unmediated representation etc.) it was his fervent hope that out of this ‘wreckage would come a new footing for the documentary enterprise’ (ibid., p. 289). Basically, documentary practitioners should abandon all claims of objectivity and the real (although it is unclear who was supposedly making these claims in 2008) and ‘embrace an understanding of the inevitable mediation of the filmmaking process’ (ibid., 289). If this occurred at a stroke, many ethical problems would be solved. Documentarists would still own a duty of care to their subjects and the shlockmeisters of ‘reality’ television would continue to shoulder a pretty serious moral

82  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth deficit; but as far as the documentarist’s relationship to the audience is concerned, ethical problems would disappear. (ibid., p. 290) According to Winston concerns about Michael Moore’s bias, Nick Broomfield’s misleading performative innocent ‘bumbler’ act and Paul Watson’s ‘fast and loose’ approach to editing factual content would all evaporate, leaving valuable insights and authenticity. ‘If documentary drops its pretension to a superior representation of actuality, explicit or implicit promises of simplistic, evidentiary “referential integrity” will no longer need to be made because they would be beside the point’ (ibid., p. 290). In a nutshell, documentary makers need to drop the Griersonian truth claims and at once the ethical dilemmas that had hitherto so besieged the industry would simply disappear. He ends the second edition of Claiming the Real with a 1927 epigram from Esfir Shub, The whole problem is what we must film now. As soon as that us clear to us, the terminology won’t matter – fiction or non-fiction. (ibid., p. 291) While Winston’s arguments were passionately held, they don’t really allow for the fact that documentary makers and documentary audiences do want to be able to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction, have and do constantly interrogate ethics and best practice and address problematic moral concerns in production. Recent examples dedicated to transforming the dynamics between documentary filmmakers and participants, challenging the lack of diversity amongst practitioners and encouraging accountable models for ‘informed consent’ can be found in research by praxis models (Lather 2018), non-extractive principles of filmmaking (Wissot 2017), ethical guides for emerging filmmakers (Childress 2020) and importantly, protocols for working and collaborating with First Nations subjects and content which are authored by First Nations experts themselves (Janke 2008). These provide ample evidence that the documentary community is willing to challenge and enforce change about potential bad behaviour and practice from within. I would add to this the ethical protocols embedded in best practice hybrid documentaries from Jennings’s The Silent Village onwards. Anyone who has spent time or worked with or in the documentary community/industry would be aware that many involved have a genuine desire (even if it falls short) to make content that serves the greater good, and one needs to consider that there are worse things to aim for in a career, for example, making content that peddles lies and fabrications for profit. In addition, the rise of initiatives and organisations promoting and supporting social impact documentaries over the last decade such as Good Pitch7 as a serious and well-funded tranche of documentary

What is the truth?  83 making with their sophisticated strategic alliances and partnerships to implement positive social change and the corresponding rise of social impact producers8 do seem to provide evidence that there are documentaries that are serving the betterment of society in the Griersonian sense of the term. It should be noted that Bill Nichols holds an extremely critical view of the social impact movement as associated with documentary finance and marketing. He highlights the bad apple example of Kony 2012 and devotes a whole chapter ‘The Political Documentary and the Question of Impact’ to detailing what he perceives as the serious shortcomings associated with social impact documentary initiatives (Nichols 2016, pp. 220–229). Academic and filmmaker Jill Godmilow is also a fierce critic of what she believes is the ethical vacuity of most contemporary documentary makers. She argues the continued clinging to realism as the ‘only authentic non-fiction form’ demonstrates how ‘lazy’ they are and how ‘pornographic’ their work – ‘The conventional documentary can and often does operate as a Playboy centrefold does’ (Godmilow 2022, p.  14). In her recent book Kill the Documentary, she asserts Harlan County USA (1976), Hoop Dreams (1994) and Fog of War (2003) are simply pandering to middle-class neoliberal virtue signalling and upholding the systems they seek to critique. The solution in her view lies in committing to postrealist filmmaking; The useful postrealist film could help us break out of our imperialist chains. It could shatter the optimism of the bourgeois world and force the reader to question the permanency of the prevailing order. Sad to say, this useful film of yours probably won’t get served up on Netflix, or any other profit-producing platform. It won’t be nominated, most likely, for an Academy Award. Economic forces reward imperialistic documentaries that reinforce our economic system. Postrealist films undermine that system and thus are not welcomed into the celebrated fold. (Godmilow 2022, p. 24) The issue with the rather generalised and broad advice from Winston, Godmilow and Nichols (who all earned or earn steady incomes from academia) is that it does not offer much of a way forward in a practical industrial sense. How, for example, in Godmilow’s manifesto would such postrealist films be funded or seen? It seems naïve to assert that simply being transparent about a documentary’s mediated representation, avoiding realism or admissions that they won’t change anything in the world will resolve the potential ethical concerns of a production. There is also no acknowledgement from Winston or Nichols that the blurry boundaries definitions of documentary they espouse along their dismissal of ‘truth claims’ may contribute to the dilemmas they identify. If a documentary maker cannot at least assert that

84  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth they are seeking to tell the truth in their films, what is it, exactly, that they aspire to do? Erika Balsom points out: No one assumes any longer, if they ever did, that there is a mirrored isomorphism between reality and representation or that the act of filming can be wholly noninterventionist. To assert such things is to tell us what we already know. And so why does it happen so often, whether explicitly or implicitly, in documentary theory and practice? What does it accomplish? Perhaps it is just inertia, a repetition of received ideas that stem from a paradigm by now firmly established. Perhaps. Yet it also reconfirms a smug and safe position for maker and viewer alike, guarding both against being caught out as that most sorry of characters: the naive credulist. We all know better than to believe . . . In light of current conditions, do we need to reevaluate the denigration of fact inherent in the championing of ‘ecstatic truth’? This is not to diminish the tremendous historical importance of such strategies, which can remain viable, nor to malign all films that engage them. At best – and there are countless examples of this – departures from objective reality are enacted in order to lead back to truth, not to eradicate its possibility. At worst, the insistence that documentary is forever invaded by fictionalization leads to a dangerous relativism that annuls a distinction between truth and falsity that we might rather want to fight for. . . . Instead of taking for granted that there is something inherently desirable about blurring the boundary between reality and fiction and something inherently undesirable about minimizing an attention to processes of mediation in the production of visible evidence, we must ask: Do we need to be told by a film – sometimes relentlessly – that the image is constructed lest we fall into the mystified abyss of mistaking a representation for reality? . . . What would it be to instead affirm the facticity of reality with care, and thereby temper the epistemological anxieties of today in lieu of reproducing them? How might a film take up a reparative relation to an embattled real? (Balsom 2017, p. 5) The question for me is not whether documentary makers should seek to tell the truth or not but how they pursue the truth through the implementation of ethical and moral frameworks. Brian Winston felt that this was an untenable pursuit and that ‘moral dilemmas [balancing free speech, informed consent and the public right to know against individual rights] are further compounded by the fact that systems of ethical behaviour are largely unavailable to the documentarist’. Winston was convinced that ‘Freedom of expression does not allow for the extensive application of a formal ethical system whether derived from Aristotle, Kant and Mill or from some contemporary thinker such as Rawls’

What is the truth?  85 (Winston 2008, p.  261). Winston’s objections are multiple, including the fact that most documentary makers are independent contractors and, ethical or not, constrained ‘within a complex net of industrial restraints’ (Winston 2008, p. 261). I will engage with this issue later, but first I want to bring up a system of teaching ethical behaviour to documentary students, documentary teachers and documentary practitioners with enormous international reach that was being established less than eight years after Winston published his statement above. Professor Dan Geva founded the research and global educational project ‘The Ethics Lab – a CILECT Project’ in 2016. CILECT is The International Association of Film and Television Schools (Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision – CILECT) founded in Cannes, France, in 1954 and includes ‘over 180 audio-visual educational institutions from 65 countries on 6 continents with 9,000+ teachers and staff that annually train 55,000+ students and communicate with an alumni network over 1,330,000+ strong’.9 The Ethics lab project, that was financially supported by CILECT, has run for eight years involving hundreds of participants and thousands of observers and provides a rigorous (and freely accessible) proliferating curriculum about dealing with dilemmas and conflicting values in one’s professional film career through the application of formal ethical systems involving Aristotle, Kant and Mill to which Geva (quite rightly) has added Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and the feminist-oriented Ethics of Care of Carol Gilligan.10 The Ethics Lab’s credo is to explore this source of human wealth and to create an educational, pedagogical, and research platform to present this corpus of diverse human experience, demonstrating that Ethics can not only be taught (a controversial idea in its own right). Rather – and more critically – it can be exercised and taught in an innovative way that produces significant motivation for change on the part of the future generation of filmmakers in their local as well as international, professional, and native communities.11 It aligns with the mission statement of the organisation that funded it, ‘CILECT believes in the inherent inter-connectivity of humankind and fully supports creativity, diversity, cross-cultural thinking and sustainable development as fundamental prerequisites to human existence and progress’.12 I have some reservations about elements of the Ethics Lab pedagogy being overly individualistic and not engaging strongly enough with external industrial realities and not historically contextualising the sources of moral philosophy it cites. Classicist, Associate Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta at Princeton13 argues that much classical philosophy, including Aristotle, ‘has been instrumental to the invention of “whiteness” and its continued

86  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth domination’. I also believe it is not currently digging deep enough into ideas about cultural bias, identity, class and race or exploring, engaging and intellectually expansive ways to illuminate these issues for documentary makers and documentary students. Examples of such explorations can include, students utilising implicit bias tests14 and Gapminder quizzes and resources,15 making narrative video essays interrogating identity, culture and bias and undertaking research on how the screen industry is grappling, on an industrial level, with inequity, access, work safety and representation. However, Geva’s project is ongoing and evolving and could easily be adapted to incorporate material such as that cited grappling with these issues. It is important, if obvious, to address that CILECT’s Ethics Lab is one example of formal ethics instruction available to documentary makers amongst a sea of possibilities. It is hard to locate a reputable contemporary tertiary institution involved in teaching documentary that doesn’t make ethics part of the curriculum – it is an area of the industry and documentary pedagogy that is clearly expanding not retracting. Winston’s caveat about independent documentary makers being at the mercy of a capricious neoliberal industry who will toss an individual’s moral niceties aside in favour of free expression and free market principles underestimates the enormous ongoing impact, over the last decade, of real-world politics and social justice movements on the industrial complex of documentary production in the West. Once again, I  do not wish to imply that the landscape is devoid of unethical practices or players rather to highlight examples of major shifts in production protocols. In Australia, decades of activism and lobbying from Australian Indigenous filmmakers has formally transformed the way documentaries (and fiction films) are made, commissioned, and funded in that country.16 It also underestimates how much of this change is fuelled from a willingness of documentary practitioners and documentary organisations to engage head on with ethical quandaries and lobby agencies, distributors, companies to initiate real change.17 This also includes a filmmakers’ ability to walk away from a job they find ethically concerning. Importantly, prominent documentary makers are willing to speak publicly and often about ethical concerns that arise alongside industrial change and discuss potential concerns and potential ways to address them. The popularity and proliferation of true crime is accompanied by dozens of articles debating the moral shadowlands of these productions. The rise of the streamers has likewise set off spirted debates amongst major industry p ­ layers – Ken Burns, Alex Gibney and almost 50 others discuss the complexity surrounding sticky ethical implications, like whether to pay subjects for their involvement or not, that have accompanied the flood of money, commissions and demands of powerful corporations like Netflix. There is much variation how filmmakers interpret these changes and their attendant pressures – there are ­arguments that this surge in commissions is promoting greater diversity amongst filmmakers and leading to more inclusive, equitable relationships

What is the truth?  87 between filmmaker and subjects – others like Gibney, Burns and Berlinger encourage vigilance (Galuppo and Kilkenney 2022). Whatever happens, some in the field are preoccupied by questions of whether the soul of documentary filmmaking will remain intact when the dust settles. Gibney says his company has recalibrated and is again focusing on groundbreaking, custom-made projects. ‘I hope that in the future, documentarians, and I include myself in this, will continue to resist the straitjacket of formulas and find ways to do interesting work’. He adds, ‘In other words, my concern for the future is freedom of expression. And the only way to push back on that is to be prepared to do it for less money’. (ibid.) A similar exhaustive examination of the ethical complexities being faced and debated by contemporary documentary makers and in this case documentary subjects appeared in the long-form essay featuring interviews with over 80 contemporary documentary practitioners and a number of subjects by Reeves Wiedeman The Documentary World’s Identity Crisis. Vulture, February 1, 2023. As to Winston’s important and urgent concerns about the existing lackadaisical attitudes to informed consent amongst documentary practitioners one can look to the hybrid documentary as a model of best practice. For me, this is more than simply a prescription for a code of conduct built into this type of filmmaking but rather an ethos and approach arising out of a philosophical moral universe that can be mined, probed and interrogated as a means of identifying and pursuing positive ethical outcomes along with what it means to tell the truth. Dan Geva’s model of teaching in the Ethics Lab demonstrates that incorporating philosophical precepts and teachings can have a strong and enduring impact on an individual’s professional film practice. Deploying philosophy as a framework to approaching the praxis of documentary has the advantage that ideas about ethics, the truth and goodness are embedded in every element of the endeavour and not tacked on as afterthoughts, separate chapters or as hoops to be jumped through. In hybrid documentary one retreats from Aristotelean ideas of the bright vigorous light of scientific methodology, observation and defence of the poetic arts bringing enlightenment and enters, instead, into the Platonic cave to seek answers. Before I write more, I need to add the proviso that the following is the way that I have utilised philosophy in documentary practice and in the classroom. It is just one approach which others are free to adopt, dispute or discard. To me it is a way of thinking and way of seeing that allows emerging filmmakers to both bring critical thinking to their work but also celebrate the aspects of experimentation, risk-taking and play that it encourages. Rather than break down documentary into Nichol’s increasingly irrelevant and hard-to-separate

88  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth modes with their implicit hierarchy of value – it is infinitely more bracing and fun to ask students to explore what a documentary in the Socratic tradition may look like. My answer to this is to show them the hilarious New York Op Docs What is a Photocopier? (2014) to stimulate discussion and creativity and to demonstrate the powerful truths that unceasing ‘Socratic gadfly goading’ questions can achieve. The other essential thing to note is that while I  believe that the hybrid documentary is best contextualised and taught through the prism of a non-mimetic Platonic moral universe, I am not arguing that this makes hybrid documentaries (ala Nichols, Renov and Winston) a better, more honest or more transparent means of making documentary. In brief, I do not believe that direct cinema is the demonic, debilitating, limiting mode as it is frequently characterised. Nor do I  think ‘it set back documentary 25/30 years’ as argued by Errol Morris. I appreciate that there were serious tensions between strictly observational filmmakers and those who were not, especially in the later part of the 20th century, but it can also be argued that the technical and intoxicating cinematic innovations of the 1960s injected much-needed energy, vitality, diversity of distribution and audience engagement into an industry somewhat languishing (and potentially tainted as government propaganda) after the boom years of the 1930s and World War II. Plato and the hybrid documentary Nichols begins his enormously influential scholarly work Representing Reality (1991) by asserting that we cannot love documentary films (or fiction films) and Plato at the same time. This is a result of how Nichols interprets the following passage from The Republic When the mind’s eye is fixed on objects illuminating truth and reality [the sun] it understands and knows them, and its possession of intelligence is evident, but when it is fixed on the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its opinions shifting, it seems to lack intelligence. (Plato 1952, p. 309) For Nichols, taking a literal and anachronistic view of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, this twilight world consists of images produced by all cinema makers including documentary makers which are the false markers of reality, the misleading reflections shown to shackled inhabitants. What in my view Plato is referring to here is the interpretations of reality by poets and artists of whom he was particularly sceptical, believing their work impeded a rigorous intellectual and spiritual quest though the cave to seek a deeper non-mimetic truth by means of allegory and allusion. Basically, not simply believing what one is seeing. While documentary makers can produce artistic and poetic work, few documentary makers would describe themselves just as artists or

What is the truth?  89 poets in the way fiction filmmakers might. What drives many documentary makers is a quest to winnow and communicate essential truths about the world. This makes them more akin to Plato’s philosopher guardians of his imagined Republic – poor, austere, communal, and socialist leaning distinct from his banished poets: [Plato] is rather interested in training guardians to ‘think abstractly’ (Cornford cited in Lee and Lane (2007, p. 259)). The primary aim of the mathematical studies is to train guardians in the cognitive virtue of abstraction. For Plato, the virtue of abstraction ‘draws the mind to the truth and direct the philosophers’ reason upwards, instead of downwards’. Successfully engaging in the cognitive ability of abstraction (which is the activity characteristic of the specific virtue in question) allows them to move from the physical world of perception to the intelligible realm (which is only accessible through pure reasoning). It helps guardians move from the state of belief (pistis) to the state of mathematical reasoning (dianoia). The cognitive virtue of abstraction is a prerequisite for guardians advancing to the study of the dialectic. Nevertheless, Plato argues that the study of these five mathematical sciences is not enough because they involve certain assumptions that do not allow the mind to acquire knowledge of the Forms (noesis). Therefore, those who have excelled in their education are introduced to the study of the dialectic. The dialectic is the only procedure that ‘destroys’ assumptions, by undoing their status as mere assumptions, and moves towards their justification through the first principle. Those who become experts in the dialectical method acquire the cognitive virtue of debate. According to Plato, having the cognitive virtue of debate entails that (i) they are able to give the account of ‘the essential nature of each thing’. (ii) They are able to ‘ask and answer questions with the highest degree of understanding’. And most importantly for Plato, (iii) they are able to acquire understanding of the Form of the Good because they are able to give an account of the Form of the Good and reply to all objections and questions raised against them. For Plato, acquiring understanding of the Forms and the Form of the Good is necessary for agents to become truly virtuous, both morally and intellectually. (Kotsonis 2020, p. 254) The way Plato thought and wrote is very akin to how a hybrid documentary functions. Everything Plato produced in his lifetime was driven and shaped by a highly complex and politicised reality. None of his writings were in his own voice but that of his beloved mentor and teacher Socrates, who, in Plato’s view was sentenced to death by the corrupt state. All his dialogues, including The Republic, feature real historical figures engaged in intense, allegorical morality plays in vivid, what-if scenarios, festooned with rhetoric that seeks

90  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth to provide truthful answers to essential questions about the universal human condition. Anyone reading Plato at the time or in the thousands of years since is aware the Dialogues are predicated on the living breathing historical Socrates and his Socratic method as witnessed by his student Plato combined with the ornately (one may say cinematic!) constructed scenarios he places Socrates in, in order to demonstrate a logical and fact-based thesis. Afterall, Plato invented the entire legend of Atlantis (in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias) as a parable to warn and educate young Athenians about the corruption of excessive power and hubris as discussed by the very real Timaeus of Locri, Hermocrates of Syracuse and Critias of Athens. The Dialogues and The Republic debate, critique and analyse the furniture of the world, are not mimetic and are received and interpreted by audiences on multivalent levels. They are hybrids. It is an ideal form to foster an authentic form of informed consent because it cradled in a methodology that will always encourage the consistent interrogation as to how this is to be pursued, achieved, measured, demonstrated and tested. Productions such as The Silent Village and The War Game highlight how constantly and consistently hybrid documentary makers were preoccupied by asking whether they had achieved this goal and having achieved this what reciprocal obligations were required by the filmmaker. A reminder that not all hybrids sit on the side of virtue, Luke Moody’s incisive commentary on the form observed some examples of questionable ethical merit (perhaps justified by the fact they were made in non-Western settings with non-Western subjects) but done well, with ethical integrity and critical thought they can become a window into a powerful inclusive cinematic practice (Moody 2013). In the following chapters that focus on the praxis of hybrid documentaries it will be shown in concrete terms how informed consent is achieved through the hybrid documentary workshops not just once but iteratively throughout casting, pre-production, production and post right up to lock-off. It pushes the boundaries of conventional ethical best practice that may be characterised as a set of rules or recommended strategies to deploy for asking a participant to sign a release form. An example of this would be like that given in filmmaker Bec Barry’s exegesis The Dark Grey Zone that recommends 2. A consent meeting should take place with participants and their advocates, to fully explain the demands of participation and give participants the opportunity to ask questions about any aspect of their involvement in the film’. Barry’s recommendation also included a cooling-off period prior to the subject being asked to sign a release form (Barry 2021). I am aware that the academy and the film school can afford emerging filmmakers the luxury and safety net of deploying radical inclusive practices such as leaving consent open throughout the duration of a production which are simply not always available in a commercial industrial setting. They are a little like Plato’s ruminations about an idealised republic – sites that can produce rich food for thought, maps for a better future even if they are hard

What is the truth?  91 to implement in the economic/commissioning realities of the world of professional documentary practice. Then again, my rationale is exactly that. The tertiary screen environment is best served not by mimicking the existing industrial landscape but by producing those that can transform it. Notes 1 Winston identified that the issue was first raised in 1970s in an academic context in the Journal of the Film Association (Winston 2000, p. 155). 2 This was addressed in Oppenheimer’s 2004 companion film The Look of Silence. 3 The cases cited were Enjoy Poverty, The Act of Killing, The Ambassador and the films of Chris Marker and Jean Rouch Ethnographic films in Africa. This issue is revisited in Chapter 6. 4 Winston had been highly critical of O’ Rourke’s earlier film The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) which he described as being ‘ethically suspect’ (Winston 2000, pp. 148–49). 5 In fact, Brian Winston was invited onto Australian national radio to weigh into the debate, although not comment directly on the case which was before the court, when O’ Rourke was sued and then counter sued over issues relating to the consent of two underaged Indigenous girls who appeared in the film (Rigg 2001). Winston also raises ethical concerns with the film in Winston (2008, p. 250). 6 I am no doubt jeopardising my position countering Winston’s argument by invoking Nazis in mine. Two documentaries that spring to mind as making extraordinary and lasting social, political and historical impact were those George Stevens made at the end of World War II. Stevens was part of the US Army film unit that participated in the liberation of Dachau. The resulting films The Nazi Concentration Camps (1945) and The Nazi Plan (1945) were made explicitly to be presented as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. The significance of this footage and these films is monumental. In 1944, less than a year before two French women (prisoners in Ravensbrück) Loulou le Porz, a doctor, and Violette Lecoq, a nurse, watched a lorry drive up ‘And it lifts up and tips out a pile of corpses’. Le Porz says that her reaction was simple disbelief. The sight of a truck full of dead bodies was so outrageous, so out of scale with ordinary experience, that ‘if we recount that one day, we said to each other, nobody would believe us’. The only way to make the scene credible would be to record it. ‘If one day someone makes a film they must film this scene. This night. This moment’ (Kirsch 2015). 7 https://goodpitch.org/. 8 The Impact Field Guide  & Toolkit. Accessed October  27, 2022. https://impact guide.org/impact-in-action/meet-the-impact-producer/. 9 CILECT. Accessed October 28, 2022. www.cilect.org/. 10 The Ethics Lab. Accessed October 28, 2022. https://theethicslab.com/. 11 Credo – The Ethics Lab. Accessed October  28, 2022. https://theethicslab.com/ credo/. 12 www.cilect.org/. 13 Dan-El Padilla Peralta. Princeton Classics. Accessed October 28, 2022. https:// classics.princeton.edu/people/faculty/core/dan-el-padilla-peralta. 14 Select a Test. Accessed October  31, 2022. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ selectatest.html. 15 Gapminder. Accessed October 31, 2022. www.gapminder.org/. 16 Screen Australia, the country’s federal screen-funding agency has a head of Indigenous unit overseeing all aspects of screen involvement with Indigenous material

92  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth (as does Australia’s national public broadcaster) and houses a raft of codes, guidelines and requirements surrounding working with Indigenous content and subjects. Pathways and Protocols – First Nations Content – Doing Business with Us – About Us. Screen Australia. Accessed October  31, 2022. www.screenaustralia. gov.au/about-us/doing-business-with-us/indigenous-content/indigenous-protocols. Guidelines First Nations Programs. Screen Australia and the Australian Government. Issued 5 March 2018. Updated 1 July 2021. Iva Mencevska. (2020). Truth Telling in Australia’s Historical Narrative. NEW: Emerging Scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.5130/nesais.v5i1.1552. More recent initiatives led by Australian Indigenous filmmakers favour inclusive collaborative modes over consultation (encouraged in Janke’s work) Collaboration vs. Consultation: Moving Towards Better Practice in First Nations Storytelling. AIDC. Accessed October 31, 2022. www.aidc.com.au/event/collaboration-vs-consultationmoving-towards-better-practice-in-first-nations-storytelling/. 17 The following examples focus on a raft of recent initiatives in Australia and the UK. About the ABC’s diversity and Inclusion Plan. About the ABC’s Diversity and Inclusion Program. Accessed October 31, 2022. www.abc.net.au/corp/ diversity-and-inclusion/about/. Diversity Arts Australia. (2019). Shifting the Balance: Cultural Diversity in Leadership within the Australian Arts, Screen and Creative Sectors. Parramatta NSW: Diversity Arts Australia. Who-Gets-To-TellAustralian-Stories_LAUNCH-VERSION.Pdf. Accessed October 31, 2022. www. mediadiversityaustralia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Who-Gets-To-Tell-Australian-Stories_LAUNCH-VERSION.pdf. “Diversity and Equal Opportunities in Television and Radio 2019/20,” n.d., 50. Report on the UK-based Broadcasting Industry. Ofcom: Making Communication work for Everyone.

Bibliography Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2019). Diversity and Inclusion Plan 2019– 2022. https://about.abc.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ABC-Diversity-Inclu sion-Plan-201922.pdf Australian International Documentary Conference. (2022, March 7). Collaboration vs. Consultation: Moving Towards Better Practice in First Nations Storytelling. www.aidc.com.au/event/collaboration-vs-consultation-moving-towards-betterpractice-in-first-nations-storytelling. Balsom, E. (2017). The Reality-Based Community. E-Flux Journal (83). www.e-flux. com/journal/83/142332/the-reality-based-community Banerjee, P. (2005, February 1). Born Into Brothels: Ethical Problems? Naseeb.Com. www.naseeb.com/villages/journals/born-into-brothels-ethical-problems-6672. Barry, R. A. (2021). The Dark Grey Zone: Ethics and Power in Documentary Consent Processes. Open Publications of UTS. Scholars. https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/ handle/10453/149330 Briski, Z.  & Kauffman, R. (Directors). (2004). Born into Brothels. Camera Work. Film Australia. Bruzzi, S. (2006). New Documentary. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge. Burnet, D. & David, G. (Directors). (2011). 5 Broken Cameras. Kino Lorber. Centre  International de  Liaison des  Ecoles de  Cinéma et de  Télévision – CILECT. www.cilect.org/. Childress, S. (2020, July 9). The Documentary Future: A Call for Accountability. Medium (blog). https://medium.com/@sonya.childress/the-documentary-future-a-callfor-accountability-79e7c1315912.

What is the truth?  93 Cribb, R. (2014, February). The Act of Killing. Critical Asian Studies 46 (1). https:// doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2014.867621. Croft-Cusworth, C. (2014, February 28). The Act of Killing’ in a Democratic Indonesia. The Interpreter. Lowy Institute. de Beaufort, M. (Director). (1996). The Connection. Carlton ITV. Diversity Arts Australia. (2019). Shifting the Balance: Cultural Diversity in Leadership within the Australian Arts, Screen and Creative Sectors. Parramatta NSW: Diversity Arts Australia. Doc Society. (2023). The Impact Field Guide  & Toolkit. https://impactguide.org/ impact-in-action/meet-the-impact-producer/. Fraser, N. (2014, February  23). The Act of Killing: Don’t Give an Oscar to This Snuff Movie. The Observer. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/ act-of-killing-dont-give-oscar-snuff-movie-indonesia. Galuppo, M. & Kilkenney, K. (2022, September 16). Inside the Documentary Cash Grab. Documentary Ethics, Payments in Streaming Age: Filmmakers Ken Burns, Alex Gibney Debate. The Hollywood Reporter. Gapminder. (2023). www.gapminder.org/. Geva, D. (2022). Credo – The Ethics Lab. https://theethicslab.com/credo/. Godmilow, J. (2022). Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/godm20276 Harvard University. (2023). Implicit Bias Tests. Select a Test. https://implicit.harvard. edu/implicit/selectatest.html. Housten, R. & Hudson, R. (Directors). (2004). Mighty Times: The Children’s March. Southern Poverty Law Centre. Janke, T. (2008). Pathways and Protocols: A  Filmmaker’s Guide to Working with Indigenous People, Culture and Concepts. Canberra; Australia: Screen Australia, Australian Government. Kirsch, A. (2015, April 6). The System. The New Yorker. Kotsonis, Alkis. (2020, February). What Can We Learn from Plato about Intellectual Character Education? Educational Philosophy and Theory 52 (3): 251–60. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1631157. Lather, P. (2018). Thirty Years After: From Research as Praxis to Praxis in the Ruins. In H. Helen Malone, S. Rincón-Gallardo, & K. Kew (Eds.), Future Directions of Educational Change: Social Justice, Professional Capital, and Systems Change (pp. 71–85). New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269955. Levin, G. Roy. (1971). Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film Makers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Media Diversity Australia. (2019). Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories: Putting the Spotlightt on Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Television News and Current Affairs. www.mediadiversityaustralia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Who-GetsTo-Tell-Australian-Stories_LAUNCH-VERSION.pdf Mencevska, Iva. (2020). Truth Telling in Australia’s Historical Narrative. NEW: Emerging Scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.5130/ nesais.v5i1.1552. Moody, L. (2013, July  2). Act Normal: Hybrid Tendencies in Documentary Film. 11 Polaroids. Journal of Film, Sound & Art. https://11polaroids.com/2013/07/02/ act-normal-hybrid-tendencies-in-documentary-film/. Moore, M. (Director). (1989). Roger & Me. Dog Eat Dog Films. Morley, C. (Director). (2011). Dreams of a Life. Dogwoof Pictures.

94  Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth Morris, E. (Director). (2008). Standard Operating Procedure. Participant Media. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B. (2016). Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Oppenheimer, J. (Director). (2012). The Act of Killing. Final Cut for Real. O’Rourke, D. (Director). (1991). The Good Woman of Bangkok. Camera Work. Film Australia. O’Rourke, D. (Director). (2000). Cunnamulla. Camera Work. Film Australia. Padilla Peralta, D. (2022). Princeton Classics. https://classics.princeton.edu/people/ faculty/core/dan-el-padilla-peralta. Plato. (1952). The Republic. The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Chicago; London; Toronto; Genoa: William Benton, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. Poser, R. (2021, February 2). He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? The New York Times, sec. Magazine. www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/ magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html. Rigg, J. (2001, October 31). Lies Damned Lies and Documentary. Arts Today. Radio National. Julie Rigg Interview with Professor Brian Winston. www.abc.net.au/rn/ legacy/programs/atoday/stories/s405852.html. Stevens, G. (Director). (1945). The Nazi Plan. US War Department. Nuremberg Trials. Stevens, G. (Director). (1945). The Nazi Concentration Camps. US War Department. Nuremberg Trials. Weideman, R. (2023, February 1). The Documentary World’s Identity Crisis. Vulture. Weiner, Brett. (Director). (2014, April  28). Video: Opinion | Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier? The New York Times, sec. Opinion. www.nytimes.com/video/opin ion/100000002847155/verbatim-what-is-a-photocopier.html. Winston, B. (2000). Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. London: British Film Institute. Winston, B. (2008). Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. 2nd ed., Rev. and Updated ed. London: BFI. Wissot, L. (2017, September  28). Whose Story?: Five Doc-Makers on (Avoiding) Extractive Filmmaking. International Documentary Association. www.documen tary.org/feature/whose-story-five-doc-makers-avoiding-extractive-filmmaking.

Part II

Praxis Why make hybrid documentaries?: methodology, ethics and impact

4 A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops

In these next three chapters I will be transmuting into text theoretical and practical knowledge developed through innovative approaches to teaching and producing hybrid documentary. Using the film school environment as a laboratory over a ten-year period one could repeatedly test, research and investigate theory through practice and impact. The student films produced through these techniques had worldwide breakthrough festival success. The 25 student hybrid productions I  and my team oversaw during this time appeared in hundreds of Australian and international festivals. Such techniques can be used by emerging and professional filmmakers alike, and it can be useful for theorists to consider how such hybrid documentary forms are practically developed and produced in a workshop environment. The development processes were a combination of theoretical lectures, exercises, street casting and an intensely non-hierarchised, collaborative production methodology. The filmmakers and, critically, the subjects, found this intense participatory hybrid approach to documentary deeply effective in unlocking potent creative cinematic responses to non-fiction narrative and fostering highly inclusive practices with subject/participants. The street casting framework used, along with the hybrid production strategies for identifying, casting and working with subjects, also provided authority and ownership to the subject/ participant at the heart of the hybrid documentary. It is over a decade since I facilitated the first hybrid workshops at Australia’s national film school. Analysis and discussion of these workshops, which evolved over the years it was offered, incorporate insights from graduates reflecting on the impact these productions – the theory, methodology and ideology – has had on their careers. These recent interviews followed a creative reflective practice methodology (Candy 2020). I focused on graduates, approximately 80% of the cohort, who have continued to have active careers in the documentary industry. The collaborative interdisciplinary hybrid documentary workshops were launched in 2012. We accessed subjects through a street casting process where we put out a broad public callout seeking individuals to come in to tell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-7

98  Praxis a personal life-changing story. The day attracted dozens of radically diverse participants to the school. The students identified the individual they felt would be most responsive to the highly participatory development processes embedded in the hybrid documentary workshop model. The documentary students worked in collaborative teams consisting of postgraduate students from producing, cinematography, production design, editing, screen composition and sound design. The teams worked with the selected subject to forge innovative and bold non-fiction projects. The impetus for embracing hybrid documentary as a major production module/workshop was enmeshed with the opportunity I and group of colleagues1 were given to create an entirely new postgraduate documentary curriculum from scratch. At the time The Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) had undergone a major transition (one of many) shifting its suburban campus to a bespoke inner-city facility and had no stand-alone documentary course. Instead, documentary subjects had been incorporated into the postgraduate drama directing curriculum. This was an awkward fit and suited no one. The directing students were not particularly interested in the non-fiction-focused modules parachuted into the predominantly fictionintensive pedagogy, and the patchwork nature of the documentary content meant the approach was ad hoc and cursory. In late 2011, I  was appointed head of documentary and miraculously, in comparison to these tertiary financially straightened times, given ample resources and time to create something innovative, deeply researched and distinct. At that time AFTRS offered full-time postgraduate diplomas in cinematography, screenwriting, production design, sound design, editing, producing and screen composition, and it made sense to add documentary alongside the fiction-skewed Directing Graduate Diploma. AFTRS, which also offered part-time Graduate Certificates in the same areas, short industry courses and a foundational ‘taster’ year for school leavers, had a charter as a national centre of excellence to train emerging practitioners to enter the industry. The Graduate Diploma in Documentary launched in 2012 was a 5-days/40-hours week, nine-month intensive production-focused curriculum. It was predicated on the need to reflect the explosion of non-fiction content, styles and methodologies from the late 1990s onwards but also to emulate, somewhat, the vanishing apprenticeship model in which the generation that preceded them had trained. It was also to recognise that documentary makers were no longer always a solo operator or the director of a tiny crew, à la direct cinema. The raft of cinema release, big-budget documentaries from the early 2000s on and the rise of blue-chip non-fiction television series indicated that students needed to obtain larger scale on set and location experiences with big crews in complex production settings. We felt strongly that a film school had to be a place a student could take risks and experiment in a way a rapidly evolving, increasingly corporate and risk-averse non-fiction/documentary industry may not encourage.2

A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops  99 The introductory overview on the inaugural syllabus read as follows: The training provided will reflect industry best practice and focus upon the extraordinary innovations and techniques in non-fiction storytelling which are rapidly challenging traditional approaches to film and television practice. The Graduate Diploma will offer a rigorous and comprehensive syllabus including modules in advanced research and interview and performance, along with large-scale cross disciplinary exercises (with students from producing, production design, cinematography, screen music, sound, editing) in dramatizing the real [hybrid documentary], observation and re-enactment. Students will be offered training in solo and large crew shoots and will complete exercises in a variety of formats and styles working with a range of subjects. The course will be launched with a two-week practical master class in cinema release feature documentary led by a leading international filmmaker.3 Throughout the year long course students will have numerous opportunities to meet, be taught by, and work alongside leading representatives of the industry. All aspects of production will be covered exhaustively from the conception of ideas, to pitching and the creation of market-ready-elements along with each stage of shooting from pre to post. The course will culminate in an intensive workshop focused on the development of a slate of projects ready to take into production. (Syllabus Overview. Documentary 2012) The reason for the long quote is that it is useful to see how the hybrid workshops, pompously titled ‘Dramatising the Real’ (my fault!), but always called hybrid, in the first year before it was officially changed, sat within the curriculum. Along with creating prototypes and pitch materials (including trailers, synopsis, treatments) for feature documentaries, series and formats, the students produced three completed shorts – a solo shot observational film (cut by editing students) and two major large-scale interdisciplinary productions – one hybrid and one exploring re-enactment. The latter was included because it was a stylistic staple of much commissioned documentary television yet was rarely taught in a comprehensive and rigorous theoretical and practical way. In addition, despite filmmakers like Errol Morris making it seem magically simple, re-enactment was often done very badly. The motivation for including hybrid was multifaceted – it was an approach that seemed to be both audacious and proliferating and it was a form both experimental and high risk that encouraged students to approach documentary from a bold, distinct and fresh perspective. It offered a radically different industrial

100  Praxis model of collaboration for participant/subjects and crew members in the creation of a work. Cassie Charlton, 2013 Graduate.4 I  can remember you saying at the beginning of this subject that . . . you should relish this moment to make something like this, because once you enter the industry, the opportunities will be few and far between. And I remember thinking, I want to make films like this all the time . . . I did find avenues to work in this way again, [which was different to the work I also do], you know, in terms of paying the rent, working in television. (IV Cassie Charlton 2022) The hybrid workshop ideology and structure were influenced in part by the methodologies of Amiel Courtin Wilson, one of Australia’s most original documentary makers. He had made two successful observational feature documentaries Chasing Buddha (2000) and Bastardy (2008) when he started to work in a more hybrid like way. His short 2008 film Cicada selected to screen as part of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes was a powerful piece to camera in which former prisoner Daniel P. Jones (who had started acting after his release) recounts a vivid and traumatic childhood memory. The work was a result of a long intense collaboration and development period in which Courtin-Wilson took verbatim interviews of Jones and worked them into a monologue that he gave back to Jones to perform. Cicada was a turning point because I’d interviewed Dan about this formative trauma in his life, witnessing a murder when he was five. The original story, the way he’d told it, was about an hour long. I  knew I  wanted to make this as a short about his experience but it had to be edited down so I  transcribed the interview and cut it down to an 8-page monologue that refined and distilled all the beautiful, poetic turns of phrase that he uses, so I gave it back to him and said ‘How about we experiment with you learning your own words as you would learn a monologue’, and because we were shooting on 16mm we only had three rolls of film to shoot the whole short. When I saw how well Danny was able to reabsorb a distilled version of his own story, while retaining the emotional core of what he was telling, it instantly made me realize that you could extrapolate a larger version of that. (Fairfax 2019) The larger version was the feature film Hail (2011), which he and I would describe as a ‘Beyond Hybrid’. In the film, Danny and his real-life partner Leanne play out a complex ‘what if’ version of their own lives. In this potent, highly cinematic and surprisingly low-budget film, which debuted at the Venice film Festival, Courtin-Wilson had made extensive use of intensive street casting callouts for key roles which resulted in raw, authentic performances

A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops  101 (Siemienowicz 2012). It was these two core methodologies which we incorporated into the hybrid workshops. The content and subjects for each production were sourced through a street casting, and the films would then be constructed from the detailed verbatim interview transcripts of those who were ultimately cast. Unlike Cicada (2008), these transcripts rarely led to scripted performance but instead worked as jumping-off point for improvisation. We also hired Courtin-Wilson to come and work with the student documentary makers one on one, developing the projects for a five-day period after the street casting but before pre-production. Overview of the structure of the workshop Hollie Fifer, 2012 Graduate5: I liked the permission it gave us as filmmakers . . . to go a bit nuts. It was the directive, because it was . . . forcing us in a way to give up whatever style we came into the course with, and said, ignore it, you haven’t found your style yet don’t be stupid. Try this, and I think it gave us a lot of permission to then redefine ourselves and explore what we could do if we went to [the] limit, and I think we were all pushed to the limit. (IV Holly Fifer 2022) The hybrid workshops were run five times in a seven-year period. Each iteration varied slightly so what is outlined in this chapter and the next is an amalgam and ideal version. The workshop and the course that spawned it no longer exist – AFTRS shifted away from its focus on elite, limited cohort, postgraduate training to a much broader curriculum and is currently offering a generalist three-year BA in film and a two-year specialist MA to a much larger overall cohort. A critical part of the success of the hybrid workshop structure was that we had (for-the-most-part) matched numbers of students in their respective specialised areas – documentary, cinematography, editing, production design, sound design, screen composition and producing. We were thus able to generate between three and eight production teams with the same key crew roles (we occasionally added costume designers who came over from the National Institute of Dramatic Art).6 Besides ensuring there was a good mix of genders on each team we did this process randomly. The pedological rationale was that because there are many experiences in the industry in which one doesn’t get to pick one’s crew, it was a good work-like experience in finding harmony in difference – (although this didn’t always work!). More critically, it was because we wanted to encourage the teams to work collaboratively in a nonhierarchal way and to solve creative problems collectively. The workshop worked best when we offered it as the first major production of the school year. Given the students came from all over the country most were strangers to each other at that point. Practically speaking, it was also helpful that we had most of the resources we needed in-house. This included enough space to a host a street casting with

102  Praxis eight discrete soundproof interview spaces, rehearsal space, studios, cameras, sound equipment, post-production facilities and administrative support. The additional costs varied from year to year, but we always included payment for the subject’s participation in the shoot (at actors equity rates), a small production budget for each film (mainly for the designers) and payment for a hybrid filmmaker as a guest lecturer (over the years we had filmmakers Amiel-­Courtin Wilson, Sophie Hyde7 and Dr Anna Broinowski)8 who worked with the hybrid teams during development. Briefing and schedule The workshop ran over a 16-week semester – with the schedule leapfrogging over other subjects in the curriculum – some which contributed directly to the workshop (like history of documentary, story and interview technique) or were preparatory work for the other productions (observation/ re-enactment). This gave the students ample time to deeply absorb, develop and apply what they had learnt at each stage of the hybrid documentary workshop process. During orientation week, the student teams were assigned, then gathered together, briefed about the workshop and given details about the street casting which was to be held four weeks’ later on a Saturday. A production coordinator worked to send out the street casting call-out all over Sydney to local radio stations, libraries, community groups and organisations. Students were given flyers and asked to disseminate the callout. The call-out was headlined ‘Have you got a story to tell: The National Film school is looking for people with rich life experiences and a personal story they want to share’. It emphasised that we were looking for real people not professional actors, stated the dates they needed to be available and the fact they would be paid for their involvement if they were cast. A dedicated email and phone number were set up as a point of contact. After this the onstaff production coordinator (and only them) would liaise with participants. Potential participants were briefed that they would be asked to tell a fiveminute life-changing story and be prepared to sign an agreement allowing AFTRS to film the audition. The production coordinator scheduling the street casting day required sensitivity, compassion, nuance, patience and common sense. A process such as this attracted a broad and eclectic response. Sometimes, the responses were silly, others traumatic. For the most part, they were about major life events. With much discussion (and many meetings with myself, the coordinator and other staff), it was critical to ensure those who came in were going to be empowered by the process. Giving ourselves a month from the call-out to the casting provided the time to do this carefully and thoughtfully. The role of the production coordinator was critical to the success of the workshop, and from the first year onwards, we always employed graduates to take on

A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops  103 the role because of their intimate knowledge of the workshop and the ethical obligations involved. Margaret McHugh, 2012 Graduate and hybrid workshop Production Co-ordinator 2017/2018:9 after that call out went out people would email me through a little short pitch, like an expression of interest and little pitch about their story . . . So, then I would go through all those stories. (Depending on student numbers we could be looking for up to 70 to 80 subjects). What I was looking for [was] a range of different stories. I was [also] doing that first check to make sure that the people, understood what they were getting themselves involved with, I would then reply to those emails and just really make sure that they understood it was a casting, it was a student film [and] that these stories were also designed to be screened in a public forum. Another major check that we had was that it was their story, so that if they were talking about a traumatic event that they were the holder of that experience. So they weren’t sharing other people’s stories we had to make sure that they were over 18, like all your basic kind of checks. Then I would give them a call once I pulled together a shortlist and just do an additional check to make sure, you know, that they comprehended what was happening, [and that] at least on the phone, [it] felt as though they were mentally sound. (IV Margaret McHugh 2022) The coordinator needed to be skilled enough to know when to articulate to the prospective subject that perhaps that the workshop was not the best forum to tell their story. If they were talking about a pretty extreme traumatic event, then I made the decision that perhaps this wasn’t the best story to explore in a student film context, that it needed more time, [and] more capacity to build up a relationship. And facilitate some sort of like aftercare of that person. So with quite extreme traumatic stories [ensuring] there was also the element of distance. So for instance, if someone was speaking about a sexual assault and it only happened two weeks ago I  would make that decision that it was too close to the event and that there needed to be more of a separation before that was ‘performed’. (Margaret McHugh IV) As the street casting was coming together, the students were given an assessment summary (this would vary for each discipline). The Documentary directors received the following assessment briefing. Hybrid Workshop. Assessment Task: Creative Collaboration Portfolio including Concept, Portfolio and Learning Plan: This task is designed to

104  Praxis measure the effectiveness with which you plan, cast, and develop your hybrid project with your street-cast subject. It is also designed to measure your collaboration with your creative team in transforming your nonfiction material into a compelling a dramatic hybrid form ready for preproduction. 50%. Marking Criteria. 1. Capacity to identify rich narrative and visual potential for dramatisation in the subject’s material. 2. Demonstrates insight and foresight in casting subject based on subject’s level of commitment to process and director’s ability to shape material and work productively. 3. Works collaboratively with production team and cast to construct and develop dramatic hybrid scenario/concept/script. 4. Operates an effective rehearsal process with non-actors. 5. Effective synthesis of all the elements of the creative process into a Learning Plan to ensure rehearsal, concept, planning, collaboration, production feasibility targets are met. Cross disciplinary Hybrid Exercise: A  completed film (approximately 5–8 minutes) to lock off (including music, sound design, grade and mix). It must be based on a real life event that has happened in the past and must be framed by an interview or transcripts of that event. 50%. 1. Effectively implements the creative and practical principles of the Creative Collaboration Portfolio during pre-production, production and post. 2. Solves problems that arise during the production process and works according to schedule deadlines. 3. Demonstrates responsibility and accountability for personal artistic vision using innovative, hybrid and constructed dramatic principles. Responsibility and accountability extends to all aspects of the work of creative collaborators, including cast. Course Overview’. (AFTRS. 2013. Module Assessment Summary. Graduate Diploma in Documentary. Hybrid Documentary). In the meantime, the student teams’ were introduced to the concepts and cases studies of hybridity in documentary. While the students were all postgraduates and many of the crew members had done undergraduate film degrees – this was not always the case with the documentary students. Given the complex reasons one is attracted to working in documentary rather than fiction, we had students with degrees in engineering, visual arts, law, journalism, anthropology, comedy, communications and arts management. While they had all made documentaries (entry was via portfolio), their knowledge of documentary could be limited. By the time they arrived at the hybrid content they had done intensive one- or two-week modules in the history and art of documentary, story (this was an all-discipline module) which focused on Aristotelian poetics and the hero’s journey and a feature documentary masterclass. Almost all the students, including the documentary students, had little or no idea what a hybrid documentary was, and the majority regarded documentary as being an observational documentary. In taking them through this new way of working, we took our time to emphasise that while we were

A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops  105 playing with form – we were still making documentaries and that there were real people involved that required constant ethical consideration. What distinguishes the documentary from other cinematic modalities is its involvement with a world that continues beyond the film’s frame. Documentaries depict individual lives, political events, and social hierarchies that keep acting and transforming in myriad connections even after films come to an end. In documentary cinema, ‘the end’ is merely a threshold to the ever-varying processes in which we and the world around us take shape. (Hongisto 2015) The lectures would begin with explorations about the possibilities of hybrid documentary. Slide: hybrid documentary – fact versus reality 1  What will happen in lecture

• Discuss what is a hybrid documentary and how they work. • Definitions and historical context. • Hybrid doco clips – in particular, we will look at what are the hybrid techniques used and how they function to tell the story. • Exercise – think about a story you would love to/or are making a documentary about and think of a way you could use hybrid documentary techniques to tell it. Slide: what is a hybrid documentary?

• Does anyone know what a hybrid documentary is? • Can anyone give a definition for documentary? The hybrid case studies included Jennings’s The Silent Village (1943); Watkins’ The War Game (1965); multiple works from Errol Morris The Thin Blue Line (1988), Standard Operating Procedure (2008); Brian Hill Drinking for England (1998), Pornography the Musical (2003), Feltham Sings (2002); Leth and Von Triers’ The Five Obstructions (2003); Guy Maddin My Winnipeg (2007); Rossellini Green Porno series (2008); Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008); Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2010); Indigenous Australian artist Tracey Moffat’s Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990); Amiel Courtin Wilson’s Cicada (2008) and Hail (2011); Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life (2011); Konopka’s Rabbit ala Berlin (2009); Anna Broinowski’s Forbidden Lie$ (2007) and Nick Park’s Academy Award-­ winning 1989 short Creature Comforts. We also looked at the ‘beyond work’ (fictional work using non-actors or improvisation) of Indigenous filmmaker

106  Praxis Ivan Sen’s Toomelah (2011) and Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006). We added to this list the array of hybrids that came out from 2012 onwards, Stories We Tell (2012); The Imposter (2012); The Act of Killing (2012); Kate Plays Christine (2016); Broinowski’s Aim High in Creation (2013); Lynette Wallworth’s VR work Collisions (2016) and Awavena (2018). Kitty Green’s 2015 short Casting Oksana Baiul and 2017 feature Casting JonBenet. After the first year we were also able to use the examples of student’s completed short form hybrid documentaries. The lecture introduced them to a variety of academic and industry definitions of hybrid documentary, including Janet Merewether, Luke Moody and Tabitha Jackson, (who commissioned The Abor and The Imposter when she worked for Channel 4). It also contextualised the form within the history of documentary along with its origins in experimentation. Jackson’s incisive comments provided a way into introducing philosophy to the students, ‘I don’t question the [hybrid] form until it doesn’t work’, said Jackson. ‘[Hybrid films] are not just an intersection’, she explained. ‘The reason they work, when they work, is that the combination makes them stronger. It’s not just an intersection – it’s a different way of getting to the truth’ (Macaulay 2012). It was fundamental to begin with interrogating questions about why we tell non-fiction stories and why we distinguish between non-fiction and fiction. This would lead to analysis and discussion of ‘What is the Truth?’ ‘Why Tell it?’ ‘How does one come to it?’ Students would do instant writing tasks responding to the above and about times they had been lied to and the impact of that discovery. The question ‘Why Hybrids? Why make them?’ was also posed. One answer was to ask how many opportunities are you going to have to make a risky, high-concept, cinematic collaborative documentary with umpteen resources and a budget that asks you to wrestle and play with platonic ideas about the truth. After the first year we could also point to their success on the festival circuit as a compelling additional reason. We also looked at a series of Australian feature films from directors with a documentary background playing in the hybrid spectrum had made with extremely low budgets that achieved festival success and been nominated for, or winning, major international awards, catapulting the filmmaker’s careers forward. Iven Sen Toomelah (2011) (Cannes), Kim Mordaunt The Rocket (2013) (Tribeca & Berlin), Sophie Hyde 52 Tuesdays (2013) (Sundance & Berlin), Amiel Courtin Wilson Hail (2011) (Venice), Courtin Wilson and Cody Ruin (2013) (Venice), Bentley Dean and Martin Butler Tanna (2015) (Venice & the Academy Awards), Kitty Green Casting JonBenet (2017) (Sundance). As we say in Australia ‘beer budget. Champagne results!’ Rowena Potts, 2014 Graduate, I felt when I saw them that that was like a real wakeup call and a refreshing new model that I had not really thought of.10 As noted earlier, the students had a basic introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics, but in the hybrid lectures they were asked to consider other philosophical and

A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops  107 theoretical pathways to the truth including Confucian, feminist, queer and avant-garde film theorists, the postmodern sceptics, Nichols, Winston and Renov and eventually ending on Plato, although if I were to develop this in the future I would incorporate the ideas of philosopher Bruno Latour especially those interrogated in Pandora’s Hope (1999). Through these discussions, exercises and investigations we always tried to find examples of what might be an equivalent instance in documentary. As noted in Chapter 3, What is a photocopier? (Weiner 2014) on New York Op Docs was a concise way into talking about Socrates. After all, who are we as documentary makers if we are not people, Gadfly like, asking questions? Nick Park’s original Oscar-winning Creature Comforts (Park 1989) used the Vox pop voices of the British public responding to two (unheard) questions became a way to frame Confucian notions of the truth. One of the questions is asking the occupants of aged-care facilities about their experiences, and one question is to children asking them about their thoughts on visiting animals in the zoo. Park uses claymation to cast them all as zoo animals and zoo visitors to hilarious, thought-provoking and slightly heartbreaking results. It’s a perfect hybrid, but it also perfectly encapsulates the Confucian ideal ‘They who know the truth are not equal to those that love it, and they that love it are not equal to those that delight in it’. Aristotelian-like documentary would be those based on systematic observation and analysis of the natural world that combined with logic could make true statements about what something is and its natural cause. We’d show Direct Cinema examples of observational documentaries such as Harlan County USA (1976), Armadillo (2010) and Cartel Land (2015). For us, it was asking students to contemplate and applying principles of Platonic philosophy that were the most helpful in unlocking the conceptual pathway to hybrid documentary – there are no doubt other ways. We would use the Allegory of the Cave from The Republic to unpack notions that mimetic reflection of the real world may be inaccurate, misleading and skewed, obscuring the truth. A truth one can only get to via deep inner philosophical and intellectual contemplation and communicated through metaphor, allegory, parable and speculative what ifs. The first ‘Platonic’ documentary we would show was Rabbit ala Berlin (2009) an ingenious hybrid that takes the well-trodden narrative of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, but tells it entirely, via Attenborough-like voice over, through the point of view of the rabbits in the no-man’s death zone between East and West Berlin. The parable elevates the story beyond politics and history to capture the allegorical language eastern European artists used during the Cold War. Part nature study, part cold war allegory .  .  . Teasing and shrewd, ‘Rabbit à la Berlin’ is a floppy-eared fable about the uneasy trade-offs between liberty and security. Fondly remembered anecdotes from citizens and former guards alternate with mottled black-and-white photographs and archival film (some of it fake, including bunny footage

108  Praxis gleaned from YouTube). Employing wily close-ups of twitching whiskers and soaring sentry boxes, the director, Bartek Konopka – who wrote the story with his cinematographer, Piotr Rosolowski – captures the confusion of the rabbit’s-eye view as circumstances and boundaries change, yoking humans and animals to similar fates. (Catsoulis 2010) Errol Morris’ work was also particularly useful in illuminating bold cinematic choices one can make when visualising the past. If we were moving away from Aristotelean notions of the observable and away from filming unfolding action, students had to engage with complex ideas about historical depictions and description. Whoever they were going to select from the street casting was going to be telling a story of transformation from their past and as a team they need to reflect deeply and question how they would create this cinematically. They were given Hartley’s well-known quote ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there’ and asked in teams to work out how they would cinematically visualise that idea (Hartley 1953). They were then asked to do the same about Faulkner’s comment ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’ (Faulkner 1951). The students were asked: If your aim is to recreate the past visually – do you opt for archive, re-enactment, reconstruction, interviews from witnesses, experts, historians? What if there’s no archive? Do you recreate and reconstruct? Animate? Have a presenter wandering about? Do you just shove actors in beards  & period frocks and film them low budget drama style – How do you shoot the dead? The Thin Blue line (Morris 1988) and the New York Times ‘Play it again Sam. Re-enactments Part 1 & 2’ (Morris 2008) provided ample evidence about the failings of mimetic and literal interpretation and the value in interrogating ideas of a reliable fixed past. Morris did this not to promote relativism (which he loathes and regards as a direct line to Trumpian rhetoric of ‘alternative facts’)11 but to get to the truth. ‘If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves – because, regardless of what it is – we are likely to uncritically believe it’ (Morris 2008). What we were asking of the students was that as they approached the street casting was to look beyond their eyes and with their team to dig and come to a deeper different way to communicate the truth. It is self-evident that documentary makers should deploy the same skills of great historians; they should evoke, provoke, entertain and explore. As filmmakers exploring the past they should bring all their cinematic skills to the material and recognise that so much of the relating and recounting of history involves all the frailties and wonders of memory that spring from the interiors of people’s heads. These memories, accounts, transcripts, primary and secondary sources are not inert, fixed scenarios frozen in another country – they are fluid, organic and alive. The students needed to embrace this. They were not condemned to just make literal, cheap drama with silly wigs and stick-on

A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops  109 beards and instead were encouraged to work in the realm of symbolic cinematic language fusing genre, tone, point of view and story. They needed to bring to the visualisation of the past – innovation and experimentation so that an audience not only sees the past but can grasp it viscerally. A potent example we used was again gleaned from Morris’ work. 20 years after The Thin Blue Line when Errol Morris came to make to make Standard Operating Procedure (2008) about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, he was faced with a particularly 21st-century history problem – there was no lack of archive – we know that the guards themselves had photographed what went on in there to pornographic excess. There was no lack of material relating to Iraq or the prison itself. What there wasn’t was visual material that explained how a group of US soldiers came to do the things they did. To do that Morris had to film what went on in their heads. What he brought to life was not the literal or the naturalistic Abu Ghraib but a kind of location in a horror film in which all who entered it were condemned to play out a life-and-death scenario ordained by irrevocable forces above. When a young female soldier arrives at the prison for the first time what Morris recreates visually is not a young female soldier arriving at a prison for the first time but her interior landscape. We hear her whispered first-person recollections of the smells, the screams, and her sense of the ghosts of the dead and see her childish scrawled stick figures depicting torture. As she enters the prison, Morris recreates a scene that is not only not literal – it’s not even real. He brings to life one of her terrifying and recurring nightmares – of a helicopter exploding in a violent inferno with her on board, and what we know and feel as an audience at that moment is – that she has arrived in hell. The preliminary lectures concluded with a reminder that while hybrid documentary plays at the edges and expands the documentary form, but it is still telling a truth and working with the real. As such, no matter how bold their cinematic explorations and endeavours they must also focus on their obligations to these truths and the ethical implications they entailed. The concepts and exercises were accompanied by communication about the overall production structure. Six weeks of pre-production, 2-days rehearsal and master interview, 2-days shoot, 10-days edit, ten days of sound design and music composition all within the first semester. The final grade and mix were completed in the second semester. As they approached the street casting day, students were reminded about their obligations to the subjects. We noted that everyone would be busy on the day – the teams would talk to up to eight potential subjects each in 30 minutes slots – but to please make sure your subject is comfortable, respected and listened to. While their story may not personally interest you, it is significant to them and they have come in to share it with you, so give them the respect they deserve. (Hybrid lecture. AFTRS/UTS 2023)

110  Praxis Notes 1 Contributors to the curriculum included Dr Anna Broinowski, Dr Tom Murray, Madeleine Hetherton, Ruth Cullen and Dylan Blowen. They were highly experienced documentary makers and teachers. 2 As a reminder – this curriculum was launched the same year the definition of documentary went to Federal Court in Australia. See Chapter 2. 3 Filmmakers included Marshall Curry, Joe Berlinger, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. 4 Cassie Charlton has worked for several large-scale documentary production houses in addition to producing her own broadcast, wildly distributed and awardwinning films such as Frank (2013) and Psychics in the Suburbs (2015). 5 Hollie Fifer has numerous Documentary Credits including the Festival hit The Opposition (2016) https://theoppositionfilm.com/ a film she began developing at film school. She currently works for Doc Society. https://docsociety.org/ impact-lab-au/ 6 The National Institute of Dramatic Art is the performing arts equivalent of AFTRS. www.nida.edu.au/home 7 Sophie Hyde. IMDb. Accessed November  17, 2022. www.imdb.com/name/ nm1170520/. 8 Dr Anna Broinowski. The University of Sydney. Accessed November 17, 2022. www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/anna-broinowski.html. 9 Margaret McHugh www.margaretmchugh.com.au/ is an accomplished academic and filmmaker specialising in hybrid films. She returned to AFTRS after graduation to work as a freelance hybrid director of the award-winning festival hit The Drovers Boy (2014), which had its world premiere at Sydney Film Festival and went on to screen at over 25 festivals. Margaret also was the creative producer of the hybrid film What Do You See? (2017) that had its world premiere at Frameline Film Festival – the largest LGBTIQA+ film festival in the world and screened at imagine NATIVE Film Festival in Toronto. She was a lecturer at AFTRS in 2017/2018/2019 and is now a lecturer at UTS, Sydney. 10 Rowena Potts took leave from her PhD programme at NYU to complete the 2014 Documentary Graduate Diploma. After graduation she completed her PhD and has gone on to create powerful hybrid documentary work most recently as a part of a research fellowship at Australia’s prestigious Powerhouse Museum. 11 ‘I sometimes joke that Kuhn [a promotor of relavatism] set back the whole profession of history and philosophy of science by at least fifty years. . . . there was Kuhn ensconced in his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies, writing about how there is no such thing as truth. I actually find it deeply repellent . . . I see him as not entirely responsible for the debasement of science, and the debasement of truth . . . I see a line from Kuhn to Karl Rove and Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump’. Interview with Errol Morris. (Lam 2017)

Bibliography Australian Film Television and Radio School. (2023). www.aftrs.edu.au/. Barnard, C. (Director). (2010). The Arbor. Artangel. UK Film Council. Broinowski, A. (Director). (2007). Forbidden Lie$. Liberty Productions. Broinowski, A. (Director). (2013). Aim High in Creation. Unicorn Films. Candy, L. (2020). The Creative Reflective Practitioner Research Through Making and Practice. London: Routledge.

A model for teaching hybrid documentary workshops  111 Catsoulis, J. (2010, December 7). Out of Paradise and Into the Pot: A ­Post-Communism Parable. The New York Times, sec. Movies. www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/ movies/08rabbit.html. Charlton, C. (2022, November 16). Interview. Rachel Landers. Confucius. (1901, December 13). The Analects – 6. The Analects Attributed to Confucius [Kongfuzi], 551–479 BCE by Lao-Tse [Lao Zi], Translated by James Legge (1815–1897). US-China Institute. https://china.usc.edu/confucius-analects-6. Courtin Wilson, A. (Director). (2000). Chasing Buddha. Flood Projects. Courtin Wilson, A. (Director). (2008). Cicada. Flood Projects. https://vimeo. com/23456282. Courtin Wilson, A. (Director). (2009). Bastardy. Film Camp Pty Ltd. Courtin Wilson, A. (Director). (2011). Hail. Flood Projects. Courtin Wilson, A. & Cody, M. (Directors). (2013). Ruin. Flood Projects. Dean, B. & Butler, M. (Directors). (2015). Tanna. Contact Films. Fairfax, D. (2019, March). “Godless Mysticism”: An Interview with Amiel Courtin-­ Wilson. Senses of Cinema. Issue 90. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2019/ interviews/godless-mysticism-an-interview-with-amiel-courtin-wilson/. Faulkner, W. (1951). Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House. Fifer, H. (2022, October 11). Interview. Rachel Landers. Folman, A. (Director). (2008). Waltz with Bashir. Bridgit Folman Film Gang. Green, K. (Director). (2015). The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul. Film Camp. Green, K. (Director). (2017). Casting JonBenet. Netflix. Greene, R. (Director). (2016). Kate Plays Christine. 4th Row Films. Greengrass, P. (Director). (2006). United 93. Studio Canel. Hartley, L. P. (1953). The Go-Between. Amsterdam: Macmillan. Heineman, M. (Director). (2015). Cartel Land. A & E Indie Films. Our Time Projects. Hill, B. (Director). (1998). Drinking for England. Century Films. Hill, B. (Director). (2002). Feltham Sings. Century Films. Hill, B. (Director). (2003). Pornography the Musical. Century Films. Hongisto, I. (2015). Soul of the Documentary. Open Access E-Books. Amsterdam: University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048525294. Hyde, S. (Director). (2013). 52 Tuesdays. Closer Productions. Jennings, H. (Director). (1943). The Silent Village. Crown Film Unit. Konopka, B. (Director). (2009). Rabbit ala Berlin. Icarus Films. Kopple, B. (Director). (2011). Harlan County USA. Cabin Creek Films. Lam, B. (Host). (2017, April  18). The Ashes of Truth. Series 1. Episode 9. Hi Phi Nation. https://hiphination.org/ Landers, R. (2012). Course Overview. Syllabus. Graduate Diploma. Documentary. Landers, R. (2013). AFTRS Award Courses 2013. Module Assessment Summary. Graduate Diploma in Documentary. Hybrid Documentary. Landers, R. (2023). Hybrid Documentary Lectures. AFTRS/UTS. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Layton, B. (Director). (2012). The Imposter. Film 4. RAW Production. Leth, J.  & Von Triers, L. (Directors). (2003). The Five Obstructions. With Almaz Productions S. A. Macaulay, S. (2012, November  15). Debating the Future of Hybrid Films at CPH:DOX. Filmmaker Magazine. Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a Focus

112  Praxis on Independent Film, Offering Articles, Links, and Resources (blog). https://film makermagazine.com/58100-debating-the-future-of-hybrid-films-at-cphdox/. Maddin, G. (Director). (2007). My Winnipeg. Buffalo Gal Productions. McHugh, M. (2022, November 11). Interview. Rachel Landers. Metz, J. (Director). (2010). Armadillo. Fridthjof Film. Moffat, T. (Director). (1987). Nice Coloured Girls. Women’s Film Fund. Australian Film Commission. Moffat, T. (Director). (1990). Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy. AFTRS. Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Mordaunt, K. (Director). (2013). The Rocket. Red Lamp Films. Morley, C. (Director). (2011). Dreams of a Life. Dogwoof Pictures. Morris, E. (Director). (1988). The Thin Blue Line. Miramax. Morris, E. (Director). (2008). Standard Operating Procedure. 4th Floor Productions. Morris, E. (2008, April  3). Play It Again, Sam (Re-Enactments, Part One). New York Times, Opinionator. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2008/04/03/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-one/. Oppenheimer, J. (Director). (2012). The Act of Killing. Final Cut for Real. Park, N. (Director). (1989). Lip Synch: Creature Comforts (Original Short) – Aardman Animations. Channel 4. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F4OVFUiM7k. Potts, R. (2022, November 11). Interview. Rachel Landers. Polley, S. (Director). (2012). Stories We Tell. National Film Board of Canada. Rossellini, I. (Director). (2008). Green Porno. Sundance Channel. Sen, I. (Director). (2011). Toomelah. Bunya Films. Siemienowicz, R. (2012, October 25). Embracing Chaos and Making Hail. An Interview with Amiel Courtin- Wilson and Michael Cody. AFI Blog. Wallworth, L. (Writer and Director). (2016). Collisions. Coco Films. Wallworth, L. (Writer and Director). (2018). Awavena. Coco Films. Watkins, P. (Director). (1965). The War Game. BBC. Weiner, B. (Director). (2014). Video: Opinion | Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier? The New York Times, sec. Opinion. www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000002 847155/verbatim-what-is-a-photocopier.html.

5 Collaboration Exercises, problem-solving, script development, design as metaphor, form as content. The impact of workshops on graduate careers

Non-hierarchal collaboration was a key to the success of the hybrid documentary workshops in all stages of development from pre-production to post-production. In contrast to the auteur model of much narrative fiction, in the hybrid workshops and production structure we encouraged both subject/s and crew (director, producer, production designer, cinematographer, editor, composer, sound designer – or variations and different combinations of those roles) to consider themselves as equal creative contributors in the development and production process. The practical execution of this started with the team and exercises outlined in the last chapter but began in earnest at the street casting. It was also supported by a number of key factors; the contractual relationship with the subject, that they were shown a final cut for feedback before lock-off, the structure of assessment – giving 50% of the assessment marks over to the creation of a collaborative portfolio, timetabled creative feasibility, design feasibility and post-production workflow meetings with all team members and their respective heads of department and the building of digital collaborative development sites through pre-production. Street casting All team members were required to participate in the street casting day including production designers, editors, sound designers and screen composers. They along with the producers, documentary directors and cinematographers were encouraged to think of themselves as a film collective and given background briefings and short biographies of the seven or eight subjects (each team) would interview and encouraged to actively participate in the shoot – sound designers helped set up equipment and monitored sound, editors data wrangled, designers and composers kept notes about design and music ideas inspired by the subject’s tales. The day ended with a one-hour discussion about the subjects and who they thought may work well in the hybrid conceptual framework. The production coordinator, as outlined in Chapter  4, ensured that all those who were participating were completely briefed on the hybrid framework and schedule (if they were cast) and that they felt supported and comfortable. The subjects were greeted by either the DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-8

114  Praxis director or the producer and taken into the individual team’s interview space. The emphasis was to keep the conversation causal and unhurried as the participants told their ‘life changing’ story. Each street casting session was carefully lit, shot and sound recorded at a professional level on the off chance a team need to use the original footage in the production, something which occurred on a few occasions. The street casting day could involve up to 70 to 80 participants. They were startlingly diverse both culturally and socially, and the age range was between 131 and 80. Those who were ultimately cast included a celebrated fashion designer in her mid-eighties who had fled communist Hungary in 1956 leaving her famous film director behind – who then made a film about it in 1957; a rural truck driver dealing with post-traumatic stress; a 13-yearold cellist who with her mother had fled Iran; a young woman whose three siblings had died of an inherited fatal genetic syndrome; a first nation’s skydiver who had escaped a harrowing past; a bullied teen who had attempted suicide; an animal wrangler, a private school-educated Indigenous man coming out; a ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’ winner who had used her winnings to pay for her husband’s dementia care; a middle-aged woman who had stumbled across a dead body in a forest when she was a rebellious teen; a Malaysian transexual photographer forging a new identity in Australia; a middle-aged shopping addict; a Chinese/Australian mother and daughter – the former who had her musical hopes crushed in the Chinese cultural revolution something impacting her relationship with her singer–songwriter ­Australian-born daughter; a Columbian/Australian mother and daughter – the mother had fled the violence of her drug dealer partner while pregnant and a black American actor and stockbroker in his late fifties who had lived in Australia for 30 years and was estranged from his US-based children, one of whom was in jail. The teams did not have to choose a subject from those they had been scheduled to interview on the day and were encouraged to interact with other teams to identify participants who had made a strong impression from the overall pool. All the rushes were uploaded to an accessible shared site and notes exchanged between teams. All the team members needed to reach a consensus on casting predicated on which participant they felt would work best in a hybrid context – these encompassed discussions on the cinematic potential of the narrative told and the participants’ willingness to contribute – identifying story, design, visual and aural possibilities. It was also emphasised that the decision to select the participant had to be based on much more than simply the story they told on the street casting day, which, probably only hinted at the depths of what could unfold throughout the collaborative hybrid process. Cassie Charlton 2013 Graduate. [I was] quite nervous about [the street casting] because I  think even though loads of people showed up, we didn’t have much control over who would be walking through

Collaboration  115 the door. So I  was very worried that I  wasn’t going to get anyone good .  .  . my instinctive thought as we were doing the interviews was you speak to so many people about what happened in the past with them. And I  was like, how do you not make it not a reenactment? How do you push this story into the present somehow? So I remember just trying to find someone who had live emotional energy about something in the past. Someone who you could see that there was something going on with them right now and I felt like I could work with that rather than trying to make a musical of their past or, you know, something like that. And so that’s how I approached [it]. It was ‘who’s a livewire right now? (C, Charlton IV 2022) The teams were given a week to decide. The documentary directors were tasked with contacting the then-selected subject and ensuring they were happy to work on the production. They were also tasked with contacting those who had not been selected. They were required to speak to these people, not simply leave a text or email, thanking them for their involvement. The production staff then commenced with contracting. Whoever was cast was paid at actor’s equity rates for all subsequent rehearsals and shoot days. The actual decision of who to cast was part of a discussion amongst the crew but skewed finally towards the person the director connected strongly with. Directors were encouraged to trust their instincts on this, not overthink, and to focus on the relationship they could form, as it was, they who would spend the most time getting to know the subject in both informal and formal settings. They had to feel that they trusted that person, and the trust was reciprocal. It was also critical the directors kept the fidelity to the documentary frame and the documentary subject. Many of the crew members had not worked in non-fiction or with non-actors before. As will be demonstrated later, without the director being vigilant the production could quickly veer in inauthentic and problematic directions, towards, what one director referred to as, ‘just bad drama’. Reflecting on the director–subject relationships up to ten years on – I realise how many of these frequently and apparently odd couple pairings – 25-year-old white Australian Cassie and 59-year-old black American Frank; 24-year-old Australian Amber and Hungarian Marie in mid-eighties; 26-yearold gay Logan and Māori pastor and sexual assault survivor, Cynthia in her early forties; Indigenous Australian Tash in her late thirties and 19-year-old suicide survivor Dane; heterosexual law professor in her mid-forties, Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman Larissa and Indigenous gay student liaison officer James in his early twenties – had in fact much more common than was immediately obvious. As will be demonstrated in the following chapter, for the majority, these relationships had enormous impact on both subject and director and would continue to grow and evolve over years after production was completed. This was directly predicated on the inclusive, collaborative and

116  Praxis co-creative practices fostered between subjects and teams within the hybrid workshop structure.2 Finding the narrative and the hybrid form through collaborative creative practice The casting and preparatory lectures took place over a six-week period. After casting, Week 7 to Week 12 consisted of a development period3 prior to preproduction commencing in Week 13 in which the director, subject and crew worked collaboratively and intensively to work out, experiment, and test how the projects would take shape as hybrid documentaries. Several scaffolding elements were set in place to facilitate this process. The first was the scheduling of long-form master interviews with those that had been cast. The interviews were done in Week 7 with most of the team present in formal studio settings and went for two or three hours. Often, it was here that important narrative details emerged, and it gave both subject and crew time to settle in and establish the ballast of their relationships and collaborations. 2014 Graduate Ella Rubeli4 was struck how quickly the usual power dynamic shifted between subject and director. Ella was a young awardwinning video journalist when she applied to do the documentary course at AFTRS driven in part because she was ‘sick of the news cycle’. I felt very conflicted in journalism about representing people and about you’ve only got so many seconds to get an idea across and inevitably you end up quoting some line that’s out of context or it’s really hard to tell the whole story in a short piece. [Through Hybrid documentary she realised] okay, we can really give the power back to our characters to a degree here. They can represent themselves a bit more. I really liked that idea and . . . I’m a little bit skeptical of the whole idea of truth or capturing truth, but I found it much more of an equitable way of telling a story, and I really liked that. (Ella Rubeli IV 2022) Directors transcribed the formal interview, shared it with the team and started looking for ideas and clues which would form the bedrock of the hybrid script/treatment/framework. For almost all the students, this was both an exciting and slightly alarming time. It was important that they stay open to ideas during the development period and not lock down things too fast. We were asking them to find concepts, metaphors, visual responses and to work in non-mimetic ways and not simply construct a fixed script. It was made clear to them all this was an opportunity to be bold and take risks. It was a really exciting opportunity .  .  . we can bring flair into this. We can go a bit wild here. We’ve got resources don’t restrict the

Collaboration  117 imagination here. It’s a hybrid film you’re off the leash. You can really go wild. (Ella Rubeli IV 2022) The formal activity of the master interview was complemented by the plethora of informal activities team members initiated with subjects to learn more about them – phone calls, coffee, home visits, work visits often with designers and cinematographers and occasionally composers. Logan Mucha, a 2012 graduate, was working with Cynthia, a Māori pastor who had been sexually assaulted as a child and had encountered her attacker as an adult and chosen to forgive him. Cynthia used the story in her church as a parable of healing. Logan and his producer Taylor were conscious that they wanted to create a safe creative environment for Cynthia and needed to develop intimacy and trust. They volunteered at the church several times ‘we sort of spent a lot of time at her church, we met up with her family, all her friends . . . we did little interviews along the way’.5 Adam Rosenberg, a 2012 graduate,6 had cast Kit a 50-something truck driver from the country – who had arrived for the audition in a Stetson – without having a strong sense of what Kit’s story was. Instead, Adam asked him to be involved because, he was kind of fabulous looking and he used a lot of metaphors [in] just general conversation. He always had a lovely turn of phrase to describe things. . . he seemed like someone who was open to the idea of trying something and an intuition on Adam’s part that he had something deeper that he wanted to share. And how we actually got to the story that we told [of Kit being held-up in his truck and developing PTSD] is that I just hung out with the guy for a long time. So we spent a couple of days together where I just went up. He was up on the Central Coast. I think I went up there a few times and we just hung out and after a number of times and hanging out with him, he told me that he tried to kill himself. (Adam Rosenberg IV 2022) To harness, collate and synthesise the many responses to formal and informal encounters with the subject a shared digital site was created (the teams mainly used Tumblr for its design appeal back then) so that that all team members could upload ideas, pictures, film clips, music and inspirations. Because the material was primarily non-verbal, the site coalesced into an organic and evolving visual and aural storyboard. It also heightened participation. They gave us a central platform where we could share images and talk to visual ideas. We also shared sound references. We shared

118  Praxis films, so it became like this central hub [a] kind of moving, growing mood board. And it also kicked everyone, I  think, [to be] accountable creatively like if the production designer wasn’t putting stuff up there they’d be like, where is it? Where’s the visual style? What are the references if the composer kind of dropped off the face of the planet? Well, you’d know that because they weren’t responding or commenting or adding to the blogs and posts and stuff it held to account the director to actually sit down and put all of that visual material into one place and communicate it to the rest of your team. And it also enabled it to grow because it was a collaborative process. (Margaret McHugh IV 2022) Ideas of how to transform these narratives into hybrid forms could and did come from everywhere. 2013-graduate Lucas Li talked about the hybrid collaboration as giving one a bigger toolkit that by leaning into more expansive cinematic techniques ‘it could be really effective for, you know, delivering the truth in a more impactful way’ (Lucas Li IV 2022).7 It was one of his subjects who wrote the song that features in his hybrid My Red Guard (2013) as a key narrative turning point. Logan’s editor Alannah who was an ardent fan of the work of Bill Viola where he had filmed faces and back projected them on silk and filmed them again. This developed into the idea of filming Cynthia in advance blowing up the image and rear projecting it in the studio, so on the production days she could perform with her gigantic self, observing her own improvised performance. Rowena discovered that Peter, the young son of a much older, acclaimed Australian sculptor (who had since passed away) was an enthusiastic performer, leading her to ask her composer to set one of Tom Bass’s poems to music. Peter learnt the song and performed it on location with the composer’s guidance. James the Indigenous student liaison officer mentioned his spiritual connection to the Mopoke owl, and the cinematographer Tom then facilitated bringing an owl to set by incorporating a separate technical assessment for his own discipline into the hybrid production thus allowing Larissa the director to include the owl as a character that could interact with James in the film.8 James brought his then partner and entire (gay) football team to participate in the shoot. Some teams worked intensely to derive the hybrid design from the way the subjects described themselves [Kit] said he’s just a fucked up, busted up, broken down truck driving cowboy, I  think was the quote that he said to me one day. We used that to build up the visual style of the piece .  .  . Laura (the Production designer come up with the idea of using a series of mirrors and broken mirrors, and then when he was talking about computers and (his brain) overloading, we thought we’d kind of put him in a mess of

Collaboration  119 wires and we put him in an old busted up truck [found by the producer Katie]. (IV Adam Rosenberg 2022) Kit had also spoken of the neon glow of the truck stop where he was held up and the truck hijacked, so the team started exploring lighting the entire production with neon lights. In some cases, the hybrid design and concept came swiftly. In conversations with the subject Nicole, who had once found a dead body, the director Ella describes being focused on bringing a kind of element of absurdity or surrealism into it . . . I understood it had to get right back into [her] headspace. I understood that sometimes to get to represent the truth, you almost have to take a step away from it to reinterpret it. I remember thinking, so she as a young girl had had been in a summer camp and come across a body of a dead man who’d been shot . . . he was dead. He was bloody and she just, she never knew what happened to him. She kept telling that story her whole life. And I sort of thought, she’s still living with this man. Like he follows her around. And so I  was okay, let’s just be literal with this. Let’s have her sit on the couch next to him and tell the story and maybe connect with him somehow. The story hit me as the moment maybe when her childhood ended. And so, I thought, how can we make amends with this? In [Happiness Is a Warm Gun 2014] she almost become a mother figure to this man [and could finally] put him to bed or put him to rest. (Ella Rubeli IV 2022) For Jacob, a 2014 graduate, the hybrid form of Annie’s story came via a mixture of deep ethical care and a clever metaphor. Annie had arrived at the street casting to tell the tale that as a younger woman (she was still young), she had been unable to reach orgasm and detailed how she solved the problem. Jacob was struck by her exuberance and confidence and that the story was about empowerment. A  story about someone’s sexuality told without fear and with great humour. At the start of the collaboration the thing Jacob felt was most difficult was, I felt that some of my collaborators were much more from a narrative, fictional world and [thought of Annie] as an actor . . . acting, whereas I was very conscious, she’s a real person telling us her real story. [I]t was something that I struggled with it was something that played on my mind a lot to be respectful of the fact that she was a real person telling a real story and it was, you know, a very personal, emotional thing for her and took a lot, I reckon, to come and just do that with people that she didn’t know.

120  Praxis He didn’t want the film to be cheaply sexual. And I  remember the [idea of the] call center came in quite early on because that was what she was doing at the time. She was working this dead-end job. She hated it. And there was this thing about [failed] connection and those themes working together. [I had once also worked in a] call center and for 99% of you time it’s just getting rejected, rejected, rejected, which is what her body was doing to her until she finally made this final [breakthough] . . . and that setting became the metaphor and there’s truth to it. And so early on, that became [the] thing.9 (Jacob Schiotz IV 2022) The collaborative process for the most part yielded rich responses, but it could also bring with it complexity and conflict in trying to land on what the hybrid form of the subject’s story was. There was always a danger that they become this kind of mishmash. . . . [this] is something that kind of feeds back into the hybrid [form, you seek] style, but it’s not style over story . . . So you also need to hold the line on some aspects of that production process to keep checking in – Does this stylistically serve the story10? (Margaret McHugh IV 2022) Rowena Potts, a 2014 graduate, had taken a leave from her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at NYU to enrol in the documentary course. She found that her previous experience in observational filmmaking made it hard for her to imagine telling the story in any other way and difficult to collaborate with the production designer. She was telling the story of Peter who was born very late in the life of a famous older sculptor – a man who hadn’t seen Peter as the adult he had become – and her instinct was to film it in verité at his childhood home surrounded by his father’s sculptures. It was hard. It was hard for a really long time I did not know what I was going to do, what this was going to look like, how it was going to work, was it going to come together? I’d never done anything with music, [production design] or sound design or costumes. I  had conflict with [the production designer] because I said, I want this to feel like we’re just in his space. I  don’t want it to be super designed. And she said, well, that’s taking away my role. I need to practice being a production designer. You’re not giving me a chance to be a production designer. I had to liberate myself or just trust that it was going to be okay and sort of trust that the team would work together, and we would make it into something. And I think we did. I had conflict with her, but then we settled it. So that was a concession I made, but then I think it was the right call when I look at it now, because she took his environment and

Collaboration  121 made it into kind of a stage and the whole thing is about him performing [to an absent father] and it seems to work. The hybrid production that was most fraught in terms of collaborative consensus was one of the most conceptually ambitious and ultimately very successful on the festival circuit.11 The tension arose not from director Cassie’s relationship with the actual Frank in the titular role, but with a creative team wanting her to lock down a concept prior to the shoot while she was determined to experiment as long as possible through development and into production knowing that ‘the process was the most important part that was the thing I stuck to was the, the doing of it by doing it, I’ll work it out’ (Cassie Charlton IV 2022). Cassie had cast Frank because he was a ‘livewire’, but she initially knew nothing of what story they would tell. During the master interview Frank spoke of his childhood in Mississippi, ‘experiences of racism, prejudice and bigotry’ (Frank Hybrid Creative Portfolio 2013b) .  .  . that he had been the first person in his family to go to university, he had moved to Australia in 1986 (the year Cassie was born) ‘Why did he leave? Grief, Bankruptcy, Divorce’ (Portfolio) leaving behind two small children – an adult son now in jail for drugs and an adult daughter who he had never seen in adulthood (she refused to meet him) along with an unseen grandson. Cassie knew that the film was probably to do with Frank engaging with his past but unsure what it would be – she wanted to commit to the ‘wobbly’ road of hybrid development; so wobbly. I remember it being quite tricky for me to manage [the collaboration] it was hard on Tumblr. I hadn’t worked out what the hook of the whole thing was for a very long time. And so in terms of collaborating with like the cinematographer, the production designer and the people on my team, it was pretty rocky and [there] had to be a fair bit of trust that I would work it out in the end because it went through lots of iterations I always withheld a lot of stuff because I [didn’t] want to confuse people too much either . . . I didn’t want them to, to latch onto any one idea because it was never going to be one thing until the edit. Like, I really felt like the whole thing was going to be a big omlette until we got into the edit. Cassie was influenced by directing practices that favoured on-set improvisation such as the work of Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, Amiel Courtin Wilson’s practice in Cicada and Hail, Ivan Sen’s strategies with the non-actor Indigenous cast in Toomelah and the experiments of Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth in The Five Obstructions (2003). To her, the hybrid process ‘was a drama framework and a documentary camera that is using drama as a tool to get a truth getting [to] something that is definitely not fiction’ (Cassie Charlton IV 2022).

122  Praxis In Week 9 we brought in our guest hybrid expert professional filmmaker to work one on one with the directors to help bring focus to the concept development – in Cassie’s year it was Amiel Courtin Wilson whose work had deeply influenced the architecture of the hybrid workshop. At the end of the week we also asked the directors to submit a hybrid documentary working plan that summarised in just over a page or two the synopsis, visual/aural references, emotional beats and hybrid concepts.12 This sharpened the overall vision for all the projects, and for Cassie it proved to be a turning point. Cassie had been toying with the idea that the hybrid process might be therapeutic for Frank and that she might introduce some obstructions ala von Triers. Through the one-on-one session she came away with the references she needed to unlock what she would do. Of particular influence was William Greaves’ 1968 experimental film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, combining drama camera and observational documentary camera footage. She also came away confident that she should pursue her ideas about ‘Filmmaking Process as Therapy’. Her notes at the time stated; I am interested in evening out/equalizing the relationship between Frank and I. If Hybrid is a process, then let it be about that process and let’s document that process, What are a 60-year-old black man and a 25  year old white woman doing together? Why do I  want to send Frank to a psychologist? (Frank Hybrid Creative Portfolio 2013b) And that’s what she did. Via an intensely rigorous ethical consultation process, Cassie hired a psychologist to do live sessions with Frank in the film. There was also a film within a film in which actor Frank was on set with a film crew (all actors) and a young boy playing his son, all filmed by a drama cinematographer. The entire process, drama crew, real crew, including Cassie were filmed by a documentary cinematographer. Whatever happened would be captured. All this was possible because of the trust Frank and Cassie had formed. He wasn’t worried because I kept a face of ‘it’s all going to be fine’. So I think that was why he wasn’t worried. That’s where the trust thing comes in. Like, I just feel like he didn’t know much about me but he trusted that I’d be careful with him and with his story [We’d send] text messages to each other where I  tried and keep him in the loop about what I was thinking at any given time . . . I chose him because I  knew that I  could do that with him, I  guess. Yeah, not because he had some cracker story. I chose him because I felt he would be okay working like that. I gave him little ideas about ‘we might send you to a psychologist’, but I made sure everything was embedded in what he’d already told me. It wasn’t like it was being plucked out of thin air from

Collaboration  123 just some crazy idea I’d had overnight, like a lot of everything I came up like him going to a psychologist, him being on set, him being with his son, this character playing his son. It all was born from interview material that I captured with him early on. I could always say to him, like, remember when you said this to me, I’m thinking [of doing this] it all came from something real, which is why he wasn’t freaking out. Cassie was wary of falling into the ‘bad drama’ trap if things became overly scripted, and she wanted to avoid it being a ‘squeaky-clean kind of hybrid [which are just] dramatised life stories’. Instead, she would put Frank with the psychologist and then into the drama scenes and rehearse them repeatedly. I knew that Frank would get to a point where it would all become very real for him. And so the documentary camera became the most important camera. I don’t think I necessarily knew that at the time. I think the shooting strategy was just to keep these two films going at the same time. And because I had trust in the documentary camera, I knew that they would be alive to looking for that real emotion we needed. In the shoot we just carried on filming the same little improvised scenes over and over again in the hope that, you know, that something might happen. In the hope that something might tip over with the boy, something might happen with Frank, something might happen with me. What happened was . . . I don’t think [Frank] felt unsafe at any time. I don’t think he felt backed into a corner. It took me by surprise it got too much for him and he felt that his son was representing his son too closely and sitting at a dinner table trying to be a good dad and not being a good dad, trying to be that thing and not being that thing was really hard and he started crying and I was genuinely very worried in that moment. I was like, shit, we’ve broken him. I really did think that. I thought I pushed it too far and I did worry. It’s interesting the filmmaker I am now. I don’t know that I would have dealt with him the same way. Actually, I probably would have. But like it was, it was a genuine moment. I felt very responsible as there were so many people in that set he broke down and that became the heart of the film, that moment. So then we had to turn the whole film inside out because all that documentary stuff was now the most important stuff.13 (Cassie Charlton IV 2022) An added complexity to the development process was the growing awareness amongst most of the documentary directors of the pitfalls of overly scripting the productions and not allowing for adequate improvisational explorations and discoveries during production. However, given the scale of the collaboration production designers, cinematographers and producers had to have a clear set of parameters of what might occur to organise equipment, dressing, sets and props and ensure everything had been

124  Praxis pre-approved for safety and feasibility. Those hybrid documentaries that appeared to bloom were those in which the teams were able to collectively build a creative frame and a set of strategies which would support the creative teams’ explorations, enhance the subject’s performative abilities by allowing them to remain present and responsive on set to suggestions and ideas from the documentary director. For many, some of the strategies Courtin Wilson had used in Cicada with co-creator subject Daniel P. Jones, of generating a tightly scripted sevenminute monologue from hours of transcript, which Dan would learn and perform to camera – would not work. Jones’s advantage was that after release from prison he had worked as a performer in a theatre group for years and had a good set of performance craft skills. Many of the directors and subjects in the workshops found that working from a detailed (albeit verbatim) scripted text too enervating, and it lacked spontaneity, spark and the vitality of a real life, lived. What was useful was Courtin Wilson’s insights about working with non-actors on set. Despite Jones’s acting experience and that they had deliberately avoided rehearsing on the actual day of filming, the first attempts came across as lifeless. Courtin-Wilson got Jones to stand up (they had intended originally to have him sitting) and deliver it straight to camera. This simple change in physicality transformed the delivery. Many of the directors embraced these techniques of exploring physical techniques to get subjects moving (walking, jumping, singing, in one case hanging from a harness) and improvise with them on set to great results.14 These techniques minimised self-consciousness amongst the subjects and by encouraging them to physicalise action and interact on set helped them generate creative responses in the present which in turn enhanced their status as co-creators. Many directors talked about being acutely aware that for the on set dynamic to work they had to relinquish a certain element of control and radically trust the process. Unprompted, most of them characterised a pivotal moment in the workshop when they ‘let go’ or they were ‘letting go’, something Courtin Wilson refers to as ‘surrender’. This is not vague or imprecise or a woolly decision. Rather, it was accepting a shift in power away from auteur models in which the director works from a singular vision to an inclusive environment of collaborative co-creation. Hollie Fifer: [on the collaboration] It was a really great process, because I think we all understood that we were all, each only ten percent of the production that we that we relied on each other to figure out what we were going to do . . . It was very egalitarian. (Holly Fifer IV 2022) Logan who had completed a five-year engineering degree prior to his postgraduate documentary studies summarised this ideal hybrid documentary

Collaboration  125 production environment as safe site, thoughtfully constructed, encouraging play, adventure and risk-taking. Engineering taught me all about structure . . . it is all about building boundaries around certain systems and things. And so for me when I  do a hybrid project, it’s all about a structure or boundaries or a framework in which you work and then letting everybody run wild in it. I can get everything, all these ideas and stories and people running around and I will put these put these boxes around everything and that funnels it towards a direction. It gives me the comfort of knowing that something is not just going to go off the rails, like it’s not going to not find its voice. I kind of have a structure that allows it to go forward but it gives people the people the freedom to move within that. When making the hybrid Clan (2013), Larissa Behrendt,15 spoke of ‘letting go’ of the prescriptions and conventions of the fiction screen writing postgraduate diploma she had completed the year before. She found that adhering to ideas about three act structures, putting everything down on a page or that something had to occur exactly at a precise point was too constrictive. Instead, she ‘just threw out all of that, that sense there was a right way to do it . . . not that it’s unstructured’ . . . instead it was trusting in the process that you come to deeply understand a hybrid documentary allows a director to become ‘unleashed’ and ‘unshackled’. Through the hybrid workshops Larissa found a cinematic vocabulary that resonated deeply. Well, I found it really liberating in a way . . . my approach now to documentaries probably [is] highly influenced by [the Hybrid Workshop]. It’s a form that fits really neatly with Indigenous storytelling, .  .  . I think I was drawn to it because it doesn’t sit in a kind of western linear storytelling framework, which is really limiting, and you’re always pushing up against that as a First Nations storyteller. And so being able to tell a true story that plays with imagery, plays with sense of time, you know, the lines between what might be a thought or a dream and what’s actually real coming into a kind of different space is, I  think, very much a space where First Nations visual storytelling sits much more comfortably. I feel like what we learned in that workshop and doing that first film has kind of continued to allow me to mix up how I  tell it. I  felt like I  was unshackled by having to sort of go down a certain way. And I  think it also has allowed me because of that to start with concepts and ideas quite fluidly when I start a project, rather than having a particular formula by which I work now. (Larissa Behrendt IV 2022)

126  Praxis Dropping emotional anchors in production and post ‘Letting go’ did not imply that the documentary director relinquished their commitment and obligation to telling a real story about a real person and ensuring that the hybridisation did not flip into overly stylised fictions. Hollie Fifer had cast Corinna Newman who was in her early thirties, and together they were developing the hybrid based on her life as the only surviving sibling of four. She alone of her sister and brothers had not inherited mutations in the WFS1 (most common) or WFS2 (CISD2) gene from both parents which led to Wolfram (or Didmoad) syndrome, causing blindness and early death. At 12, Corinna had pretended to go blind, as her siblings actually had, and then spontaneously ‘recovered’ when she wanted to audition in dance for a performing arts high school. Holly and Corinna spent a great deal of time together talking about ‘the philosophy of life’. Corinna felt passionately that she had to live her life completely and without fear as she was having to live the potential of four lives and not just her own. Holly was initially daunted by how to approach her story through a hybrid form, but she was also acutely aware that if one told the story ‘traditionally’ either as an observational film or as an interview/archive-based film it would ‘just be a documentary of ghosts’ about ‘dead children . . . not a happy story’. Despite the apparent grim narrative content Corinna was a person full of optimism, joie de vivre and the wisdom of a survivor. What was also apparent was that she was not felled by loss and brought joy and humour to her relationship with her still living parents. To reflect this, Holly, Corinna and the team had conceived a design methodology in which Corinna would dance through her childhood memories on set that included a childhood bedroom with a play teepee in the corner, a theatre with steampunk optometry equipment and a bank of piled television sets which would playback family archive of the Newman family when they were kids playing and performing at impromptu family concerts. Corinna in a long pink tutu would recount her story in voice-over while she tried to ‘dance’ herself away from the memories, avoiding them by donning thick out-of-focus glasses only to be compelled to engage with the multiple archive images that came into focus. As they headed towards pre-production, Holly began to feel that something had become unmoored, that the design had become too theatrical, too tricky, and while it captured the buoyancy of Corinna’s resilience it lacked the requisite emotional stakes that communicated viscerally the magnitude of the loss. Holly realised the film [needed] ‘anchors to root it in the reality that still made sense. In some way the archive was helping, because that was the reality, but it .  .  . needed another anchor’. It was the archives that led to the second anchor, which was ‘the parents on the couch’. All the archives of the dead children was on old analogue DV, VHS tapes kept by Brian and Therese Newman, Corinna’s parents. Holly went to meet them in their home and said if they would trust her with the tapes, which (lacking the requisite players) they could no longer view, she would get them digitised and return

Collaboration  127 everything personally. Holly was aware that this involved an enormous act of faith on their part, and while they appreciated the offer of digitisation, they asked if they could also come to set and watch. And then, because they were going to come along, I said, Oh, do you want to be in it? And they were like, Oh, no, No, no, [then] Eventually they just said yes, and it just made sense to have them there . . . it happened organically. Their appearance became the emotional centre of the film when Corinna unable to watch the archive in the theatre set crawls back through her teepee to encounter her parents sitting on a couch watching a 20-year-old VHS tape of all the children performing at a Christmas concert in the family house. Corinna watches as her father starts to weep, and Corina turns finally to watch her dead siblings and, in that gesture, she is liberated [somewhat] from her ghosts. Holly added a final ‘anchor’ in post by going back to Corinna’s original audio from the casting day. They had not been able to capture the raw authenticity of this first telling during the development period, and using it as the voice-over provided the ballast needed to keep the project grounded in reality – to hold the ‘line’. I think There is a line, probably even in Surrealism, surrealist fiction, where you’ve lost your audience because it makes no sense anymore. There, there must be a line with all [documentary] filmmaking I don’t think the line is a logic line. [its an emotional line]. (Holly Fifer IV 2022) What drove Holly to pursue these anchors was what she describes as her pursuit of the truth. . . : ‘It’s like this. You’ll never get there [to the truth]. But you know when you when you’ve [betrayed it] . . . when you’ve told a lie, you know when you’re lying’. Margaret who was the creative producer of What Do You See? (2017) also felt the first cut of the film featuring Sereena16 had lost its relationship to the real. It felt too fictional and I came back to them (the director and editor) . . . I had to say to them, look, we’ve lost it . . . it’s untethered. It’s gone. We need to kind of bring it back down. I  just kept saying to them let’s get some archive (of Sereena’s childhood in Malaysia prior to her transition). We had to open the edit up again. It was, you know, this whole palaver, right? But I  knew we needed to (be) reconnected to that this is a real story. This is Sereena’s story. And, this person that you’re seeing exists in the real world and archive just reconnects it

128  Praxis back to the documentary form in a really powerful way . . . it’s that hybrid documentaries, it’s not about them kind of playing with fact or fiction or whatever. I  think actually what makes them interesting is, their relationship between the filmmaker, the subject and the audience. And it kind of continues to complicate that relationship between all three and form as well.17 (Margaret McHugh IV 2022) Impact festival and filmmakers The hybrid documentaries produced out of the workshops had significant and widespread festival success given they were produced by relatively inexperienced teams. One of the advantages of working in this exploratory, high-risk hybrid aesthetic is that the works stand out among a multitude of short documentaries submitted to festivals worldwide. For the very low cost of production the films had enormous impact in helping to launch careers, screening all over the world and winning multiple prizes. As examples, Clan (2013), screened at over 30 national and international film festivals, including Berlin, Frameline in San Francisco, Sydney and Melbourne, New Zealand winning best short documentary at Adelaide and Canberra film festivals. At Midnight (2014) had over 20 screenings, including Hot Docs Canada, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sebastopol and Rhode Island. The Drovers Boy (2014) won multiple awards and was screened at over 25 film festivals; Sydney Film Festival, Adelaide Film Festival, St Kilda Film Festival, Berlin Independent Film Festival (Berlin), Queens World Film Festival (New York), Ethnografilm Festival (Paris) and Arte Internacional De Cine Y Arte (Buenos Aires). Beneath Heaven (2012) won two human rights award in Belgrade and Australia and had screenings in Croatia, New Zealand, New York, Belgrade, Montenegro amongst others. What Do You See? (2017) also debuted at Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco and played at imagineNATIVE Film Festival. The workshops also had considerable impact on the career trajectories and praxis of most of the participants – particularly the directors and the subjects. Interviewing them, 7–10  years after graduation, provided a distance for them to critically reflect on the influence working within a hybrid framework had on their subsequent careers. For Margaret who had a visual arts degree prior to completing the graduate diploma and was a video artist, it perhaps unsurprisingly led to her making multiple films in hybrid forms and completing a master’s of research on hybrid documentary and currently completing a PhD exploring the intersections of hybrid film forms, documentary film, feminist theory and screen production research. More intriguingly, Ella, Rowena and Logan who came from journalism, ethnography, and engineering respectively and had only worked observationally, all now work almost exclusively and with great success in hybrid documentary. Many of the graduates I interviewed spoke repeatedly about how the

Collaboration  129 workshop practices deeply influenced the way they work in the screen industry. Both Larissa and Adam, who work in more traditional modes, nonetheless adhere to the transformation it brought in the way one could approach creative documentary responses to the real. Overwhelmingly, it was evident the workshop provided a best practice model of co-creation and inclusiveness with subjects that strongly continue to guide their relationships with participants. The subjects were all invited to provide feedback prior to lock off and of the 25 hybrid films that were made none requested significant or problematic changes to the final cut. That said their feedback was taken seriously and frequently enacted. After completion, screenings were held for teams, participants and their family and friends. Given the intensity of the process, these were often critically important events ensuring the investment of all the creative collaborators, including the subjects, were recognised and acknowledged. While it brought to an end the formal relationship of all the hybrid workshop participants, many of the directors and subjects formed strong bonds that continue up to ten years later – some travelling around the world together for festival screenings. The next chapter features interviews with four participants I  approached to gauge their experience of the workshop and the impact on them in the years that followed. I was interested in talking to those subjects who had shared particularly intimate, challenging and potentially exposing stories about themselves and been willing at the time to have these stories spliced, diced, experimented on and hybridised on by fairly young and inexperienced film students. It had been a concentrated experience, I was curious to engage with their critical reflections on the process and the impact, if any, on their lives. Hollie Fifer: looking back on it, I don’t think I knew it at the time, but I think, looking back on it, I probably asked [Corinna] for more than I would another documentary participant, and she probably accepted that. Because it was a student film because it was a learning outcome, because she was being paid because she wanted to for a lot of reasons. But she was definitely pushed to her limit as well, which I wouldn’t necessarily do with someone else . . . It was the hybrid film did it to us. It was like we were all spellbound. We all had to go into this world and do this thing that we wouldn’t normally do, and therefore we never then had a sense of like, Oh, no, that’s too far because you’re a spellbound in the world that you’re creating together. (IV Hollie Fifer 2022) Notes 1 We allowed this sole under-18-year-old subject to participate because her mother was part of one of the teams. 2 The following schedule lays out the steps developing and shooting the hybrid documentary shorts over a 16-week semester. Only Week 13–Week 16 were full

130  Praxis weeks. All the other scheduled milestones worked alongside (and sometimes outside) other timetabled classes. O week. Wednesday 15 FEB – O week HYBRID brief to student and casting dates Week 1 Friday, 24 February – finalise audition notice street casting. Week 2 Friday, 2 March – get audition notices disseminated. Week 4 Friday, 16 March – follow up auditions and prep. Week 5 Wednesday, 21 March – (Art of Doc pt 2 – see lesson plan). Week 5 23 Friday – PM production pathways and workflow with HYBRID teams. Doco present learning plan draft to HOD/Lead teacher. Week 5 Saturday, 24 March – street casting. HYBRID teams. Week 6 Friday, 30 March – watch rushes and select in teams. Week 7 Tuesday, 3 April – Interview HYBRID subject concept, cine, Vis, feasibility. Week 9 Monday, 16 April–20 April – HYBRID teams meet work with guest. lecturer, concept locked, draft script. (AMEIL). Week 10 Friday, 27 April – rehearse with HYBRID subject or prep. Week 11 Friday, 4 May – HYBRID prep. Week 12 Friday, PM meet HYBRID designers and Cine – finals plans/storyboards/ design. Week 13 – HYBRID Pre. Week 14 – HYBRID shoot. Week 15 – HYBRID post. Week 16 – HYBRID post spotting with music and sound design. SEM 2: see schedule TBC for mix, grade and debrief. 3 All the students had classes on other discipline-related subjects during this period. 4 Ella Rubeli currently works almost exclusively in hybrid forms. In addition to being the 2013 Walkley award young journalist of the year (Australia’s most prestigious journalism awards), she is a multi-award-winning hybrid experimental filmmaker. Her projects have been showcased at international film festivals, including IDFA and SXSW and presented by SBS and ABC Television networks in Australia. Her writing and photography have been published in The Good Weekend Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian Australia and SBS Online. www.ellarubeli.com/about 5 Logan Mucha is a director and video artist whose films have played at film festivals globally, on TV and major online platforms. His films have played on ABC iView, Virgin In-Flight Entertainment and with Teen Vogue USA, and he has twice won Best Australian Short at the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival. 6 In 2013, Adam Rosenberg completed an internship with Radical Media, moved up New York and set up the documentary company Wandering Crew. https:// wanderingcrew.com/. He has created documentaries for ABC, Viceland, SBS and the Australian Government. 7 Lucas Li 2013, Graduate. After graduating from the Documentary Graduate Diploma Lucas completed his master’s at AFTRS. He produced several documentaries. He has recently transitioned from a career in filmmaking to art therapy. 8 Michael Lavarch financed this aspect of the shoot covering the cost of the wrangler and owl on set. 9 Jacob Schiotz is an accomplished director and editor, now works as an independent filmmaker specialising in documentary and music videos. 10 Margaret McHugh IV. Margaret believes this happened in her first hybrid short which became too fictional and lost authenticity. These lessons for her led to her directing and producing a series of subsequent extremely successful, awardwinning hybrid shorts.

Collaboration  131 11 Amongst other accolades, the hybrid short Frank screened at a major festival Moonlight Cinema at the Sydney Opera House this year before 2022 Oscar winner Summer of Soul nine years after it was completed. 12 Ouroboros – Hybrid Working Plan. Director Liz McCarthy. Synopsis JJM transcends his abusive and disadvantaged upbringing and becomes a skydiving instructor. As a skydiving instructor, Jackson finds the control and freedom that were denied him as a child and which alluded him as an adolescent and young man. Jackson finds solace, release and fulfilment while freefalling at 200 kilometres per hour and chasing cumulus clouds. Jackson, whose c­ hildhood dream was to be a pilot, has become the pilot of his own body and of his life. Story: Philosophical/emotional/story beats • Man’s birth into chaos, ‘the abyss’ (immersion, suffocation, confusion) • Enveloping chaos, ‘the whirlpool’ (thrashing, closing in, surrounding, encircling) • The fight, ‘the struggle’ (struggling for air, for control, for freedom) • Breaking through, ‘transcendence’ (taking off, breaking to the surface, regaining air) • Reward, ‘the glory’ a state of grace, (flying, floating, freefalling. Freedom and control leading to the experience of beauty, bliss and fulfilment) Concept: Abstract Two distinct story worlds will be created in the film and a third transitional space explored between these two worlds. The first will be an underwater world, a world of chaos representing the struggle of Jackson’s childhood and adolescence. Camera and design will reflect a sense of suffocation, of thrashing and struggling for air and a desire to break free of the external encircling chaos. I want to construct a physical whirlpool underwater that brings the chaos and confusion to what would otherwise be a serene world. I want to shoot this sequence in slow motion to capture the participants’ sense of struggling against the external chaos. This scene will culminate in Jackson breaking through to the surface of the water signifying his transcendence into a new phase of his life, a new reality in which he has broken free of the external constraints – the whirlpool of his life. As Jackson breaks through to the surface of the water, the water and the sky will invert, and we will find ourselves with Jackson in the air, freefalling. Visual Story World 1 Underwater – The World of Chaos; man entrapped in constant struggle (samsara) Camera • Underwater shoot • Slow motion camera (1000 fps) Into The Sun (Amy Gebhardt), Only You – Portishead Music Video (Chris Cunningham) Design • Dark water with some speckled/dappled lighting • The creation of a whirlpool. An external force that is at play outside of the participants’ control • Costume – either simple loose-fitting clothing or elaborate • Mood • Colour palette dark blue

132  Praxis 2 Transitional space between the water and the sky • Story: ‘the inversion’ breaking through – the transitional space, a disorientation for the audience, putting the audience in Jackson’s POV and signifying a dramatic shift in his world • Ways to represent this shift • Shift in light • Shot choice close-up of bubbles and hand in water coming through to the surface • Shift in colour palette • Overexposure • Textural change Music and sound design • Music will be sparse and minimal and suggest an atmosphere • Sound design abstract and suggestive 3 The Sky – The World of Glory and Grace Jackson is now floating in the sky. We are given the initial impression he is floating but he is actually falling, it is not until we see him relative to a cloud that we can conceive how fast he is falling. We have a sense of what it feels like to freefall. This is a blissful and redemptive world. It will contrast with the initial. Camera • Intercutting between slow motion and regular speed • Potential use of found footage • Potential for shooting POV shots with Jackson using heropro head cam The interview with Jackson • Design: a surreal sense of placelessness, colours – white, yellow • Camera: close and still, details in the eyes, extreme close-ups Direction: explore the pauses, cut to Jackson in between sentences (the power of silence) References • GIZO • Gestalt • Aeronout Mik • Amy Gebhardt • Bill Viola • Malik (Days of Heaven) • Bergman • Video art, video installation, Sean Gladwell • Music vid Chris Cunningham • Claire Danie – Annette and Bonnie • THE WIZARD OF OZ • www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNf5Ga1rw78 3 Frank’s account of the entire production is in Chapter 6. 1 14 Rouch and Morin had done this with Marceline in Chronicle of a Summer encouraging her to speak about her hitherto uncommunicated experiences in a concentration camp. 15 Larissa Behrendt is a First Nations Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman. She is Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous

Collaboration  133 Education and Research  at the University of Technology, Sydney. After graduation she has become one of Australia’s most accomplished documentary directors and screenwriters. Larissa Behrendt – The Screen Guide. Screen Australia. Accessed November  7, 2022. www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/p/ Larissa-Behrendt/31581/. 16 An interview with Sereena is in Chapter 6. 17 Other hybrid teams who felt that they had lost their connection to the real used other strategies such as shooting observational sequences during post to lace through the more overtly constructed hybrid material or used post-production to radically veer away from the ‘script’ that guided the production shoot and instead creating a completely different version of the film.

Bibliography Behrendt, L. (Director). (2013). Clan. AFTRS. Charlton, C. (Director). (2013a). Frank. AFTRS. Charlton, C. (2013b). Frank. Hybrid Creative Portfolio. Unpublished. Fifer, H. (Director). (2012). Corinna. AFTRS. Greaves, W. (Director). (1968). Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. William Greaves. Li, L. (Director). (2013). My Red Guard. AFTRS. McBride, A. (Director). (2014). At Midnight. AFTRS. McHugh. (Director). (2014). The Drovers Boy. AFTRS. McHugh. (Producer). (2017). What Do You See? AFTRS. Mucha, L. (Director). (2012). Beneath Heaven. AFTRS. Rubeli. (Director). (2014). Happiness Is a Warm Gun. AFTRS. Interviews Behrendt, L. (2022, November 6). Interview. Rachel Landers. Charlton, C. (2022, November 16). Interview. Rachel Landers. Fifer, H. (2022, October 11). Interview. Rachel Landers. Li, Lucas. (2022, November 16). Interview. Rachel Landers. Marks, J. (2022, November 8). Interview. Rachel Landers. McCarthy, L. (2022, November 16). Interview. Rachel Landers. McHugh, M. (2022, November 11). Interview. Rachel Landers. Mucha, L. (2022, November 10). Interview. Rachel Landers. Potts, Rowena. (2022, November 11). Interview. Rachel Landers. Rosenberg, Adam. (2022, November 7). Interview. Rachel Landers. Rubeli, Ella. (2022, November 11). Interview. Rachel Landers. Schiotz, Jacob. (2022, November 9). Interview. Rachel Landers.

6 Subjects in hybrid documentaries Casting, collaboration and co-creation. Whose story is it? What happens when hybrid documentaries behave badly and compromise the veracity of the content and integrity of the subjects? Are there checks and balances? Should there be? What are the experiences of participants/ subjects of hybrid documentary? This chapter opens with a brief examination of perhaps one of Australia’s most badly behaved documentaries in recent years. It is not a hybrid documentary, but it provides an important parable of the sorts of moral obligations any documentary maker owes to the truth and critically to its subjects, issues that can become particularly fraught when working in the hybrid form. The documentary in question was the 2009 film Stolen made by first-time filmmakers Violetta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw and experienced documentary producer Tom Zubrycki. The film was distributed as a revelatory expose of covert modern slavery that was said to be rife in a refugee camp in Algeria’s Western Saharan Desert. The problems started when the main subject, Fetim Salam – who was one of the slaves in question – arrived at the Sydney International Film Festival premier to denounce the claims of the documentary, its directors and her portrayal in the film. Fetim stated she was not a slave, and the film makers had misled her and mistranslated her statements in the English subtitles. This predicament led to an extraordinary amount of fingerpointing and volatile accusations from both sides. Interestingly, given the claims the original film was making, almost none of the fallout seemed to be focused on Fetim herself – neither her safety, her opinion, her sense of selfworth, nor what impact the film had upon her were focus of the bitter dispute. Nor did her disavowal of the film seem to impact the success of the film on the festival circuit with selectors snapping it up without much thought on the consequences this might have had upon the main subject. The filmmakers, both residents of Australia, had asserted that they alone, in a huge refugee camp of thousands of inhabitants that was ‘crawling with [up to 6000] United Nations officials, refugee agencies [and] NGOs1’, had DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-9

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  135 uncovered a systematic practice of enslavement of the darker skinned refugees by the lighter skinned ones. They estimated there were up to 20,000 slaves. The co-directors had originally set out to make a film about family reunion and stumbled upon this dark secret. At one point during the film the documentary makers had to bury and then smuggle out their footage. After the film debuted and was denounced by Fetim, there was a broad range of industry and press reactions, forums, meetings and discussion panels which included a cinematographer who had worked on Stolen also denouncing the work for factual inaccuracy – he went on to release a counter documentary called Robbed of the Truth (2011). The most exhaustive examination was a highly detailed investigation by the Australian public broadcaster programme The 7.30 Report (15 June 2009). An investigative team returned to the camp and interviewed Fetim and her family, a cross section of NGO workers, a representative of the main political party – the Polisario Liberation Front – overseeing the camp, the cinematographer and an Australian politician who had visited the refugees. Collectively, they all stated the film was false, and there were no slaves and that those who made the ‘slavery’ assertions now said they had been misinterpreted and/or coerced (and in some instances paid) by the filmmakers to state these falsehoods. The investigative programme interviewed the two directors and the producer who all stuck to their ‘slavery exists and is widespread’ accusations, taking the position that Fetim and others who had made the claims had been bullied by the dominant political party in the camp and intimidated by the slave owners into recanting their claims. The investigative team then had the film retranslated by an independent expert who worked for the broadcaster Al Jazeera. Scenes were screened in which the subtitles in the original and the retranslation by the investigators were seen in parallel and revealed to be startlingly different. One scene in the original, reads in the subtitles as a frank admission about Fetim’s status as a slave. In the retranslation, it reads that Fetim and others are discussing that Violetta, the director, wants them to say they are slaves which is not true.2 This film and the fallout make for an intriguing case study in a documentary ethics class. It elicits much debate about what was going on – were the filmmakers deliberately lying or naïve and delusional or had they in fact, remarkably and exclusively, unearthed the truth? How could two such completely contradictory stances be made – there is widespread slavery; there is no slavery? One possible explanation comes out of recent debate about the extractive practices of relatively wealthy Western filmmakers descending on extremely poor and in this case, stateless people who, possibly, may end up saying things that might please strangers. The filmmakers were at pains to say that they did not give anyone money per se (as if this somehow makes their relationships equitable), but they had paid for food and trips for some of the subjects. The filmmakers were on their third trip to the camp when the revelations from Fetim and others spilled forth. What better way than to keep the foreigners engaged – if in fact that was what they were saying – Violetta

136  Praxis spoke Spanish but not the local dialect – so who can definitively say what was corrupted, twisted, re-spun or lost in translation. I always end these sticky ethical discussions saying the debate as to who was telling the truth is not the most important issue at stake. What matters most is the filmmakers failed in their most basic duty. To keep their subjects safe. Given the assertions by directors Ayala and Fallworth in the film and the potential of retaliation against the subjects who had purportedly made these clandestine statements about being slaves, no attempt was made by any of the filmmakers to get their subjects to safety prior to the release of film. Indeed, their primary concern seems to be the smuggling out of the buried rushes. If the participants were telling the truth, and the filmmakers had exposed the horror of embedded slavery running rife through this refugee camp, were they not expecting the subjects who still lived there to be exposed to violence – to be potentially attacked, exiled or killed because of their incendiary, accusatory revelations. Shouldn’t they have been warned? The film went on to appear in over 80 significant international festivals. Perhaps, the programmers were hoping Fetim might show up and denounce it live at their venue as she had in Sydney, garnering a bit much-needed viral publicity. They like the filmmakers simply did not appear to be particularly concerned about the effect the exhibition of the film was having on the subjects. In this, Brian Winston and I concur – documentary makers past and present can behave extremely poorly towards participants under the guise of the ‘consent defence’ and in the pursuit of ‘higher truths’.3 This celebration of, and hunger for, provocative, topical and/or innovative content on the international festival circuit has increasingly fuelled suspicion and hostility about documentaries particularly hybrids that have sometimes been seen to have a fairly loose relationship with the moral obligations filmmakers (or indeed distribution platforms such as festivals) have towards the truth and towards the subjects/content at the center of their screenworks. Certain hybrids, such as The Act of Killing, The Ambassador, Red Chapel, Kate Plays Christine and Casting JonBenét, have received both considered and fierce criticism. As noted, prominent documentary commissioner and commentator Nick Fraser was harshly censorious about The Act of Killing although little of this was directed towards the treatment of the, admittedly, morally bankrupt main subjects. Luke Moody observed that the antics of Mads Brügger, for example, getting Congolese Pygmy people drunk and have them dance for his on-screen persona Mr Cortzen all apparently to expose contemporary colonialism, might be an example (along with The Act of Killing) of ‘ethical experiments’ in hybrid documentary that are: Safer to play out elsewhere, [in] an irregular place without regulation. If the game turns sour, are we prepared for the fallout of failed Ambassadors of the future? Who is implicated in the game? Who is safe from its story? In most cases the filmmakers can walk away and wipe their

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  137 hands, a seemingly necessary premise for such ethically fraught filmmaking strategies. Would their actions be more tamed if conducted on home turf, under the scrutiny of Western media and apparent tradition of journalistic discipline. (Moody 2013, p. 11) Not only are the experiments of certain hybrid documentary seen to be ethically fraught, but the experiments themselves in hybridity can be perceived to have become unanchored, rendering the projects as shallow, self-serving narcissistic exercises in style and/or form over substance. An ornate but empty decorated shed and not a healthy duck (Kohlstedt 2016) in which form and content have become unmoored from each other. A review of The Ambassador asked what game Brügger was ‘actually playing’ in his repeated forays into ‘troubling ethical territory’, concluding that ‘Brügger seems very taken with his own cleverness – his too-cool-for-school attitude suggest that’s his ultimate aim is really to amuse himself. It all may be a private joke’ (Dworkin 2012). Erika Balsom had a similar reaction to Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine in which the actress Kate Lyn Sheil made various attempts to act out/ enact the tragic 1974 on-air suicide of reporter Christine Chubbuck. Balsom in her ‘scathing’ and ultimately, for Greene, life-changing review4 found the ideas embedded in the conceits, ‘we are all performers’, documentaries are constructed, and reality is changed by the introduction of camera, to be ‘heavy-handed’ and ‘sophomoric’ leaving issues like the ‘ethics of spectatorship in relation to the crucible; of power and ethics in documentary’ under interrogated. ‘Too clever by half [the film] approaches these questions but takes only a superficial interest in them. To do them justice would require understanding documentary as something more than a confidence trick’ (Balsom 2016). The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis garnered comparable impressions from watching Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, a hybrid documentary that retells the stories and hypothesis surrounding the 1996 unsolved murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsay from the point of view of multiple performers ‘auditioning’ for various roles – the mother, father, JonBenet, her brother and various suspects. Dargis described the film as ‘vacuous’ and that its high production values failed to ‘transcend the banality of its ideas’. Whether one agrees with this harsh assessment (and many would not) she does make the astute observation that could apply to hybrid documentaries in which the conceit is not deeply and authentically connected to the subject matter or subjects but sits outside as a stylistic artifice. Dargis regarded this a ‘nonexistent complexity . . . call it theorising by proxy for meaning by proxy – in which a filmmaker waves toward an idea, say Brecht’s concept of the alienation or estrangement effect, without doing any actual hard, intellectual work’ (Dargis 2017).

138  Praxis Each of these commentators highlights the apparent disregard with which the documentary makers treat their subjects handling them almost as puppets in the service of the hybrid idea. No matter what horrors about the Central African Republic or the hypocrisy of Western diplomats Brügger wants to expose, what one is left with is the constant cruelty he displays towards his ‘pygmy assistants’ who are little more than props in his elaborate prank. Likewise, the actual violent ends of Chubbuck and Ramsay recede in the service of the big ideas the directors are trying to explore. There is little empathy evoked or indeed attention paid to the actual dead in these films be they dead Indonesians, Africans, a suicidal woman or a murdered six-year-old child. Even the living can seem disconnected from the content. Kate ‘plays’ Christine but doesn’t appear to have a strong personal connection to her. The actors in JonBenet are less a Greek chorus and more chattering, anonymous bystanders. The form does not organically arise from the subjects or subject matter and fail to achieve true hybridity. They do not evoke a new way of seeing. Nor do they endow the subjects with authority and authorial status. At their core the victims remain victims that kick-start the plot – silent and unknowable. How could the evolving form of hybrid documentary carry with it an evolving set of ethical considerations that could avoid this sort of result? If so, what might they look like? One area of enquiry may be to consult with those at the centre of the content themselves. There has been seldom any research done on what documentary subjects think about the films they appear nor about subjects about which the content has a real-world impact such as the brother of the murdered child JonBenét Ramsey. That said, it is an issue gaining focus amongst contemporary documentary practitioners.5 Nor is there much research about the subjects of hybrid documentary – a form that often plays and stretches the boundaries and frameworks of documentary conventions. What do they feel and think about the form? It’s been over ten years since I have had contact with many of the hybrid documentary workshop subjects. In deciding who to approach I was guided by wanting to get a good sample of the range of participants but also to look at those subjects who were very different from the directors they had worked with. Often, the hybrid films they made went all over the world, so I also wanted to gauge the impact of that. I conducted semi-structured interviews with four somewhat randomly selected subjects. What struck me, was how, unprompted, each of them stated what an enormous, transformative impact the experience and the film have had on their lives. This is not to imply being in the films suddenly magically made everything better for them. At times the films failed to have effect the subjects imagined, instead leading to unexpected consequences. The tales they came in with, as detailed in the last chapter, were dark – recounting trauma, loss, redemption – but the finished films are not. The process had given them a way of communicating their stories that was liberating and empowering.

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  139 Clan 2013 (7 minutes) Subject – James Saunders; Filmmaker – ­Larissa Behrendt. A young Indigenous man comes to terms with his sexuality combatting racism, his cultural heritage of rigid distinctions of ‘men’s and women’s business’ and homophobia. The director (cited in chapter 5) was also an Indigenous Australian. James Saunders was in his very early twenties when he was cast by Larissa Behrendt in her late forties in the hybrid documentary workshop film. While they were both Indigenous Australians, she was a much-published, distinguished law professor at an Australian University, on sabbatical studying documentary, where he worked in student liaison. He’d seen a poster advertising the hybrid casting at the university, we had a slight interaction at the University of Technology Sydney. Larissa was in the research team, so they were up in the tower and I was down on level six with student outreach. So we didn’t have a lot of engagement . . . I think I’d spoken to her once before. The story he came in with which would form the basis of Clan was about coming to terms with his sexuality as an Indigenous man combatting both racism and homophobia. Larissa said that she really wanted me to be part of the process. She wanted to help tell my story. I felt an immediate trust as the result of that. She has an academic background. She’s very thorough in what she does. So, I knew that it would be done with respect and safety and all these things that were, I think, required for something like this . . . I just immediately felt like I trusted her. Larissa met with me and explained in depth about what a hybrid documentary was, and she spoke about these themes she wanted to touch on and how we would do that with the different elements, whether it was, you know, me talking to camera, acting out scenes with other actors or performer or voiceover work. And showing me, her vision through a look book. My understanding of hybrid documentaries was we’ve got like multiple ways to tell a story on film. Despite the harrowing nature of some of the subject matter James responded to the improvisation, experimentation and playfulness throughout the production encouraged by the director and crew. At one point to physicalise his experiences They said to me, we’re going to be putting you in a kind of harness and we’re going to be pulling you up and dropping you down as if you’re falling. She wanted to capture this kind of sense of falling. It really helped tell the story. It felt really cool, exciting. I brought in some of my teammates [from the all gay rugby team the Convicts] as part of the

140  Praxis shoot. My partner at the time, Charles, he was a part of it as well. That studio is a beautiful space. The director of photography was, quite amazing to work with. It was a lot of fun. I think because of the experimentation with the hybrid form, and because it was Larissa’s first documentary film [at AFTRS]. I know that there was a sense of newness for her in experimenting, in learning how to run a set. I felt the collaboration. I felt like the subject, but I felt I had input. There was one moment that was particularly confronting. I get quite emotional because I had to talk about something I hadn’t spoken about for a really long time. And you have a camera, a huge camera in your face and all these lights and these people standing behind it but the crew were all fantastic I never felt judged or pressured from the crew. You know talking about themes of Indigeneity and homosexuality in certain places in this country can still be really awkward. But the crew were not awkward with me – they held space – from the sound guys to the grip, everybody on the set – I didn’t feel any judgment and that made it a lot easier. Larissa sent me a cut to view. I  was living in a little apartment in Waterloo. I  remember watching it and I  cried because I  didn’t know how it was going to look, and I  didn’t know what the final product would be. It captured who I  was in that moment and the events that led to getting to that place. The visuals in that hybrid format allowed for the audiences to put themselves into that place and to feel and connect emotionally more, as opposed to just me sitting there talking to camera. It went to film festivals around the world including Frame Line Queer film festival San Francisco. They invited Larissa and I to attend. So I got to be part of San Francisco Pride as well. We watched it in the oldest theatre in San Francisco and the crowd was, San Francisco, gay men and women, mainly gay men 60 years old, possibly 70 years old. While we were watching Clan, there’s the scene where I’m falling. I felt men around me, older men, gasp. They were they were experiencing the emotions I had felt that Larissa captured in that imagery. That was powerful, a beautiful experience. People reached out to me on social media, a lot of gay men who has seen it reached out to me, some Indigenous and non-Indigenous, they were all closeted and living in parts of Australia. VIRGIN AIRLINES, put it on their planes and a lot of people were watching it. I started to realize that it’s still not easy to be gay and it’s even harder to be Indigenous and gay. To go through everything I’ve been through and to be able to stand to comfortably and talk about that and for the film to be seen – It felt right. Everything about it felt right. I have no regrets about it at all. The style it took it away from being for lack of a better term like poverty porn, you know, where people go and they document the harrowing lives of people on the streets and drug addicts or people who are struggling with illnesses. It took the story away from that because it

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  141 was a story being told in a way that is more creative and more free and not a lens on my day to day, it’s these memories in this world that I’ve come from and this place that I’ve found myself now. I experienced a tragic loss a couple of years ago. My younger brother committed suicide – he was living in the closet. It brought me back to the film and brought me back to who I am and how I lived my life and how I’ve tried to show to show him, even though I  didn’t know. He never came out to me. I tried to show him that you can be yourself and in the gay community there is no defined structure. You define your life. And I tried to show that to him. His death had a really significant impact on me. It reminds me of those men those people reaching out after they saw the film. For me, it’s been a powerful reminder about the power of storytelling and the power of discovering new ways to tell stories and having a collaborative approach involving the subject as a part of the process. I’d been on film shoots before and I watch lots of documentary films like I’ve loved documentaries since I was a child. I was aware of the traditional way of the director finding the subject and going and shooting that. And then the older I’ve got, the more I started to delve into journalism and media studies, started to learn about exploitation within documentary film, which is really common. And so when you flipped the power structures [in the Hybrid workshops] to say actually there’s something bigger than you – trust the process, I wasn’t aware of that actually occurring in the time. But now reflecting I can actually really see that. And the process of someone like Larissa, who was an established academic lawyer in a highly successful career. She’s a phenomenal woman. Her letting go. I now kind of see her trusting me as the subject and trusting the team, giving us power, was huge, I don’t think a lot of directors would be able to do that. Preloved (2014) (five minutes) Subject – Jill Chivers; Director – Shaylee Gomes. A Shopping Addict Slays her Demons My principal reason for contacting Jill about her involvement in the hybrid workshop was that she of all the subjects was the most public about her experiences. Jill Chivers is an experienced and media-savvy counsellor and workshop leader who assists those with addictive behaviours, including shopping addiction, which in her view is no less debilitating a dependency than that of drugs or alcohol. As part of her media outreach and profile she had published a highly detailed diary of her experiences participating in the hybrid workshop, highlighting the overwhelming and lasting impact it had on her (Chivers 2023). While the film itself didn’t have the international festival reach that many of the other hybrids had, it clearly resonated deeply with her. From her website it was apparent she had the skill to identify what it was about the process itself that was particularly effective for giving a subject a sense of creative power in what she called ‘a co-created discovery’. Shaylee

142  Praxis was an emerging documentary maker and Jill a very experienced media professional having appeared in dozens of talk shows. She’d heard about the workshop audition through a friend. I was in discussions with a production company here in Queensland to start looking to turn Shop Your Wardrobe into a TV show. Because I’d appeared in quite a lot of media but really mainstream like Today Tonight, The Project and on the breakfast and morning shows, which have a very particular style and cadence of telling stories – and this documentary project was really different to that. So that was how it started; I had to apply to get a slot to be interviewed, and then I booked my flights. It was a bit of an adventure. During my interview with Shaylee, I  was something like the ninth person she interviewed on that day and I remember talking about what she was wearing, but not in a judgmental ‘dress for success’ kind of way, more of a ‘you’ve made some interesting choices in your outfit’ way. I remember Shaylee was wearing a hat and I commented on it. And so I was personal in my initial contact with Shaylee on that very first day but non-judgmental. And I think getting those two things can be really challenging because often when we receive personal feedback, we often feel the need to protect ourselves from it, like it’s going to hurt or it’s going to be critical in some way. It is personal to comment on someone’s personal appearance and it could be considered quite very brazen to do so. But because I did it in a way that signalled my deep curiosity about this topic and the connection that what we wear affects how we feel about that ourselves, it struck a positive note. How do clothes have this power over how we feel when we wear them? It’s endlessly fascinating to me. Shaylee and Jill had to do a lot of their preparatory contact on the phone but fell immediately into collegiate, intimate collaboration as they approached the shoot. I trusted Shaylee absolutely. And I guess that’s why she remains one of the most important people in my life even though we don’t have regular contact. The trust I placed in her is about as high a trust I’ve placed in anybody in my entire life. And that is significant. I trusted her personally. I trusted her professionally. It was clear she was committed to her team. I understood and valued that. She had a lot of responsibility, a huge amount of responsibility. We made a decision that we wouldn’t prepare a script for me to memorise or read during the shoot, but we would let the shoot flow with Shaylee asking me questions and me answering them as honestly as I could on the day. Once we decided this, I knew my biggest preparation was to develop a relationship with Shaylee and trust in her and the

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  143 process, and surrender to it. I knew I couldn’t over-analyse that decision because I knew it could immobilize me when the shoot came around, and I would be overcome with fear. And so I really just said to myself, I’ve made this decision. I believe in this person. I know where this is going to go. I know what is going to be produced. It is a documentary for the school. I will get to see it. I would remind myself of what the concrete, tangible outcomes of doing this. That just wasn’t going to float off in in a way that I  would never see it. And so I  had enough ballast around me to be able to put aside any of these rising, panicky feelings that I’m sure I must have felt. I asked Jill to dive deeper into why she thinks she trusted Shaylee so much. And what specifically was Shaylee doing in the hybrid workshop framework doing to evoke that? How do we know we trust somebody? Part of it was just intuition and instinct. Part of it was there was a bit of disclosure on Shaylee’s behalf, she told me about herself. We had real conversations, she shared and talked as well as listened. She talked about being gay. We talked about the fact that her partner was Canadian and my husband is Canadian. She shared of herself. I guess a lot of that helps as well. Our conversations always felt like real conversations, real sharing. Shaylee was a good listener. She asked lots of follow up questions. I  didn’t get the feeling that this was going to be a glory project for her. She understood that for her to be a really good documentarian, the project had to focus on the subject. And I had a very much a sense that this was a team. I felt the project and the process was very collaborative. I  felt very much part of that team. I put that down to Shaylee. And I think also the cinematographer, he was a huge part and they obviously had a wonderful connection – those two in particular think, were instrumental in bringing out those sort of cultural waves of what the project was going to be. It was very much a journey of co-created discovery. Never once in the entire experience did I experience the feeling that I might be psychologically unsafe. I just knew I was safe with Shaylee. I knew she had a depth that at least matched mine. And that’s fairly important because I know in the work I do, which is in the corporate world, you don’t find a lot of people with a depth that matches the depth that I bring. I could be working with someone who’s experiencing really uncomfortable feelings, and it’s not going to bother me as a facilitator. I have a deep capacity to be present while other people are experiencing whatever they’re experiencing and Shaylee had that too. And that’s really rare because with most people, you can feel it when your emotions are too much for somebody, they just kind of hack it but they really just want you to stop – stop expressing strong emotion

144  Praxis because they don’t want to see it. They don’t want to witness it. They don’t want to be anywhere around it. ‘You’re having a breakdown’? Or ‘She broke down completely’, that’s how it’s described. I  had no sense that Shaylee thought I was breaking down when I was expressing strong emotion during the shoot. Her response to what was going on, I felt, signalled again that I had well placed my trust in her. I don’t think that the [Hybrid] film showed me as a victim, I think it showed me as a vulnerable person struggling with something and still struggling with it like it’s clearly present and real in that moment. I didn’t feel it victimized or diminished me in any way. I wouldn’t call it a light-hearted film, but I also wouldn’t call deep and heavy either. And I think that is the power of the talent of everybody involved. And the editor, I’m in a remember meeting [the editor and composer in post-production and having conversations with them . . .] And so I just increasingly had this sense of all these people who were being impacted by the telling of this story. And yes, I was the subject of it, but they all had their own journeys that were important to them that were coming out of this. [My reaction to watching the fine cut before lock off was] there were just so many layers to it One was just she stupendous beauty of it and the overall quality. . . . I mean, just that the level of quality was just extraordinary. Apart from that, the emotional impact of seeing the film was enormous. I just wept and wept. It was huge, it was absolutely huge. There’re so many ways in which the final film affected me psychologically and emotionally. And it was wave after wave of impact. [I chronicled the experience on my blog at the time because even then], I knew this would be a once in a lifetime experience. . . . People who have seen the film, it gives a sense of who I am and where I stand on this. And it also is a signal of a bit of a turning point for me in my life in terms of standing up and claiming my story on a platform that I didn’t have the opportunity to do so before. This kind of addiction is much maligned, much misunderstood. It’s one of those addictions that gets laughed at, and in reality, it isn’t funny. If you think of one of the jokes about shopping – ‘I’d give up shopping, but I’m not a quitter’; now take out the word shopping and put in being a Meth addict. Is it still funny? It’s not funny anymore, is it? Or being a gambling addict or being bulimic. It’s not funny. So this film makes it really real. People who are affected by overshopping compulsions are more plentiful than what you imagine. And they go through a really painful experience, which is exacerbated by the fact people don’t understand it. Other people, often those closest to the person suffering, feel perfectly justified in poking fun at it. And so part of the power of doing this film was not necessarily Hey world pay attention, but to those of you who are paying attention, this is a little thin slice of what it’s like.

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  145 Being part of making this film was a turning point in my journey with my family of origin. When I came back from filming, I was interested to see whether any of my family members would ask questions about it. They didn’t. So that has been quite interesting in terms of the dynamic with my family of origin. It was the beginning of a pathway of change with them, a distancing. I’m okay with that now although it’s been painful. It’s sad, but to me this was a milestone, an important marker not to rush past or brush over. If somebody makes a film about you and your people, the ones who are supposed to love you the most, just ignore it – well what does that say? I don’t know but it seems significant. So I paid attention to that and I made some choices in terms of my relationship with them. I receive feedback to this day from people who’ve seen it and say that film had a huge impact on them. And so I know that in terms of others seeing it and having it reach them and it has achieved that purpose. And that feels really nice. I feel like I’m making some sort of contribution. Frank 2013 (eight minutes). Subject – African American Frank Aldridge (60); Director – Australian, Caucasian Cassie Charlton (25). A  documentary experiment that blends observational footage with improvised drama to reveal the real Frank Aldridge – a comedy actor who harbours a deep and hidden sorrow about the secrets of his past. Cassie’s experiences are outlined in the previous chapter. Frank Aldridge worked in Sydney as Stockbroker and part time actor. I got a call from my agent, and he said that there was a project with AFTRS students, they were looking for interesting people. I  had no idea what [Cassie] was looking for. We just sat down informally and she asked me to tell her about my life. So naturally I started telling her all about the good things I’ve done. But really she wanted to pick out a particular part that I’m not very proud of. I just felt like I needed to get that moment off my chest. It had been lingering on my mind for so long and Cassie brought it out. I  guess most great directors do. I  immediately trusted her I  guess some people consider that strange, but I have a niece with the name Cassie and that that made a lot easier, felt like I was talking to my niece half the time. And it was just the chemistry, I guess, between the actor and the director. Cassie laid everything out in front of me. She told me exactly what she was going to do, what was going to happen, and she said it’s going to get very personal and to let her know at each stage if I wasn’t comfortable. She asked all the right questions – it was pretty easy. I didn’t think of it as an [hybrid] experiment at all. I just thought it was just a movie. And even though I  was playing myself, which was

146  Praxis very strange. You become a chameleon, you adapt to what’s going on with what’s happening in the room and that’s exactly what happened. She asked that question [about my estranged son in jail]. I don’t like to dwell on things that aren’t comfortable and things I’m not very proud of, but she asked that question. She wanted to know about my family life whether I had children and what happened to my wife and all of that. Just like old friends talking, about something I had failed at. My son, the fact that I  left America 30 odd years ago. And I  felt embarrassed that I  had to leave America because I  had problems with my wife. But, you know, people don’t always get along together. And it wouldn’t be fair to the child to live in a house full of commotion, even though he didn’t realize what was going on at the time. Cassie brought all that stuff out in me and we just kept talking focusing on the sadness. I just felt like it was something I had to do. A couple of times in production. I was uncomfortable sitting across the room from a child that reminded me of my son. And going through all the commotion that we normally do at a dinner table and discussing how school was and everything that brought back heartfelt memories. I think the last time I cooked dinner for him. It was just amazing how familiar everything became. Even the set design was somewhat familiar. It was exactly what we had in America at home. Even the set designer made me feel comfortable. We talked every minute just about what scene was coming up. And she wanted me to be comfortable and just portray the scene as I normally would, in a setting like that, because I don’t think Cassie would know what words to print out that would be what people would say inside of a family home like that. So she more or less left it up to me to do the adlib. It worked evidently, even though that ad libbing wasn’t acting, it was the real deal. Cassie invited me in (to watch the film for the first time). It wasn’t totally finished yet, but when I saw it – it was moving – I said wow – it brought out the truth. It was something I  had to get off my chest so I could move on in my life. So the fact was that Cassie helped me more than I helped her in making a film. I sent it to everybody, in my family and a most of them were speechless. Unfortunately, no I don’t feel that it brought any healing at all (with my family). They felt it was a skeleton that should have been left there. The film debuted at Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis. Cassie and Frank were invited to attend. That was spectacular. Like a Hollywood setting for me. It went over five days and Cass and I were going to all these different screenings of different films from all around the world. Meeting all these different

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  147 people from all around the world and they all loved the movie and everybody could relate to it. There were a lot of Fathers out there that related to the movie, so that was thrilling. I  could not believe I  was actually back home, right down the road from where I went to university and just felt great. I realized that I’m not alone and not the only Father out there that makes mistakes. It did help me – I did get that healing because that weight was off my chest. I felt like, Hey, I’m not the only one. I forgave myself like that after I saw the reaction. I’m very proud of the film. I couldn’t have [been emotionally vulnerable unless I trusted Cassie] only certain people can bring out emotion. And I don’t know if Cassie took psychological courses or what, but she knew exactly what to say and how to approach me to get the best for the movie – the best reaction out of me. Working with the psychologist was fun too, because I explained to Cassie I had already been to see three psychologists in my life no. 4 was Cassie’s (on set on screen) psychologist. I just felt it was all part of my treatment I have been going through my whole life, there wasn’t anything wrong with it to me. I felt safe because Cassie guided me every step of the way. Like the part where when she saw that, I would get a little bit teary eyed. She stopped everything until emotionally I calmed down a little bit and was very, very soothing. Like she was part of my family. The reason the film has played all over the world and keeps being screened 9 years after it was made is because of the honesty the honesty in it, because its real and something that’s not manufactured, that’s not me pretending to be somebody else. And I  think that’s what people want to see. People want to see honesty out there in the movies. They don’t want to see that made up stuff. They want to see real life stories no matter how bad or sad it is. It is moving and people want to be moved. What Do You See? 2017 (6 minutes) Subject – Sereena Damanhuri, Indigenous Australian; Director – Michael Bonner. Producer Magaret McHugh. Born in Malaysia and now living in Australia, Sereena, a transfeminine dancer, performer and photographer, poetically discusses her upbringing and trans (in)visibility – questioning the viewer, ‘What do you see?’. I was involved with the film industry. I had just finished shooting for Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017) I was one of the cast. After I finished the wrap I  saw the [hybrid workshop call out] I  replied to the advertisement that wanted you to tell your life story. I fixed an appointment with the director and some of the crew. . . . I have beautiful memories. I got a very, very warm welcome [they were all] really hearing what I  wanted to say. I  didn’t necessarily want to talk about my life. I wanted to share the story of why my community,

148  Praxis the trans community, is not being represented fully. I really wanted to talk about the situation facing the trans community. What is happening today, right now, what needs to be done. You know, as a transsexual, we are always living in the shadows. The reason why we are living in the shadows is not because we want it but being dragged there because of the system that wants us to be in the shadows – deep inside we actually don’t want that. Witnessing some of my friends that go through with a sex change just because they wanted to remove that shadow identity so they ‘appear’ in the correct way – but [even then] they are still not – you know because that kind of hope that you can [pass as cisgender] clouds things – it’s not a real. I don’t want my friends or my community to suffer from that choice [because] they are not seen properly for who they are. I understand. When I was young, I wanted to be like a girl, you know? But then is that what I really want? You go to that choice because of the system – you choose that, even if, it’s not [what] you really want. I want to tell the community at large. It’s okay to be us. We are good enough. At the end of the interview, I’m just gave a question to the director, ‘what have you seen?’ [I got a call] Oh we’re going to, to select you for our production. We [had] a briefing together with the director and crew . . . it was amazing how they come up with production design just from my description of things. The set was amazing, really impressive. What came from me is the dialogue I  gave them. How is my life transition from [childhood] to today? I’m still living a double life. You know what do you see today? What do you see yesterday? The visuals [Sereena in three settings], came from the choices of what the viewer wants to see [me as a man, as a woman, as a drag performer]. And what I wanted to present. The film cuts between Sereena in three settings – Sereena as a man in the family home in Malaysia, as a stylish woman in Sydney photographic studio, as a showgirl in a club. They went to my workplace. I  was performing I  was performing at Universal as a showgirl. The crew went backstage where we put on the costumes, I took pictures for them. And then from that they created the set. It made me feel special and supported with what I wanted to say. They really put an effort and put the work in. They really cared about what they wanted to present. That’s what I felt during the film – care and support, love, that’s what I felt. I never thought that I would be in the centre of the screen. In my country [Malaysia] we are really in the background. It’s a bit of fresh air. I got the support. My voice is there.

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  149 The whole shoot on the set was improvised. [I started dancing] in the traditional way of Malay movement . . . the movement is very feminine, so as a male, you, when you are involved with movement like that, it’s not appropriate, you know? But I enjoyed doing that since I was young. It’s part of me that easily flows and I can just be myself without any, second thought. In the last shot of the film the camera pulls back to reveal all three sets [the Malaysian home, the photography workspace, backstage at the club] in a vast studio. Sereena speaks directly to camera. [I got] emotional at the last take when I asked society to see me regardless of [the fact] I’m a transsexual. I’m also a human being who wants equal opportunity, equal love, equal care, equal existence. I  was screaming ‘see me as a human being, not just what my gender is. I’m just a human being, apart from being a showgirl or being transgender, I’m just a human being I  should be accepted as normal. I  should be given the given opportunities and be welcomed and shouldn’t have any obstacles’. That’s why I  was crying. I  was just looking at a camera, asking – What do you see? What I want them to see. I was making my own dialogue. I just simply went with the flow of it. I did it in one take and never gave it a second thought. It’s just what my heart was feeling. I just went with it. Sereena described seeing the film for the first time. I had no idea it was going to come out that way. I had no idea at all. I thought this story was going to be like before when I had done interviews. I thought it’s going to be like that. I never thought it going to be like it was. That was amazing. The film performed at dozens of international festivals including Imaginative in Toronto and Frameline in San Francisco. The premiere was at San Francisco. Frame line. That was the proudest moment. I felt the validation of my self-esteem, the boost of my confidence, the turning point of my life. When I got a call from Michael the director and from Margaret the producer and the email from Frame Line [inviting me] that was and is the turning point of my life – that is the validation. I had a confidence already. I was happy with who I am. Before I  did have a hesitation to admit who I  am. Now without any hesitation I have no problem talking about my sexuality now. I have male genitals. I’m happy to say that now – before I  still hesitated to. [I didn’t] like to talk about it. After that. Yeah, I  have

150  Praxis them. I like it. And you know, that is the boost of self-esteem to be the transgender person who I am today. I think the [hybrid workshop processes] gave me more comfort to be on the lens of the camera, to be confident in front of people. I had that already as a performer on a stage but on the camera, on the set I didn’t have much experience. Working with Margaret [the producer] and the crew gave me that confidence and comfort feeling like part of a family. I felt like everyone [was] equal. I felt like everyone had a voice. I did feel like it was a 100% equal, dynamic collaboration from an equal team. It was a perfect validation for me. My life is fighting for equality and when you have that in your life as I  did in the [hybrid workshop environment] you feel a sense of home. Notes 1 Meredith Burgmann. Former President NSW Legislative Council quoted in ‘The 7.30 Report, 15th June 2009. ABC Television’. The report quotes an NGO worker as saying the 6,000 aid workers visited the camp each year had not seen any slavery. 2 The filmmakers response to the controversy can be found at www.unitednotions. film/news/stolen. 3 While I do not agree with Winston that it is all John Grierson’s fault, he discusses these issues at length with erudition and rigour in Chapters 38, 39 and 40 (Winston 2008). 4 Greene discusses the impact of this review on his practice in his interview at the end of the book. 5 An exception is the recent feature documentary Subject 2022. Directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall. Also see ‘Subject’ Review: A  Documentary Nerd’s Delight (Fienberg 2022). It is also the focus of the article by Reeves Wiedeman, ‘The Documentary World’s Identity Crisis’ (Wiedeman 2023).

Bibliography Ayala, V. & Fallshaw, D. (Directors). (2009). Stolen. United Notions. Balsom, E. (2016). Kate Plays Christine. Review. Sight and Sound 11: 62–63. Behrendt, L. (Director). (2013). Clan. AFTRS. www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5gf 06mfRJA. Bonner, M. (Director). (2017). What Do You See? AFTRS. Brügger, M. (Director). (2011). The Red Chapel. Zentropa. Brügger, M. (Director). (2011). The Ambassador. Zentropa. Charlton, C. (Director). (2013) Frank. AFTRS. Chivers, J. (2023, February 8). Preloved: The Story of My Life | Shop Your Wardrobe. https://shopyourwardrobe.com/videos/preloved-the-story-of-my-life/. Dargis, M. (2017, April 17). Review: ‘Casting JonBenet’ Revisits a 1996 Murder. The New York Times. Dworkin, J. (2012, September–October). Review: The Ambassador (Mads Brügger, Denmark, 2011). Film Comment. Fienberg, D. (2022, June 14). Subject: Film Review. Tribecca. The Hollywood Reporter. www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/subject-review-1235163437/. Gomes, S. (Director). (2014). Preloved. AFTRS.

Subjects in hybrid documentaries  151 González, C. (Director). (2011). Robbed of Truth. Collective Filmworks. Green, K. (Director). (2017). Casting JonBenét. Netflix. Greene, R. (Director). (2016). Kate Plays Christine. 4th Row Films. Kohlstedt, K. (2016, September  26). Lessons from Sin City: The Architecture of “Ducks” Versus “Decorated Sheds”. 99% Invisible (blog). https://99percentinvisible. org/article/lessons-sin-city-architecture-ducks-versus-decorated-sheds/. Moody, L. (2013). Act Normal: Hybrid Tendencies in Documentary Film. Https://11polaroids.Com/2013/07/02/Act-Normal-Hybrid-Tendencies-inDocumentary-Film/. O’Brien, K. (2009, June  15). Dispute over Stolen Documentary. The 7.30 Report. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Tiexiera, J. & Hall, C. (Directors). (2022). Subject. Lady and Bird Films. Wiedeman, R. (2023, February 1). The Documentary World’s Identity Crisis. Vulture. www.vulture.com/article/tv-documentaries-ethical-standards.html. Winston, Brian. (2008). Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. 2nd ed., Rev. and Updated ed. London: BFI. Interviews Aldridge, F. (2022, November 24). Interviewed by Rachel Landers. Chivers, J. (2022, November 17). Interviewed by Rachel Landers. Damanhuri, S. (2022, November 21). Interviewed by Rachel Landers. Saunders, J. (2022, December 5). Interviewed by Rachel Landers.

Part III

Beyond Contemporary hybrid filmmakers; interviews with contemporary documentary makers working in hybrid documentary forms Introduction The following three chapters include a series of interviews with documentary filmmakers working at the frontiers of documentary form. Not all their creative output is hybrid documentary, and not all would describe their work as hybrid (although no one objected to me calling it that) but each is informed by their bold explorations in practice and the cinematic possibilities of documentary and sits within what I have referred to as the hybrid spectrum. They call it by a variety of names, verse documentary, documentary musical, docufantasia, cinematic non-fiction, but felt comfortable with discussing ideas of hybridity in the work that challenges and go far beyond the usual non-­fiction/ fiction blurry boundary mash-up definition. Some make both drama and documentary, some work in a range of genres – observational, performative, poetic, musical. While none of them subscribe to Nichols’s hierarchy of documentary modes, some indeed have had their films maligned by observational documentary practitioners of the 1980s/1990s and early 2000s. It made me wonder if the dislike of this mode by Nichols and Winston had more to do with late 20th-century practitioner zealotry rather than whatever assertions were made by direct cinema pioneers in the 1960s. I always started with versions of the same question – what drew/brought them to documentary? Given the diversity of their backgrounds – a Pinkerton detective (cellist and grad school dropout), a socialist, a formally trained actor, a visual artist, a camera person, a working-class Southerner and a film school activist) – the answer to this and where it led the conversation was rich and varied. A few of them went to film school but most did not. Some are at the peak of illustrious careers, others at the start. All are distinguished by their curiosity and courage to listen deeply to others and their own inner voice. Each is guided by a scrupulous set of ethical principles and a powerful commitment to the truth. The examples, references, influences and ideas they talk about make for a rich well for any documentary maker emerging or otherwise to draw from. DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-10

154  Beyond I have grouped these loosely into the following chapters: Chapter  7 Explorers: late 20th-century innovators in form. Errol Morris. Brian Hill. Chapter  8 Adventurers: 21st-century hybrid documentary makers. Lynette Wallworth. Anna Broinowski. Robert Greene. Chapter 9 New visions: Acclaimed debut hybrid documentary makers. Payal Kapadia, Kirsten Johnston.

7 Explorers Late 20th-century innovators in form – Errol Morris, Brian Hill

Errol Morris Errol Morris is a director of films including The Thin Blue Line; Gates of Heaven and The Fog of War, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 2004. In 2017, he made Wormwood, a six-part series for Netflix about a CIA murder and cover-up and American Dharma in 2018, which laid bare the deranged and disturbing Weltanschauung of Steve Bannon. He is the author of Believing is Seeing, Wilderness of Error and (with co-author Philip Gourevitch) The Ballad of Abu Ghraib. Is The Thin Blue Line a hybrid documentary? I go back and forth. It does share many of the traits I identify in Chapter 2. The film brings together an unreliable visual landscape of false memories with an incendiary, evidencebased investigation which uncovers an incontrovertible truth. One is acutely aware of its construction. Morris challenged the possibilities of documentary form at a time when exploration had stalled. But none of those things drove my need to talk to him. This did. In 2018, Errol Morris published The Ashtray: The Man Who Denied Reality. The book is a scrupulously researched examination and denunciation of Thomas Kuhn’s influential thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Morris had studied with Kuhn as a graduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Princeton and had been violently ejected from the programme when he questioned Kuhn’s position that science moves ahead in paradigm shifts that are incommensurable with one another. Incommensurability – a cornerstone of Kuhn’s Structure, without which, his philosophy of scientific change is little more than warmedover sociology. You cannot objectively compare the terms of one theory with those of another, Kuhn argues, because they are incommensurable. Think of it as an emendation of John Donne’s Meditation XVII. ‘Every theory is an island entire of itself’. (Morris 2018, p. 13)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-11

156  Beyond This postmodern stance nurtured relativism and eschewed notions of absolute truth based on evidence and investigation. [Morris] asked Kuhn, ‘If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is the history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us?’ (ibid., p. 13). Reading The Ashtray I was struck at how similar these concerns were to the ones I  had about postmodern ‘reality denying, blurry boundary’ documentary theorists and also how frequently his film The Thin Blue Line (1988) was held up as a seminal postmodern example substantiating arguments about a documentary’s inability to assert arguments about absolute rather than relative truth. Was Morris aware of this? RL:

One thing I’m trying to explore is the role of theory in documentary practice. EM: You know the Yogi Berra line, which is one of my favourites: ‘In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they’re not’. RL: What drew you to documentary? EM: Probably the fact that I could do it more cheaply than anything else, that I  was desperate. I  didn’t have a script on hand to turn into a movie. Maybe it was an act of cowardice. I’m not sure. I made one small attempt to make a movie, it didn’t really go anywhere. And then I  started, for whatever reason, making Gates of Heaven and I  kept shooting Gates of Heaven and editing Gates of Heaven. The first time I thought I might have done something of interest, I brought it around to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and we were projecting essentially a rough cut of the film. . . . It was a very, very small audience. There was Tom Luddy, who really couldn’t sit through the whole movie anyway. He kept walking around. There was myself, my girlfriend at the time, Sherrie Levine and Wim Wenders. Luddy only saw a part of the movie, I’m convinced, because he couldn’t sit still. He asked Wenders what he thought of the movie and Wenders said, ‘It’s obvious it’s a work of genius’. . . . I was shocked . . . Seriously shocked. RL:

I’m curious about what it was about you specifically, your background, your training, the way you thought, being a cellist and being a graduate student that drew you to experiment with form . . . Even if you weren’t conscious. EM: But I  was conscious .  .  . I  was conscious of how I  wanted to make the film from the very beginning, conscious of things I did not want to do. I saw it as a kind of anti-documentary documentary from the very beginning. I wanted nothing in it to be handheld. If you could identify certain standard characteristics of most documentary films most of them were handheld, direct cinema, cinema verité, whatever

Explorers  157 you want to call it. It had all kinds of different names. And I thought, Let’s take these documentary rules and violate each and every one of them. I mean the rules are crazy. When I was making Vernon, Florida, I had this character in Albert Bitterling, who I truly loved. He would say to me – ‘You know, Errol, you don’t break the rules. The rules break you’. I’ve always loved the line, and he’s probably right. I mean, who am I? Who am I to even think otherwise? But in Gates of Heaven – [I] put the camera on a tripod and never take it off the tripod. Frame everything in a very deliberate, exacting way – composed shots. Instead of the idea of manipulate nothing, touch nothing, change nothing, it became manipulate everything. And that also became part of the deal. It caused trouble from the very beginning because people who I hired to work with me felt, probably correctly, that I had no idea what I was doing and felt that they needed to somehow correct all of the things that they felt were misguided, wrong, whatever. RL:

With The Thin Blue Line was there something you could not say without adopting a quite different form to the dominant prevailing style? Is that true? EM: I didn’t know if I could or couldn’t. I just didn’t. I knew what I wanted and it took a long time to get it. I knew that I was doing these interviews, you know, one by one, by one by one, with people willing to talk to me, whether it was Dallas police officers or part of the defence team involved with Randall Adams’s criminal trial. Witnesses who were prosecution witnesses against Adams at his trial. I dug up a lot of people and put them on film, always with a fixed camera, always with a camera on a tripod, always lighting them as, essentially, little tableaux. I think many of the cameramen that I  worked with could never really quite understand the idea. They thought that they should be doing something else altogether. [But] I found enough people willing to work in the way that I wanted. RL:

The decision then to visually depict what are essentially false memories, when did that come? EM: I think that came pretty early. Of course, much of what we remember, what anybody remembers, is false. It’s like people have never heard of epistemology or never heard of some kind of gulf between representation and the world. I would try to remind people that the ­re-­enactments were to take you into a world of error in the search of truth. They are not the representation of truth. Truth is something which I am not, nor is anybody else, quite capable of just laying out for you on the silver screen.

158  Beyond RL:

When you came to create a visual language for how unreliable people’s memories were, were you influenced by anything? Were you just exploring form? EM: I  think there’s a lot of things that go into it. I  had been a private detective. I was interested in what goes into proving a case. I came to believe fairly early on that there was something truly wrong with this case. By statute, every capital murder case is automatically appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin. I  went down to Austin and started reading transcripts. Adams was one of the prisoners who interested me. I’m sitting in this basement library reading, and I felt there was something wrong there. And the line I always quote – I remember it’s a line that I was thinking at the time – it comes from, Out of the Past [starring] Robert Mitchum. I  quote the line incorrectly. I  prefer this quote to what’s actually in the movie. It’s very similar, but not quite exactly right. ‘I could see the frame, but I couldn’t see the picture’. And that to me sums up the Adams case precisely. He was framed. Maybe we don’t know exactly how, by whom and for what reason, but there are a lot of fairly believable theories, and part of it was not just proving Adams’s innocence, but somehow trying to understand the case and the role of each of the people in the case. RL: Everyone seemed to have trusted you. EM: A lot of people trusted me . . . I’m finishing a movie on John le Carré and John le Carré [was] talking about . . . being a double agent. How when he was actually at Oxford, he betrayed a lot of his fellow students posing as a communist when he was working for MI5. Lying, it’s another way of describing being an agent or a double agent or a triple agent or whatever. And I think I did something very much like that [on the Thin Blue Line] without any of those grand titles. Well, these people [like le Carré] saw it as a higher cause representing the Queen, Great Britain . . . The cause of national interest is considered to be a very important and higher cause. What was my cause? I just felt he was innocent. And at first, I wasn’t sure, but I became increasingly sure. RL:

Do you have any knowledge of contemporary documentary theory? Bill Nichols and his modes and Michael Renov from USC or Brian Winston? EM: I don’t. RL: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because contemporary documentary theory started to boom in the late 1980s, early 1990s. These three men are one side of it. Their position is that all documentary is somewhat fictive or sits on a blurry boundary of fact and fiction. It is a discourse of sobriety. It is subjective. It cannot make

Explorers  159 absolute truth claims. It’s postmodernism, basically. And it’s very like [the assertions Kuhn made] and the thing I’m really interested in is that these coincide with, and are deeply influenced by, The Thin Blue Line coming out around this time. Certainly, a lot of people would regard that film as a postmodern documentary. EM: I would say, at least in my mind, it is so deeply anti-postmodern . . . People can say there’s no such thing as truth until it involves something in their own lives, and then suddenly they change their tune, often abruptly. Truth doesn’t exist, except when it involves something I did. And then it does. RL: EM:

RL:

EM: RL: EM: RL: EM:

Do you regard postmodernism and relativism as particularly destructive for documentary? It’s particularly destructive for everything. If there’s no decision to be made about truth and falsity then where are we in the world? One of the things I  started to play with in this essay [he was cowriting an essay, The Postmodernist and the Drowning Man about Janet Malcom’s ‘relativism’ (Morris and Kearney 2023)] is this idea that language was invented so that we could embody truth and falsity. How would anyone say that The Thin Blue Line is postmodern? It’s anything but postmodern. It’s the opposite. It’s an attempt to identify what’s true and what’s false. Trying to figure out what’s true and what’s false is not something that’s done by obeying documentary rules, by avoiding re-enactments. It’s by looking at evidence, thinking about the nature of evidence and seeing what kind of inferences can be made from it . . . There’s such overwhelming evidence that Adams is innocent and that David Harris is guilty. It’s almost like a joke. (I quote Linda Williams’s essay ‘Mirrors Without Memory: Truth, History and the New Documentary’). ‘The Thin Blue Line as a prime example of this postmodern documentary approach of the trauma of an inaccessible past .  .  . with its attendant ideas of relative hierarchized, and contingent truth’ (Williams 1993, p. 12). Fascinating. And what does she base this on? The assertions by some contemporary documentary theorists, that we are so subjective, that we pick up a camera and pretend we are telling the truth but we frame, we edit. Well, everybody is subjective. However, evidence can be used in order to make a case for things being one way or the other. Why is that lost in postmodernism? Whoever developed this postmodern bandwagon, to which I  think Janet Malcolm has made a number of contributions, nasty contributions, and no one calls her on it. .  .  . She’s like unassailable.

160  Beyond Untouchable. Kuhn in many ways is unassailable. Untouchable. He’s like Trump for a MAGA Republican. I don’t get it. I  find The Structure of Scientific Revolutions nonsensical. I mean, this is a long, long discussion in and of itself. But part of my problem with Kuhn . . . I never bought into it. He had a cult. He had these graduate students who were just, I mean, it was just kind of shocking. And you would be read these rules and laws about whiggishness and this, that and the other thing. Take Rashomon. Years ago, I  can’t even remember where I  wrote it. I think I wrote it for the New York Times or something. I wrote an essay on the Rashomon of Rashomon. For many people, Rashomon is taken to be an articulation of some postmodern idea of truth. That truth is variable. Truth is subject-dependent . . . relative. Everybody sees the truth in a different way. And there is no one truth, no centre. Saul Kripke’s version of it: ‘Oh, it’s obvious. They’re all lying’.1 Then there’s the Errol Morris version: ‘They’re all self-deceived’. The conclusion of Rashomon is not that truth is subjective. The truth, the solution is that people all record the world in different ways. There’s a subjective element to the way they see the world, but that doesn’t mean that truth itself [is relative]. In The Thin Blue Line do I think that it’s relative? The question of Adams’s innocence or guilt? No, no, no, no, no. A thousand. A hundred thousand noes. RL:

Certain theorists assert there is a hierarchy of value: direct cinema at the bottom, reflexive documentary, which they would regard The Thin Blue Line and other films that you have made since then, when you’re seeing/referencing the construction, at the top. What are your thoughts? EM: I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting about [documentary], that it is a heterogeneous category. It allows a lot of really different, radically different styles. There’s a big difference between Sans Soleil and Fred Wiseman. RL: Documentary is a broad church. EM: Yes . . . . but truth is not a broad church . . . I don’t know what a blurry mix of fact and fiction is, really . . . I’ve just been writing about photographs – I don’t think anybody writes about this. Maybe they do and I just haven’t read widely enough. But photographs are neither true nor false. Photographs don’t have truth value. They just don’t. Whoever thought that they did? You put a sentence next to a photograph, then you can say, true or false. Maybe. It depends on the sentence. But otherwise, no. The Thin Blue Line for me is an effort to prove the truth or falsity of certain things where I have the evidence. Maybe not all the evidence is even in the

Explorers  161 film. When I went back and interviewed David Harris with a tape recorder because my camera broke on a Friday. . . . One of the things that I said, and it’s not recorded anywhere, you just have to take my word for it. I  asked David, to me it’s the central question, ‘Were you alone in that car when you were stopped by the Dallas police officer?’ So, one way of thinking about the whole case is, was there one person or two people in the car when that car was stopped? If there was one person in the car, David Harris is the killer. If there were two people, then I  suppose it’s up for grabs in some way. And you could argue on the basis of additional information. But if David Harris tells you that he was alone in that car, he’s telling you he killed a cop. You make the appropriate inferences yourself. That’s the heart of the movie. It’s a deeply anti-postmodern idea. Who cares about the re-enactments? Who cares about any of it? I care about the investigation. Does the investigation lead you to conclude that David Harris is guilty and Randall Adams is innocent? Whether I’ve contrived 50, 100, 10,000 re-enactments is irrelevant, totally irrelevant. Do the re-enactments help you understand the case? Yes. Do they prove anything? Not really. Do they serve to discredit the four – Well, there are five major witnesses. One of them who’s the killer. The policewoman who gave contradictory testimony. The three whackos, the Millers and Michael Randell. At the end, you’re presented with a case that’s pretty strong. It’s like The Ashtray. People keep coming back to, ‘Did Kuhn throw the ashtray at Errol?’ Anything about any of the arguments against The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? No, not really. Anything about the investigation behind The Thin Blue Line? No, but should he have used re-enactments in a documentary? It’s stupid. I do believe that [postmodernism] fostered a kind of sloppy thinking where you can’t really say anything intelligent about anything. Are you really telling me that there’s no fact of the matter about who did it? There’s no way of answering the question, ‘Did Randall Adams shoot the cop?’ Are you really saying that? Well, yes, there is a way of telling. Not in all cases. I’ve done enough investigations to know that you can have a situation where evidence is lost or damaged. The way I  sometimes phrase it is, if you’ve lost all of the information about the Battle of Hastings, then how do you say anything about it? That doesn’t mean that there aren’t truths about what happened. It just means that they may be inaccessible or not accessible by us. RL:

In 2017 and 2018, you made Wormwood, American Dharma and you published The Ashtray. In Wormwood, there’s a truth that cannot be found in an American Dharma, it’s a truth that is abandoned, and in The Ashtray, it’s a truth that is betrayed.

162  Beyond This seems to be something that is really driving the work. They all have a strong central notion about the pursuit of the truth. Is it something that you’re finding that you really need to talk about more urgently now? EM: Probably defending the whole idea of truth. I  mean, my whole life has been framed by things that are just unassailable. The death of my father when I was two – true or false? My father died of a massive heart attack when I was two years old. I have no memory of him. True or false? My only sibling, my brother died of a massive heart attack at the age of 40. There are things in the world that defeat postmodern interpretations because there is a world out there. I even use a quote in The Ashtray from Philip K. Dick: ‘Reality is that which remains when we cease to believe in it’. I think it’s good to be reminded of that fact. What’s really stupid is this idea that truth can be guaranteed by some form of representation. Oh, if I don’t use ­re-enactments, it’s going to be truthful. No, that’s not going to guarantee truth. Nothing guarantees truth. It’s thinking about stuff, weighing stuff, examining stuff. RL:

Werner Herzog. What do you think of his [ecstatic truth] Minnesota declaration? EM: Oh, fuck that. RL: (laughing) That pretty much sums up how I feel. Okay. Why did you go back and write The Ashtray? Why now? Why did you revisit that? EM: Because the issues interested me, and they’ve always interested me. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions always struck me as a truly mediocre book, wrong, bogus. The history of science really still interests me. [People say] Oh, well, maybe The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is bullshit. But how about (Kuhn’s) much heralded book on Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo and the Scientific Revolution? But what is a revolution in science? I don’t have a feeling that the move from an earth-centric solar system to a heliocentric solar system was the revolution that everybody imagines it to be. RL:

Reading The Ashtray, it seemed like [your disenchantment with Kuhn and his theories] was a defining moment in your life, not just intellectually but also emotionally that has driven a lot of your pursuit of the truth. EM: Well, I thought [the book] is not so stupid. . . . I like a lot of the things in it, and there’s even that emotional stuff about being arrested at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrating against the Vietnam war, being arrested at Princeton.

Explorers  163 I felt so sad at Princeton. Most of the graduate students I met, with the exception of Norton Wise [who went on to obtain a PhD in nuclear physics and a PhD in the history of science and is a professor at UCLA], were a bunch of yes-men. They were just dunderheads. In 1972 there was of course a debate raging about the Vietnam War. But many years later, I’ve come to realize there was another debate embodied here, a debate about truth – whether truth is socially constructed or whether truth ultimately concerns the relations between language and reality. I feel strongly that, even though the world is unutterably insane, there is this idea – perhaps a hope – that we can reach outside the insanity and find truth, find the world, find ourselves. Making The Thin Blue Line was one of the most important experiences of my life, something that I remain really, really proud of – helping to overturn the conviction of a man who had been sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. There are endless obstacles to finding the truth. You may never find it; it’s an elusive goal. But here’s something to remember. The world is out there – like an undiscovered continent. And it’s our job to go out and discover it. It’s one of the deepest lessons that I’ve taken away from my experiences at Princeton and beyond. (Morris 2018, p. 174) RL:

I think there’s nothing sadder to me than shutting down a student’s curiosity or ability to question and disagree. That seems so awful. EM: Well, [Kuhn] had that great line. I’ll credit him with that great line about me. It’s somewhat true. I said to him, ‘You won’t look through my telescope’. And he said, ‘Errol, it’s not a telescope. It’s a kaleidoscope’. And it is a kaleidoscope. I can’t really argue. I’m interested in a lot of things. I’m still, I think, a curious person . . . I like thinking about stuff . . . That’s the greatest pleasure. And documentary should be a way of thinking.

Brian Hill Brian Hill is a multi-award-winning UK-based writer/director of both documentary and drama. He is one of the most inventive documentary makers of his generation, always playing at the frontiers of form. His decades-long collaboration with UK poet laureate Simon Armitage forged a remarkable practice of co-creation with many of his subjects in verse documentary and documentary musicals including Drinking for England (1998), Songbirds (2007) and Mumbai High: The Musical (2015).

164  Beyond RL: What brought you to documentary? BH: I got into documentary entirely by accident, and I had no thought in my head whatsoever about being a filmmaker, about being a documentary maker at all. I  was working in the 1980s among left-wing local authorities who decided to try and offset the worst excesses of Thatcherism. I worked for London Borough of Greenwich in the Community Affairs Unit, which comprised a women’s unit, a police monitoring unit, a race relations unit and the antipoverty unit (where Brian worked). And my job was to get people to claim the benefits they were entitled to, to represent people in Social Security tribunals. It was great. It was progressive, it was exciting. And we thought, we were doing something important. And then one day, a colleague of mine rang me and said, Look, I’m not very well. I’m not coming today. I am supposed to speak to a woman from the BBC. Could you see her instead? She was researching a new daytime show called Advice Shop, which is all about giving advice to people about housing benefits and Social Security benefits and consumer loans. I gave them some feedback because they didn’t know what they were thinking or what they should be doing or what should be the coverage. Then a week after that, they said, would you be a consultant on the show? And my boss said, That’s fine. And it meant half a day (per week) we would go to the BBC and tell them what to do, give them advice. A few weeks after that, they said it would be a full-time job because it’s clear that they’d never get anything made without somebody who knew what they were talking about. So I  started working at the BBC as a researcher, and from there I  started getting interested in documentaries. I began working for a producer called Paul Watson. One day Paul said to me, ‘I’m looking for two directors to go to Australia and to make this thing called a docusoap. I said, ‘what’s that?’ Because of course in 1990 nobody knew – docusoap wasn’t a common term. He said ‘we’re going to use the conventions of soap opera. We’re going to have 30-minute episodes, multiple characters, interweaving stories and a cliff hanger ending’. I  said, ‘I’ll go’. And he said, ‘No, no, you’re not experienced enough for this’. And then a month later, he came up to me and asked me if I was still interested. What he said at the time was, ‘maybe you are experienced enough, maybe you could do it’. But I subsequently learnt was that he’d offered it to everybody, you know, offered it to all these really experienced documentary makers and nobody wanted to go out to Australia. So I  went, and we made Sylvania Waters (1992), which was the thing really that put me on the map. I suppose more importantly what it did was it taught me that there’s more than one way to make a documentary. I’d never been to film school which meant I didn’t absorb the dogma that verité is the only way to make documentary.

Explorers  165 If I had been to film school at the time, I think I would have been imbued with the sense that verité is everything, that the only way to make a documentary is observational. And I remember, you know, coming to Australia to make Sylvania Waters and I told everyone that this is what I was doing, and they were ‘oh no we’re observational documentary makers’ as if what I was doing was something dirty. I met Australian documentary maker Bob Connelly at a party and he wasn’t impressed. RL:  Sylvania Waters was extremely successful and somewhat controversial BH:  Love it or hate it – at the time on BBC One, Sylvania Waters was getting five million viewers. RL:

Quite early on in your career . . . You made this decision to explore form quite radically. Why? I  mean, Saturday Night (1996) is very different. BH: It was partly because I didn’t go to film school [and] it’s partly meeting Paul Watson who opened my eyes to the ideas of documentary and partly I think I understood pretty early on that documentary making is about storytelling and I looked at a lot of documentaries and I thought they’re not really that interested in telling stories. They’re interested in bearing witness rather than trying to tell an engaging story. This is important because it’s a big issue. And so when I  thought about what I wanted to do, I wanted to make documentaries about serious subjects. But I also wanted to keep an audience and make them entertained and try out new things. The first big step in that direction was making a film called Saturday Night, and it was very fortunate that the commissioning editor was a man called Stephen Lambert, and he had the kind of brief that would never happen today: to hire the filmmakers he wanted to hire and to give them free rein pretty much . . . you can do whatever you like. I told him I’d like to make a film about Saturday night. He was keen and pretty much commissioned the film on the spot. When I thought about it later, I realised it had to have a bit more going on than just be a film about what people got up to on a Saturday night. It would have to explore money and the class divide and the increasing wealth gap in Britain. I felt this strongly, given that I had a background working on anti-poverty issues. We decided to make it in Leeds in the north of England. And I started thinking about the city and the city having a voice – being almost a character in the film. And the more I  thought about it, the more I thought it should be something poetic and kind of lyrical. And the more I thought about that I realised it could actually be poetry. And then a friend of mine, entirely coincidently, rang me and told me about a long-form poem

166  Beyond that had been written about the council estate we’d both grown up on in Rochdale, in the north of England. The estate was pretty rough and was part of the patch for a young probation officer called Simon Armitage. He wrote a poem called Xanadu about the Ashfield Valley estate, which is where I and my friend had grown up. I’d long gone from the Estate, but I read the poem and recognised the place and the types of people who lived there. Simon lived near Leeds, and it all seemed too coincidental to ignore, so I met him and told him about the film, and he was keen to get involved. He came up with this idea to write – not to give the city its own voice, but to write something different, what he described as the Leeds of the Mind. I didn’t really understand it at first, but the more we talked about it, the more I understood. And his idea was to complement [with narration by Armitage in verse] or deepen, do something different with the images that we were seeing on screen together, describing an alternative reality so that the viewer could have more than one layer of meaning. What you saw on the screen was sometimes given an alternative reality in verse. For example, a shot of three muscle-bound bouncers walking towards camera in slo-mo was described as ‘three Yorkshire astronauts take steps on the moon’. Or a man selling hotdogs to drunks became a man handing out canapés at the Queen’s garden party. It meant a viewer could make sense of the images on screen, but they could also imagine a different kind of world. Drinking for England (1998) was the next film we made. Simon and I decided to make a film about the culture of drinking and the strong relationship that many British or English people have to alcohol. Having made Saturday Night we decided to push the form and try something else with the new film. The something else became verses written by Simon, based on interviews I’d done with each character. Each person would then recite their verses as part of the film. We said from the outset that they could change what Simon had written; it was their story after all. I remember a woman called Donna Boyce, when I took her verses she read them and became tearful. I thought we’d got something wrong, but she just said, ‘he’s described my life perfectly in a handful of verses’. And I  think, not so much Saturday Night but certainly in Drinking for England, what we were able to do that was different to verité was by making a kind of intervention that was the distillation of people’s stories and concentration of their stories and getting them to perform. I  think it does several things. I think one is that, you, as an audience, you don’t just see the person in the documentary as being a person who’s got a terrible drink problem. You see them reciting poetry and you think, Oh, there’s something more about this person. I think you give them – not so much a dignity – but you kind of start to understand that they’ve got a creative impulse.

Explorers  167 They’re not just the subjects in my documentary. They’re kind of co-­ creators. And I  think once you understand that about people, that they have this creative ability, I think you feel differently about them. I think you wouldn’t necessarily get that in an observational documentary. And I think also, poetry is very much like film in that both can express complex ideas and emotions very quickly and in a very concentrated form. I think once you alloy them together, that makes them even more kind of persuasive, really. I think what we achieved that we couldn’t have done in an observational film was partly that about the way you perceived the contributors, but also I think you can get to a deeper truth with people. There were elements of observational footage in the film, but when it was interspersed with the performative element, I believe you start to get at more profound truths about people. You can get at aspects of the story that you wouldn’t necessarily get to otherwise. With Drinking for England, we got very strong, positive reactions to it, not necessarily from other filmmakers, some of whom were a bit sneery about this new form, which was very different to their own traditional way of working. I think they felt this isn’t documentary, but people liked it. A lot of people respond to this idea of performance, I  think, in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily have expected. People didn’t think it was fake, even though it was obviously manufactured. Sometimes, you have to trust the audience. I mean, I was terrified the whole time we’re making Drinking for England and I  just thought, this is such a bad idea. It’s like a really bad student film, you know, it’s nonsense. And it was only about four weeks into the edit I thought actually it’s going to be pretty good. The next film I made with Simon was Feltham Sings, which was the first ever documentary musical. We filmed in the biggest youth prison in Europe, and we had everyone singing songs that they co-created with us. It had a huge response, particularly amongst young people, who loved the idea of a documentary in which people were rapping about their lives. They’d never seen anything like it. I was pleased because the young audience is the hardest to get. RL:

What kept these films; Feltham Sings, documentary musical set in a youth prison (2002) and Pornography the Musical, featuring sex workers (2003) Mumbai High: The Musical (2015) what kept them documentaries and not fictions? BH: They’re a mixture of observational stuff plus some talking head interview and then the heightened reality of the songs. So what keeps them documentary? It’s not just that they’ve got some observational documentary in them that keeps them documentary [although] I think that helps. But the fact that the songs or the poems are based very much on their experiences . . . It’s a kind of distillation and concentration of their story, and none the less truthful for being that.

168  Beyond I would never question whether it’s documentary I  think it is because it’s rooted in their reality, and it goes deeper into their reality. The West End of London is full of theatres showing musicals, in which people tell stories through music and song. People have been doing that for thousands of years, and there is no reason why documentary can’t use those methods. And I’m always surprised that more filmmakers don’t use those tools that are available, why do people sort of doggedly stick to being observational and not kind of making those interventions. RL:

Let’s talk about this idea that some would describe your films as on the frontiers of blurring this fiction/non-fiction line. I mean, what are your thoughts about that? BH: [If] somebody says what you do? I say I work in fiction, and I work in documentary. And sometimes in that area between the two. And I’m kind of deliberately vague about that because I think once you start talking about the work being fiction, then you do stray dangerously into oh well. It’s made up. It’s not documentary. I mean we use these terms and we kind of bandy terms around and sometimes we’re not always very clear about what they are. But I don’t think that in any of this, for want of a better term, hybrid work that I do that its fiction or fictionalised because it’s very much based on in people’s stories. RL: What are you bound by in the documentary world? BH: I think for me, first and foremost, I have to be faithful to the people who [are in it]. I take it very seriously, the fact that somebody says, yes, I’ll be in your documentary. And I think that’s a big thing. I’m certainly not blasé about it or take it for granted and I’m always grateful. And I think that my part, the contract, although it may be an unwritten contract, my part of the contract is I  deal with them faithfully and I represent them faithfully. And it’s not me telling their story. I’m helping them to tell their story. And that’s an important distinction. And part of the way I’m helping them tell the story is by unleashing or giving an outlet for their creativity. And I think, one of the things I learnt early on in working like this was that everybody has creativity. Everybody has a creative impulse. People aren’t always allowed or given the facilities to let that show. So for me, it’s about that. It’s about saying let’s go on a journey, let’s tell your story together. And you can sing, you can dance, you can do whatever you’re comfortable with. So that binds me, really, the strict rules I have about it. That I have to be truthful, and I  have to represent them. When I  was a young director [like others I was] really arrogant and I didn’t really think about the audience that much. I just thought, well, if I like it, that’s good enough for me and what I’ve come to learn is you must have regard for how your audience will respond. If you don’t make it for an audience then who are you making for? Yourself?

Explorers  169 That’s awful! I think those are two things – my duty to the audience and my duty to the contributors. RL:

You talked about your relationship to your subjects in these films, these exploratory forms, as co-creators. Does innovation in form really shift the power and shift the nature of the relationship? BH: They’re not actors. They’re not being paid, so there is a power imbalance to a certain extent, but I  try to redress that by this invitation to say, we want to make this film, but I’ve got this strange idea that people might dance in it, people might sing, people might do all these strange things. Nobody goes, ‘Oh, wow, that’s really weird. I’m not sure I want to do that’. People generally go, ‘Yeah, great. I want to do it’, and I think just by taking that step and by inviting them to contribute and getting their ideas, I think you shift the balance of power there. I do think they get more out of it than people in a traditional documentary. RL: What is the philosophy or the ideas guiding your practice in this way? BH: It’s one thing to practice and to make films and another thing to theorise about them. I think you find that a lot of filmmakers don’t analyse too much about what they doing or why they are doing it. I think, we just get on with it, but having been put on the spot by you, I suppose. I mean, first and foremost, I want to make films that mean something and are about something important. So it kind of begins with that really – a kind of idea to do something. And then I suppose the philosophy is to be true to that story, to try and tell that story in a way that it feels true to me and hopefully to my audience and will tell us something about the world. I don’t think that the work I do is going to change the world significantly; if it does make some kind of positive change I feel that is important. I’m really pleased when I hear stories about, yeah, it may change somebody’s mind or it’s altered somebody’s perception of something – in some cases it can have an effect. But that’s not really part of my philosophy. I’m not trying to change the world as such. I’m trying to shine the torch, shine the light on dark corners and tell their stories, whether it’s about pornography or prostitution or alcoholism, drug abuse or knife crime. RL: Are you guided by a pursuit of the truth? BH: It really kind of depresses me how that kind of desire for truth or veracity is abandoned in favour of a sensational story and in favour of telling the story the director wants to present rather than a character in a documentary. A cinematographer friend was on a shoot and saw the director writing in a notebook prior to an interview. He asked him

170  Beyond if he was writing out his questions – the director told him he was writing out the answers. So he was trying to make something that would please his boss, and the channel and drive ratings up. But he certainly wasn’t interested in telling the truth. I see it all the time. Now in British television, the kind of celebrity culture which is so much about hiding the truth I feel as though I have to stick up for, a small way for what I believe in. If you’re not trying to tell the truth. If you’re not trying to do that, then what’s the point? Note 1 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, a philosopher ‘who propounds . . . thoroughgoing realism. There is a world outside of our language and us. Language is not just about us and our thoughts: it directly – unmediated by our opinions and beliefs – connects us with the world’ (Morris 2018, p. 9).

Bibliography Hill, B. (Director). (1996). Saturday Night. Century Films. Hill, B. (Director). (1998). Drinking for England. Century Films. Hill, B. (Director). (2002). Feltham Sings. Century Films. Hill, B. (Director). (2003). Pornography the Musical. Century Films. Hill, B. (Director). (2007). Songbirds. Century Films. Hill, B. (Director). (2015). Mumbai High: The Musical. Century Films. Hill, B. & Woods, K. (Directors). (1992). Sylvania Waters. ABC. BBC. Morris, E. (Director). (1988). The Thin Blue Line. Miramax. Morris, Errol. (2018). The Ashtray: Or the Man Who Denied Reality. YBP Print DDA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, Errol & Kearney, Joshua. (2023, January 21). The Post Modernist and the Drowning Man. https://airmail.news/issues/2023-1-21/the-postmodernist-and-thedrowning-man. Williams, Linda. (1993). Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary. Film Quarterly 46 (3): 9–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.1993.46. 3.04a00030. Interviews Hill, B. (2022, November 29). Interviewed by Rachel Landers. Morris, E. (2022, December 12). Interviewed by Rachel Landers.

8 Adventurers 21st-century hybrid documentary makers – Lynette Wallworth, Anna Broinowski, Robert Greene

Lynette Wallworth Visionary Screen Artist, Lynette Wallworth has been described as Australia’s ‘most influential filmmaker’ (Baum 2020). While she made an award-­winning feature observational documentary Tender (2013), most of her practice is immersive and interactive and working with emerging technologies. Her two virtual reality works Collisions (2016), made with the Martu community of Western Australia, and Awavena (2018), made in partnership with the Yawanawa people of Brazil, won the Emmy Award (2017 and 2020) for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary. Wallworth’s projects have featured at Venice, Sundance and the World Economic Forum in Davos. She has worked across an astonishing range of screen forms and with a diverse array of collaborators – each work evolving from the next. RL:

What brought you to work in creative non-fiction? What was it about you that was attracted to working with the real? LW: I’m very uninterested in fiction. I’m absolutely interested in what’s happening in our world. I think from the perspective of ‘How can we discuss what’s going on between us?’. I’m a devotee of that. I believe that the arts can be the place where we begin to seed the discussion and where we can initiate the conversation. Apart from someone like Ursula Le Guin, someone who’s writing about the possibilities of where we are going from the perspective of ‘let’s imagine the future we want to create’. That’s the only kind of fiction I’m interested in. Everything else that is fiction as distraction, or fiction as entertainment, I honestly have no interest in. I’m driven by an idea that there is work to be done. There’s work to be done in the world, and my skills are in the arts. So that’s where I do it. RL: How did you come to start to explore form in non-fiction? LW: Hold: Vessel (2001) that was the breakthrough work. It was commissioned by Ross Gibson for the opening of ACMI (Australian Centre DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-12

172  Beyond for Moving Image). When he came to me, [there was] this huge big pit in the ACMI space, it was like a big swimming pool. And so he said he wanted to commission me to do an immersive work in this space. And I went and physically looked at this ginormous pool-shaped space. But he also gave me the freedom to come at it in whatever way my mind and my creativity would take me to. I had recently been on the Great Barrier Reef with some documentary filmmakers who were filming the coral spawning. There were documentary filmmakers and scientists. I was with them. We spent this amount of time just focused, like just focused on watching one little piece of coral for hours to see if it was going to spawn – waiting for these egg and sperm bundles to go up. It was a kind of moment where you’re so highly focused that you lose time. So I said to Ross, I’m very interested in immersion and the way I would like to approach it is to create something which is about the immersion that happens when we lose time. I don’t need it to be physical immersion. I don’t want to use this entire space and be surrounded by 360-degree video. He [had been saying] I could have a motion platform that would move the entire audience with screens around this whole space. I said, I’m going to work on the concept of immersion that happens when you are so highly focused everything else falls away and you don’t need a big screen for that. In fact, I’m going to use a very tiny screen and what I need, what I’m going to do, is project footage from reality. This is footage shot by some of these same people who were focused on the coral documentary footage. I also went to scientists who were using different technologies to observe corals, and I went to an astronomical photographer, David Malin and spent time with him to import his content. So everything was coming from the real using all sorts of different technologies. But I wanted to create something that you got lost in. My screen size was the size of a bowl [the audience member held]. It was like 30 centimetres wide, and it was actually incredibly difficult to deliver because there were very few people who could help . . . there were few lenses that we could position at a distance that would actually give you a projection that small. I had to work with the Art Gallery of New South Wales and ACMI to technically solve how I could get projectors in the ceiling bouncing off first-surface mirrors to project the image down and be caught in a bowl. Technically, we worked it out. I wanted the space to be dark so that all you focused on was these three beams of light and there was nothing else in the room. I had a special floor built in there so when the image fell, it fell into the floor. You couldn’t read it on the floor. And my concept was the audience member had to carry the in screen, the lens-shaped glass bowl, into the work and find the focal point in a midair. In other words, I was working on the concept of, you know, the concept in physics in observing the duality of light that the observer impacts the experiment. So I made us, in my mind, no longer just the observer, but the observer who impacts the experiment. We’re part of the experiment. So, the shift for me in that work that was so radical was I went from someone who’d been a visual artist, who’d made paintings and photography and installations which

Adventurers  173 people came and looked at, to someone who made, for the first time, the observer as central to the completion of the work. That work didn’t exist unless someone was in the room participating in it, holding the viewing device, finding the focal point. If there was no one in the room observing it, the work was light falling into the floor, which no one could read. But the thing I didn’t anticipate [was a discovery that] proved so joyful. To make the bowls I tested with many materials and found that glass was best, so I worked with a glass artist who understood what I needed. We found that a layer of white glass on the interior and a layer of clear glass underneath gave the best projected image, no bounce back. She slumped the glass over lens-shaped moulds and then blasted the inner layer with glass beads to give a very fine surface. This was the kind of surface that we used in the beginning of cinema. We used to project film in a cinema onto sandblasted glass . . . and I had to find the lens shape which had to match your eye. I had these beautiful shelves made, very beautiful Perspex shelves outside the space to hold the bowls when they weren’t in use. [The idea was] you would go in and you would catch, in a bowl, three beams of light with imagery which came from the Great Barrier Reef often using specialised equipment to record. [You would see] what was happening at that time, 21 years ago, when marine biologists were saying these kelp forests are going, these crown-of-thorns are taking over these corals are decimating them. It was that long ago that marine biologists were worried about them. I was working with how sensitive your eyes were to this dark space. So the first beam of light you would encounter was in the red spectrum, much more vibrant, and then the next one was in the greens and yellows, and the last one was in the blue and much more monochromatic and subtle. So, the longer you stayed in the space, the more sensitive your eyes were, the more you saw. I imagined people going from beam to beam with their bowl and then bringing it outside and then returning it to the shelves, the beautiful shelves and then someone else coming along and taking them. What I  had not anticipated, even though I  conceived of all of this and, I was making a comment about climate change – 21 years ago – the effect of climate change in coral reefs. I hadn’t anticipated what people would do when I made them part of the work. And the most beautiful thing was, if people took these bowls and they would stay in the space until someone else came in and then they would offer the bowl to the next person. And that’s the thing I hadn’t imagined. And it taught me everything onwards, Rachel, because what it taught me was about gesture. It taught me that we can read things like ‘how do you bring an audience into something?’. If you want to call the audience participants – true immersion is when you don’t have to instruct people when you work with their instincts. What do I  instinctively most want to do? When you’re holding a bowl and someone comes in, your instinct is to do this, is to offer it. And so, in this space, suddenly I  saw this most banal and sacred gesture being acted out, people offering the bowl to the person coming after them. Handing on a precious bowl holding this fragile environment and that, of course says

174  Beyond everything about what we are doing, actually, in terms of climate change and the generations who will live with our impact. And that shifted my trajectory because that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want, I have never wanted, to be that kind of artist who’s making commentary for everyone else. I want to bring us all into this space together. I’m trying to make [the] work say, ‘Shall we look at this?’ That’s probably the simplest way to talk about what I’m doing. ‘What if we look at this together?’ Which means we all have to, in some way, feel we are participating. [That] we are participants. RL:

What is it about you and your background that made that such a transformative moment, as a screen artist coming to the real? LW: I  mean, I  think like many artists my experience was of being somewhat of an outsider in terms of the way I interpreted the world – saw the world. I didn’t find myself represented in popular culture much. I didn’t feel myself there. And I think that a lot of my early years was a pretence that I could fit in whilst interpreting and seeing the world in a particular way and so, in a sense, this process of making this work and having people respond to it has been hugely affirming because it’s sort of saying, ‘This is what I see’. Sometimes I have the sensation, I’m placing this interesting thing beside this delicate thing, beside this special thing, beside this, unusual thing. And they make sense to me – that’s how I perceive the world. And when I did that on my own, it was isolating. And probably the sensation was that I  was not interpreting the world in the way most people did. The associations I made were often too lateral. I suppose what I was doing in those works was saying, ‘What if I can just show you this? Can I just show you this? What do you think about this? How do we contemplate this? If we just put these things together?’ and so in one way, much of my work is about creating a community of strangers .  .  . an attempt to create a community from strangers. And it’s a community also that I can be part of. RL:

I think all your work is hybrid, and I’ll ask you what you think that means in a moment. Collisions is a classic ‘what if’ in which you construct a meeting with Indigenous Martu elder Nyarri, who had witnessed a catastrophic Atomic Blast and Oppenheimer ‘the father’ of the nuclear bomb. It’s a ‘what if’ that didn’t happen couldn’t have happened – you make happen. Some people would say that the work is playing with the boundaries. Is it non-fiction? What is it? LW: It’s non-fiction. Maybe it’s informed by, kind of, cultural understandings from the Martu and from other Indigenous people I’ve talked to which resonates with my own sensations.

Adventurers  175 At times an artwork can create something that can exist outside of linear time. It can pull things together so we can make real a moment which we might call filmic but which I  might say, ‘let’s make this moment happen’. And honestly, with Collisions, I had a very strong instinct that there was a conversation that should have happened between Oppenheimer and Nyarri, and Oppenheimer should have, in some way, outside of time, had the opportunity to hear from that man about the implications of what he was doing, what he was about to do, what he did, and that Nyarri should have had the opportunity to speak to Oppenheimer about what that decision he’d made to go ahead with developing and detonating that technology did and what that meant for Nyarri. My first instinct was I had to create a space for conversation that should have happened and didn’t. And I can’t say to you now that I feel I created something, like, a ‘what if’, as in ‘what if this had happened?’ I can say to you that something happened and what happened was Nyarri got to stand in front of a screen, what looks like a screen and is a screen and an opening. And he stood to be in conversation with this man who had impacted the trajectory of his life so radically. And in the world I come from – which is a world where I think what we imagine can be as powerful as what we think we just experienced – that meeting happened. Collisions makes a meeting happen that needed to happen. That’s how I think about it. RL: So it’s not a fiction because it did happen. Is that correct? LW: It did happen. Something needed to happen. And in an observational documentary, people would film what is happening. In this work my first instinct was something needs to happen. Something should have happened. It didn’t happen. So let’s construct the conditions for this thing to happen. And that’s what that meeting is. And everything that goes before it and everything that comes after it is pivoting around that moment when Nyarri and Oppenheimer look at each other, even though one is on the screen. But they both are saying the same thing from their own world views. And in my world view there’s something that can be brought into existence, which I probably don’t have the words for. I would say we made a meeting happen. We did it in the desert in Nyarri’s homeland. And he spoke to that screen, to the person on the screen. And I think if you accept a Martu view of time, which I  have to, because Nyarri called me into his world to assist him in sending this story out. He did that with an intention. It wasn’t mine. But my belief is that what we create in an artwork can be real, is real, even if it might look like it’s a construction, it’s real enough to change what happens

176  Beyond afterwards. And it might be real enough to change how we think about what happened before. RL:

It’s not strange in the Martu world view to talk or communicate with your ancestors or spirits and people from other places. That is their non-fiction reality. You’ve not just worked in bleeding edge forms of technology. You’ve worked in very traditional forms. I  mean, Tender [about a community in Port Kembla taking a radical approach to how Westerners deal with the dead] is an observational documentary. What are you bound by in those worlds? I  mean, you’re obviously guided by your imagination, you’re exploring form. What are the boundaries? LW: So the boundaries I  honour above all else is the relationship. How I would say this to myself is that afterwards, whoever sees that work, the Yawanawa, [Chief] Tashka [the shaman] Hushahu, Nyarri, all of the Martu sitting around the campfire or the community from the Port Kembla Community Center, that when those people experience that work, they see themselves as they feel themselves to be. So that’s my goal. And I  will keep working at it and working at it to get that – so that they see what they recognise as themselves, not just that they see themselves in the film. They see themselves not as they are being seen, but they as they feel themselves to be. They feel it to be them, they recognise themselves as they feel themselves to be. And that’s using probably a hypersensitivity, I would say hyper-empathy to those people that I’m filming. I’m in a relationship with people and I’m understanding them as I’m showing them. And my goal is that when they watch what is made, they have an intense sense of ownership over it because it feels like them. RL: How do you regard ideas about the truth in your work? LW: What I just said to you is probably my version of truth, that authenticity. I mean I’ve been to a therapist with my sister once. I understand that you can be looking at the same scene, and you can have a radically different view of what happened there to someone who was also there and experienced the same thing. I understand that. I  understand our perspectives shift. My relationship to the truth is this generally. My works are relationship-based, and most recently they are based on the fact that it’s specifically an invitation – and I  don’t mean in a kind of cloying way. For the Martu or for the Yawanawa even for the Port Kembla community, it turned out that there was something about my ability to see and know those communities that they trusted. So I’m going to say that’s my relationship to the truth that I don’t want to veer from who I understand these people to be and the relationship

Adventurers  177 that exists between us. I’m not going to manipulate or reorder that in any way. That’s my goal. It’s hard. It’s hard work, Rachel, isn’t it? It’s hard work because it’s like this incredible, delicate work of especially if, you’re working in concert with them in order to reveal something you’ve mutually agreed upon. Then I’m constructing. It’s not like I’m going back in and asking, say to the community of Port Kembla ‘is this edit okay’? No, I don’t do that. I’m holding a position which is agreed upon with the community about what it is that I’m showing. It’s an authentic relationship. I’m not going to misrepresent them and I’m not going to lie to them. But there are other people who have to struggle with that in making documentary. I talk to those people. I mean, I certainly talk to people who’ve made documentary, who’ve had ruinous relationships with the people they’ve made the documentary about, because they’ve shown what was not agreed upon. So that’s interesting. Isn’t it. Because in a way, the conversation shouldn’t be about truth, it should be about lying or deception. That is the thing that leaves the mark. And that’s the thing that destroys trust. That’s the thing that causes us to fail to value. RL:

It’s almost if the story exists already outside of yourself.

It’s like I’m tracking an animal I’ve never seen and I know it’s there and I’m seeing the signs of it. It’s showing itself to me in various ways and my goal is to see it. That’s the construction of the work. And this way it’s so awesomely wonderful to make a work because something is showing itself to me and I’m having the opportunity to reveal it. I’m watching these, these like subtle things or, or I’m hearing something that could be a little comment someone makes, but it just really resonates. And I know there’s something there. Honestly, I hate not making work because making work is so joyous to me. It’s really like the most phenomenal sense of being shown something going on – this incredible often intimate, I would say, revealing time frame, which is incredibly intense. . . . There’s some relationship of honouring what exists there. The [community] resonate with who I  am in some way, my being, how I move through the world, how I think about the world and when I think about relationships, how I think about time, how I think about art, how I think about these things is something other than the words, the names we have for them. So, the invitation is to bring that way of being into their world view and to have more and more things shown to me so that I can mould them into this particular technology and reconstitute them into this form that allows them to be shared. RL: How would you describe hybrid? I’m not asking you to define it. LW: I really love this area where we have no names. I mean, that’s when, you know you’re somewhere interesting when we don’t have the

178  Beyond words for the thing. I work in emerging technology, often we don’t have a name for this thing which is more helpful because the less of a known definition you have for something, the freer you are. When we were making Awavena and in discussion with Hushahu and Tashka about very many things and I would say, ‘is this okay, can we do this’? I ask all of these questions. And at one point I realised that that we didn’t have a name for the thing we were doing and I needed to ask them ‘What is this thing we’re doing right now’? What is this thing that we are sending out which held in it, very importantly for them, the imagery and prayer or presence of the old shaman who had died within the context of this film. So, I realised that we were heading to Sundance [to premiere the work], and I didn’t know how to talk about what this was. So in Sundance terminology it would be called an XR work because it included VR and AR and we were having to write, you know, the guff that you write around something. And I realised I didn’t know the language and I said, ‘What should we write what is this thing? What do we call it? What is it?’ And the Yawanawa said very clearly to me ‘It’s a transmission’. That for me makes the work hybrid. At one point we filmed things that happened there, they enacted things that happened there. They, they told a particular story, but at the same time, what are they doing? Like what are they really doing? They’re transmitting something to you, intentionally. And there’s a moment in that, in Awavana, and people often commented on it when Hushahu looks at you directly, both on the bridge and at the end. Now, she – and Nyarri was the same – she’s saying to me ‘What is happening here?’ And I say to her, Hushahu, you are a shaman, whatever you want to transmit. Whatever you want to tell people with your eyes and through your mind. You can do that – use the technology. Hushahu says all technology could be sacred because it’s just thought in a different form. So for her, what is she doing? She’s taking this thing, which we might call now a virtual reality film, and she is using it as a shaman to transmit something to you, as the viewer, through her eyes and her presence. I am meeting you inside your thinking, inside of your being, inside your own perception of reality. So go back home and don’t forget this encounter. (Hushahu. Awavena 2018) And I believe she does that. You know, here in Australia we had these anecdotal stories which we tell, and beyond Australia too, about Indigenous people not wanting to be photographed. Interestingly, I look at her. She’s taken that, she’s flipped it. She’s not saying that’s not true. She’s not saying it’s not powerful to take a photo of someone. She’s saying it is powerful to take a photo of someone and what can you do with that thing? So you just take it

Adventurers  179 from me and I have no impact or input into that. That’s one thing. But what if I am conscious in that? That’s another thing. And she did that and Nyarri did the same thing. Nyarri was continually, obsessively saying to me, ‘Where will the Europe people be’? They weren’t in the space. He knew they weren’t there. But he was asking me in time, in another time, where will I be? And I would say, they will be wherever that (360 degree) camera is, they will be there, their eyes will be where those lenses are. And so he would again do the same thing, give or transmit. And there’s something of that capacity in some of these people who I have been lucky enough to film with, and that is how they are using the technology. And that for me is what’s hybrid. It’s an ability to say we don’t have necessarily the words or names for this, but it’s not literal and it’s not linear and something can happen in it which ignites our imaginings in a different way. And we call it real, and let’s call it real because it’s really existing in this moment. RL:

I mean, do you have a sense that there is a blurry boundary in your work between what’s fiction and non-fiction? It seems there’s a very clear, clear universe? LW: You know, it’s feels clear to me. As I  say, I  construct, I  construct opportunities like it’s not like Nyarri said, I  want to see a video of Oppenheimer in the desert. So you could call that a construction that I’m making. But is it very truthful? It is in that interaction that’s happening. Yes, absolutely. There is, as I say, an impulse or a provocation, this thing that should have happened didn’t happen. What if that does happen? And what if we pull these into this moment in time? That’s what I’m saying to you in my work in that scene – that’s real. His reaction is real. This conversation is real. And you know what is so interesting about that, Rachel, when I first took my work to Sundance. The first work I  took to New Frontier was Evolution of Fearlessness. Eleven women filmed life size who were responding to touch. They appear before you and they’re not speaking. They don’t speak to you. It’s just their presence, and they’re looking directly at the person who is interacting with them. The interaction is simple, you place your hand on a small ember of smoky light on a glass doorway, and one of the women I filmed emerges from darkness, come towards you, life sized, and places her hand on your hand. It’s about a moment of video touch, and it’s incredibly simple and incredibly powerful because of all these women convey only with their eyes and their presence. Now, I’ll never forget this, because a lot of filmmakers came to see that work, including a lot of documentary filmmakers. And I kept getting asked the same question by people, who are used to having people in front of the camera, how are you getting this incredibly real reaction from these people?

180  Beyond How is that happening? It was like this is something mysterious. To me, it wasn’t a mystery. The conditions that we set up were based on relationships, and what happened in that moment was sacred. So for me it’s not blurry, but it’s very carefully navigated, but it’s always towards the authentic. But you know what? You don’t know what you’ll discover unless you’re prepared to accept [your lack of knowledge and authority] and then ask. So my position I would say is that is the most helpful thing to have to do in making this kind of work. I don’t know if it’s true of all hybrid work, but I’m going to say I think it’s all true of authentic documentary. You have to enter with a position of humility, that you accept that you do not know. And so, then you’re asking a series of questions sometimes very, very, very simple questions which can have incredibly surprising answers and what I don’t like and wouldn’t like would be to work with a filmmaker who thinks they know, because then I would say ‘What position is the filmmaker working from?’ It’s not curiosity – it’s assumption. I am tracking an animal I have never seen. So I come from a position that I am basing the ‘filmic’ exchange on trust and relationship and revelation, but I also accept I don’t know. And that, for me, is where the rubber hits the road in terms of what unfolds. And I can’t just trust my interpretations. I also always have to check. I have to stay in the place of unknowing, becoming more and more sensitive to what I am able to see. That’s where the ethics are for me. The ethics are around humility. Anna Broinowski Dr Anna Broinowski trained as an actor at Australia’s prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). For over two decades she has produced provocative, formally innovative and successful independent documentary features. She has won a swathe of international and national film awards including Australia’s top award for documentary directing three times. She is also an author, academic and documentary vice-president for the Australian Director’s Guild. RL: What brought you to documentary? AB: A happy accident. I was never going to be a documentary maker. Documentary to me was supremely boring. I avoided it. It was like broccoli. You ate it because it was good for you. I trained as an actor at NIDA. And I realised very quickly that I wasn’t going to be like the actor two years below me, Cate Blanchett. I didn’t have the goods to work on screen, but I still had a hunger to reach audiences. So I figured my quickest pathway to reach audiences with what I  wanted to say about the world was to become a film director. My plan was always to make feature films.

Adventurers  181 Fast forward two, maybe three, years after I graduated from NIDA, I’ve got a play I wrote about a Japanese honeymoon bride and her disgruntled Sydney tour guide on at Belvoir Street. I’m having tea with my brother, and we’re swapping notes about the crazy underground cultures we both knew growing up in Japan: gay and lesbian cabaret artists, AIDS activists, sex workers, rockabillies, Bosozoku bikers, Yakuza, the Otaku. And we realised no one in Australia knew about this. The mainstream Western idea of Japan in 1995 was ‘Japan Inc’: a corporation of salary workers who died of overwork. So we wrote down on a napkin very quickly, a crazy sketch for an idea called Hell Bento!! In Japanese, ungura shakai means underground society but ‘ungura’ can also mean hell. Our idea was to present a bento box from hell using animated sushi to represent different subcultures we were exploring. And this is what I mean by a happy accident – this one page fax, which was not a film pitch but a bunch of pictures of sushi representing a concept, happened to land on the desk of the then SBS commissioning editor David White – may he rest in peace – five minutes after he’d hung up from the AFC (Australian Film Commission), who had said, If you ever come across anything really extreme you would never normally broadcast, we’re there. He rang me straight away. He said, I’m giving you $250,000 to make this one-hour documentary. We love it. We made the film. It was a hit, and I’ll never forget the turning point, which made me realise that One: I  wanted to be a filmmaker; and Two: documentary is not that bad and doesn’t have to be like broccoli. We’re sitting in the state theatre with 2,000 people, and the audience laughed at the jokes we’d found funny in the edit, but thought no one else would. We were outsiders. We were young. We’d never made films. That moment when 2,000 strangers in the State got the humour, got the emotion, got what we were trying to do, changed my life. I was hooked on the possibilities of documentary. I think I’m particularly interested in re-enactment and hybrid because I came at documentary with the sensibility of an actor, a performer. It was the reaction of the audience that made me stay the course. RL: Why did you decide to start to explore form? AB: My first three documentaries [Hell Bento!! (1995), Sexing the Label (1997), Romancing the Chakra (1998)] were basically pastiches of each other – they were me learning to be a filmmaker. I never went to film school, so in each of those films, I would learn a little bit more about our craft, and I  was happily relying on a narrative approach that had worked well for me, which was interconnected chapters united by a meta-thematic preoccupation. But I was also still a writer, a playwright and an actor. I believed every idea should find its form. Helen’s War (2004)1 was when I started to become much more interested in linear narrative and the three-act structure. Part of me still wanted to be a fiction filmmaker and I thought, let me see if I can create a documentary that

182  Beyond will engage an audience the same way a well-made three-act drama might do. Helen’s War was the beginning of that journey, with me playing a devil’s advocate character, following the heroic, quixotic quest of my aunt, antinuclear activist Dr Helen Caldicott, to stop the illegal invasion of Iraq, partly by trying to send the Pope to Baghdad as a human shield. The film is definitely a throwback to the conventional three-act hero’s journey, you know – the hopeless, doomed quest, the passion of the woman, the obstacles she faces, her revelations at the end – all of that. After that film, which was successful overseas and this gave me a lot of confidence, I started to get excited about how you could actually create in documentary form a story as engaging as, or even more engaging than, the independent Australian dramas I  was seeing in cinemas at the time. That became my quest. I’m going to prove to the world that documentary can be riveting and get bums on seats, that it can present an extraordinary immersive journey. And guess what? It’s true. I wasn’t in a vacuum of course; Fahrenheit 911 had blown everything up by winning the Palme d’Or. I think I was probably breastfeeding my newborn when the headline that led to my first feature, Forbidden Lie$, grabbed my attention. It was an exposé by Sydney Morning Herald journalists Malcolm Knox and Caroline Overington about the non-fiction memoir Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri. The book purported to be a true story about the honour killing of Norma’s best friend in Jordan, and it became a bestseller in Australia in the lead up to the Iraq invasion, capitalising on growing anti-Muslim sentiment post-9/11. But Knox and Overington’s article said the book was entirely fabricated by Khouri, who was not what she’d claimed to be – a Jordanian virgin with a fatwah on her head for bravely speaking out against ‘evil’ Arab men – but a married mother of two and alleged con woman from Chicago. I can remember thinking oh my god, she’s a fraud. Norma Khouri lied. It’s all bullshit. She’s lying low in Chicago. No one’s heard her side of the story. The minute I saw that article, I thought, this is a film, this is something that will get bums on seats. To me, Forbidden Lie$ (2007) presented the perfect opportunity to make a heist movie. I was still ambivalent about documentary being boring. I’ve always been a fan of heist movies and I realised Norma’s story, in a sense, told itself within the heist structure, and that if we followed that structure, we would get people into the theatres. RL: I mean, it’s more than just a genre film. I think. AB: Yes, the genre is just the cladding. I’ve always been intrigued about what is truth in documentary. I think this comes from my acting training. What is more truthful, a person sitting like you and I now with a couple of photographs of their family behind them and a well-placed lamp telling you how much they love their children, or a person saying, I love my child so much I had this dream last night, and then we see them inhabit the dream – which is a more truthful encapsulation

Adventurers  183 of that person? I’m interested not just in what characters say, but what they do and what they feel. As an actor, you’re taught to think about the three motivations, what you want physically, what you want emotionally, and what you want subconsciously, which is often something not even you know you want, right? So I look at Norma Khouri. The idea finds its form is something I’ve always followed. Norma’s a con artist. Norma’s a pathological liar who deceives almost as often as she breathes. Norma finds life lived at a normal pace boring, she enjoys the thrill of the chase, she relishes it, she needs the adrenalin or she gets bored. She’s a con and an artist. This gave me carte blanche to play with techniques of perception and manipulation in the film. I’m deliberately holding ‘truth’ up for question. In the first 20 minutes I deceive viewers into thinking they’re watching a fairly worthy honour crimes documentary because the overall message of the film is Trust No One, especially not a documentary filmmaker in this post-Iraq invasion world of the Big Lie, spin and fake news. Fake news is touted as this recent Trump-era phenomenon. But fake news in my film’s iteration began with Colin Powell, the shill, holding up his little prop, the fake vial of Anthrax to support America’s WMD claims against Iraq in the UN. That was a big con. That was big state-backed lie. That’s what I was trying to echo with Forbidden Lie$. I was taking the audience on a deliberately deceptive journey, but then making them part of the deception so they would start to question the story, to analyse and deconstruct it for themselves. To understand that ‘truth’ as it is sold to us is constructed. To interrogate the idea that truth is now a commodity, and facts no longer matter. The film is playing with the whole idea of fake news, it’s a cautionary tale long before fake news went mainstream, because I was so concerned at how easy it is for super powers to manipulate people into backing illegal invasions and the wholesale slaughter of innocent people. I thought okay, in this terrain I’ve got a narrative opportunity to use green-screen, illusion, CGI trickery, all sorts of stuff. As long as I let the audience in on it at some point, which was important because otherwise I’m just a trickster myself and that wouldn’t help the message. The second thing is that as an actor I responded to strongly was Norma’s potboiler novel, which was riffing on popular Western perceptions of the Middle East at the time, where all the Arab men are cardboard cut-out, twodimensional, evil, misogynist characters, and all the women are suffering victims with beautiful bodies hidden under their burkas and gorgeous eyes. What a gift – I had to dramatise that book, right? And I had to do it in a cheesy, over-the-top, slightly on-the-nose way because it was a way of saying to the audience, ‘Yeah, I know it’s melodramatic crap, but just wait’. Norma’s book pressed a lot of creative buttons for me. If I had to go deeper, maybe I was still a repressed drama director, I couldn’t wait to play creatively with her book in the film.

184  Beyond What keeps all my films ‘documentaries’ even though they play with the form is what you said to me once, which is ‘don’t make shit up’. In a sense, with some ingenious wordsmithing, I  can say I  don’t make shit up in my films. They are all constructed but their stories are not fake. Construction and dramatisation, the use of fiction techniques, actually enhance and add authenticity to what Forbidden Lie$ is saying, which is believe nothing, everything’s constructed. Each ‘truth’ has its own way of shaping reality. RL:

Having rewatched Forbidden Lie$ recently I’m struck by how evidence based it is. Scrupulous, meticulous, completely unassailable research. Evidence. I actually don’t think it would work without it. AB: It wouldn’t work at all. Everything had to be absolutely bedded down in terms of all the allegations, corroborating things more than three times, all of the usual things you do as a journalist. I made sure I did this because I felt it also bought me the right to then be much more fast and loose and imaginative with the style. (I asked Anna what, as an academic, she made of the postmodern scepticism and blurry boundaries that infused the documentary theory of Nichols, Renov and Winston et al.) AB: Well, I’m not going to let a bunch of academics tell me how I  can make the films. But I  find Nichols very useful actually, in trying to understand what I do. I never contextualised my work until I did my PhD, and that was eight films in. I was just doing what my instinct as a storyteller told me to do. And then I read Renov and Nichols . . . Holy fuck, there’s a whole lot of thinking around this. There’s theory! And what struck me most was that what we do in hybrid documentary in the 21st century is filmmaking come full circle. We are back at the beginning of cinema, in those very early days where there wasn’t even a distinction between drama and documentary, where people were making newsreels with cardboard ships, where the Lumiere brothers were doing gags with hoses and no one cared. (While Anna challenges the distinction in funding tranches (and respective rules) in Australia that insist on distinguishing between financing independent drama features and independent documentary features she does recognise the blurry boundary theoretical stance of Renov et  al. is problematic for subjects) AB: How do I present my documentary idea to a potential subject? Well, obviously I’m not making a fiction of your life. I’m telling the story of your life. I’m going to tell the story of your life in the most truthful way I  know. I  want to capture a three-dimensional portrait of you. That means not just what you say, what comes out of your mouth. It

Adventurers  185 means what you feel, it means what you experience. It means how you are in the world. And to do that properly, I would love it if we didn’t just do interviews, which is what most people do. I’m very interested in all sorts of stories you might tell me about what it is to be human, how it is to live your life, and together we’ll come up with some ways of capturing that on screen that might not be interviews but are truthful. And you may be surprised by the things I’m suggesting, but, you know, ride with it. Tell me if you feel it’s faithful to you or not. If it isn’t, we’ll move on. We’ll do something else. But one thing I am sure as hell, I’m not just going to sit you down in an interview. That’s probably how I’d talk to a lay person about what I try to do. I think Nichols’s categories are a useful way of understanding different devices we use in documentary. But as I always say to my students when I’m showing them Nichols, you can do one or more or all of the above or even something else. To be honest I like the all-encompassing simplicity of your version, but unfortunately it doesn’t translate into academic speak – which is don’t make shit up. I think to tell the truth as effectively and authentically as you possibly can, go further. That means harnessing a whole suite of filmmaking devices available to you, many of which would we would normally associate with the fiction canon. I think what I do is non-fiction using fiction techniques. RL: Do you mean like cinematic? AB: Yes, cinematic. That whole arsenal of stuff that drama filmmakers do, which I  don’t think documentary makers do enough. Let’s just let’s embrace this wholesale – as filmmakers, all those tools are available to us to use. (While Anna doesn’t subscribe to a ‘Darwinian’ hierarchy of modes, she does prefer to work in a ‘reflexive’ way. She (like Morris and Hill) has also encountered her own share of obstacles, challenges and dismissals with and by observational documentary purists.) AB: I’m much more in the Rouch Cinema Verité camp than the Direct Cinema camp. I’d rather be a fly in the soup than a fly on the wall. I think the fly in the soup is more honest because the audience is aware of the filmmaker’s presence. I absolutely do the reflexive thing when I open Forbidden Lie$ – we see the paraphernalia of the camera and then zoom past all the lights and the crew into Norma and then past her through a CGI window that takes us out into the desert. At the time I  did that, not many people were showing the film apparatus in documentary. The key touchstone for me, the idea of an opening revealing the filmmaker’s tools, was American Splendor. I was really inspired by that film. I was also inspired by Touching the Void in terms of

186  Beyond that change that happens 20 minutes in, when the film switches from being about honour crimes to being about a dissembler. In the first 20 minutes of Touching the Void you think it’s a mountain climbing movie. Twenty minutes in you realise, oh shit. It’s a film about love, friendship, death, betrayal. And suddenly you’re in a Tolstoy-level drama, right? There are different films I was drawing from when making Lie$, including every great Hollywood heist movie from The Sting through to Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve. That reflexive thing of the visible camera crew, coupled with the backwards bouncing karaoke ball and the cheesy re-enacted music video with the flash on his teeth, plus all the green screen trickery and shenanigans I’d done with Norma, made a Screen Australia rep say to me, ‘too many movies here. One of them’s not a documentary at all. You need to just make it about Norma’s crimes and take out all the stuff about the book and that karaoke video’. She was basically saying ‘What are you doing? That’s not documentary!’ It’s what . . . RL: What Errol Morris refers to as ‘the documentary police’. AB: The doco police. Thank you. I love that. Thanks to them documentary is still a dirty word commercially. It’s boring, it’s mind-numbing. People’s eyes glaze over. We called Forbidden Lie$ a real-life thriller because we knew we’d get bums on seats if we hid that it was a documentary. We were right. The final thing I’m governed by in my approach is ethics. I call it the Beer Test. Will your subject, after they’ve watched your film, whether or not they like it, still sit down and have a beer with you. Very Australian. I don’t drink beer, I drink bourbon. But it works as metaphor. What your subject is doing by sitting down and having a beer with you is allowing themselves to be a fellow human being and share a moment of connection. At the end of the day, we’re all humans. ‘I still like you enough to have a beer with you. You haven’t totally fucked me over’. That’s maybe a low bar to set, but that is my test. (Anna’s film Pauline Hanson: Please Explain (2016) is a portrait of Hanson, a far-right Australian politician who had been disrupting mainstream politics for 20 years. After Hanson’s imprisonment, for electoral fraud, (left wing ‘greenie’) Anna followed her comeback ‘Fed-Up’ campaign. While it appears to be her most overtly verite film, but it too is highly and artfully constructed.) AB: I wanted to pull back from the trickery. The idea dictates the form. To me, the Hanson story is not about deception, beyond the political machinations surrounding her. If anything, Hanson, despite herself, is unfailingly honest at all times about exactly what she’s thinking and feeling at any point in time. She is not reflective.

Adventurers  187 I said to her at the very beginning I’m a left winger born in Japan and a Greens voter and I really don’t endorse most of what you say, Pauline, but I  think you’re the most interesting woman in Australian politics today and if you were a bloke someone would have already made this film. She was in because I’d been honest. She knew where I stood. And most of the film, the sparks are flying because I’m constantly challenging her off camera, I’m saying, ‘come on, you’re feminist. What are you doing?’ You know, we’re always at each other, we’re constantly engaging and to me that’s like acting. That’s where you get the interest – it’s when you have conflict, the spark in the eye. In terms of form, Hanson: Please Explain was more observational. But again, directing is about getting performance, even in a documentary interview. How do you get interesting footage out of a subject who is not by nature reflective? Hanson resented being sat in a chair and asked to talk about key moments in her history. ‘It’s happened. Why do I have to go there again?’ was her attitude – she found it intensely boring. She’s not someone given to deep introspection. So how do I get a performance out of her? I took my cue from The wonderful, horrible life of Leni Riefenstahl. I found all the locations where Hanson had experienced major life changes and interviewed her in situ: the prison where she was jailed under Howard and Abbott, the Ipswich hall where she was pelted with eggs when she launched One Nation and ripped her dress. I put her in the fish markets where she first started to feel resentful about Vietnamese immigrants. I put her in the courtroom where she was convicted of electoral fraud and her life fell apart. And suddenly this woman came alive because she’s instinctive, she went, ‘Yeah, I remember this’. And off she went. It was dynamite. So the film’s not just observational, it’s highly mediated to get a performance. In other words, it’s using drama techniques, the sorts of techniques a director would use with a method actor to help them find their character’s truth. (Aim High in Creation! (2013) is a hybrid film within a film. Using Kim Jongil’s manifesto on cinema and directing as her guide Anna travels to North Korea to meet Pyongyang’s master filmmakers to learn how to make her own piece of activist propaganda in Australia.) AB: It played very successfully in Europe, in particular Russia, where it made them nostalgic for the Soviet propaganda of their past. Again, the idea dictated form. I wanted to humanise the North Korean people in the minds of Western audiences, I was driven by the same sense of injustice and dread I felt making Forbidden Lie$. Just as they had dehumanised Arab men to justify an illegal invasion, the powers that be were now characterising North Korea as part of the axis of evil,

188  Beyond









and it really felt it was only a matter of time before some nasty conflict happened, in which the victims were the North Koreans. There were only three stories allowed in the Western media about North Korea: the people are brainwashed automatons, it’s an evil regime, everyone’s starving. And I knew from having watched their films that these stories were just one tiny part of the truth, there were so many dimensions to the North Korean people and their lives, as there are in any country, especially an isolated country that no one knew about. You could tell this straight away from the films, which are full of light and joy and hope and dreams and pain and, you know, flowers, lots of flowers.  Perhaps, Aim High is an example of where my motivation to get this message out to the biggest audience possible meant I chose a form that might not have been best for the material I ended up getting, because I  was given extraordinary access to this amazing country. The form I  chose was a quest movie in which I  presented as a kind of gonzo journalist, a female Morgan Spurlock. I needed to be front and centre, but it wasn’t just a spurious decision. It was also practical. There was no way I could fly my Australian actors to Pyongyang or fly the North Korean filmmakers to Sydney, so I had to be the bridge. I was by necessity the go between.   The other reason I  chose the Morgan Spurlock ‘showman’ model was that at that point in my career, I was consumed with a feminist desire to show the big boys that I can do it too, that women can do this. I was sick of all of these Vice Guide To Film types with their hip beards going, ‘Holy shit, man, I just got into North Korea!’ you know? And I  also liked the idea of leading this ragtag group of passionate actors who have this almost impossible, ridiculous quest to make a North Korean style propaganda movie, to stop a coal seam gas mine in a Sydney park.   When I think about it, Aim High is part of a triptych. I’ve made three films about deception. Forbidden Lie$ is about deception through the lens of a con artist, Aim High in Creation is about deception through the lens of propagandists. Not just North Korean propagandists, capitalist advertisers and greenwashing mining companies too. Advertising, in a sense, is propaganda without ideology – it uses the same techniques to manipulate the way we think and feel, to change how we behave. The third film in this trilogy is Uluru & The Magician (2022), which is about deception through the lens of magic. So con artistry, propaganda and magic.   I’m interested in deception because it’s something you constantly confront as a documentary maker – film is inherently manipulative so are you lying, or are you using craft to depict the truth? The mere act of making a film, the minute you start even thinking about it, you’re using techniques that might be regarded as deceptive – yet they are

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also techniques of artistry. What do you choose to keep in? What do you choose to keep out? How do you frame it? What do you ask? Where do you put the music? What do you want the audience to feel? All these questions we ask every step of the way. Every film is full of a thousand, tiny, often invisible – let’s call them manipulations, not deceits – in service of whatever it is you’re trying to say. I’m not bothered by it. Everything we do from development to the shoot to the edit is construction, that’s what all filmmakers do.   But I like what you’re saying, which is documentary makers using hybrid techniques feel almost compelled to ask that extra niggly question, you know, ‘oh, hang on, should I look at this ethically? Is this right?’ I think maybe this comes back to what non-fiction filmmakers know – which is if we simply followed the Direct Cinema mantra to the letter and let life play out unmediated in front of the lens, let the boom drop in shot, avoid tricky edits, be ‘truthful’ by avoiding artistry of any kind, the film we’d end up making would be boring. Without mediation, life at normal speed is dull. To make it bearable you condense the story. It comes back to time, I think. To tell the whole story in 90 minutes we do all of this sleight of hand that you don’t see, but you end up somehow seeing the truth.

RL: But that’s no different to writing any non-fiction book. No, I know. So why all this sturm und drang about it? I mean, it’s just what you do as a filmmaker. It goes back to the contract you make with your audience when they press play on your film or walk into a cinema, that what they’re seeing really happened and the people they’re seeing really did it. That’s a major contract, it’s built into what we do. That’s why we are worried and why we do think about it. But going back a little bit further, you also feel beholden to your characters. Documentary makers should be worried. Worried about what we’re doing to our characters. They’re giving you their lives in a box, and you are playing, whether you like it or not, and let’s face it we’re all flawed, but you’re playing God with their life in the edit. That’s sleepless night territory, right? You don’t want to betray someone and cause harm – what gives you the right, even if you hate their politics, to stuff up their lives with your little film? If you don’t want to do that, then of course you have to play with a straight bat and question every little manipulation a fiction filmmaker might use without thinking about it. You’re going to make sure it’s in the service of a higher truth. Also, that it reflects the contract you made with your main subject when you sat down and said, I’m going to make this film with you and I’m doing it this way. I think the word hybrid exists only because the documentary/drama binary exists. If that binary didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have to say hybrid. If I was talking to a bunch of documentary students, I might explain that a

190  Beyond hybrid film is one in which you’re going to be using a bunch of techniques we might conventionally associate with drama storytelling in your film, and that’s fine. I love the Mark Twain quote ‘fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t’. That quote sums up why I am passionate about documentary and why actually, after all these years wanting to be a drama director, I never became one. Paradoxically, when you make that contract with your audience – you’re watching a documentary, the person on screen did these things, they’re happening for real – it gives you massive creative freedom. As long as that contract is established, you can be as creative as you like and use whatever performative and dramatic techniques serve the truth you’re trying to convey. In fiction film, you have to consistently work to suspend the audience’s disbelief and the parameters within which you can do so are restrictive. In documentary we’re free. That’s why documentary keeps evolving. That’s why we’re having this conversation. We’re still at the beginning of what doco can do, it’s a wild west of a format and then you throw in the post-truth world, what are we going to end up with? You know, it’s almost limitless. Robert Greene Robert Greene, filmmaker, scholar, writer, critic and teacher, is one of the foremost adventurers in making hybrid documentaries (with the caveat that he once called for a death sentence on the term). Greene’s documentaries have undergone an extraordinary evolution from early works such as Kati with an I (2010) to Actress (2014) to Bisbee 17 (2018) and Procession (2021). Bisbee 17 uses contemporary inhabitants of Bisbee, Arizona to enact the violent forced deportation in 1917 of 100 miners attempting to unionise. Procession features six adult survivors of child sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests working with Greene as co-creators to make short films confronting their pasts. Robert was an inaugural Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellow in 2015 and served on the US Documentary Jury for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. He has edited many features, including Her Smell. Greene has written for outlets such as Sight & Sound, Indiewire and Hyperallergic. He cocreated the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri and serves as its Filmmaker-in-Chief. RL: What draws you to documentary? RG: There’s an excitement in the form. I just love the possibilities of it. It also comes from trying to write screenplays as an undergrad and hating the process so much. In fact, when I’m editing fiction films now, I basically refuse to read the screenplay because I just I hate scripts. I hate writing them, I hate reading them. I hate the process that they are connected to. I know their usefulness and I’m talking specifically for me.

Adventurers  191 As an editor of fiction films, I don’t need the script to be able to work through the film. I  may have to reference it to understand how to make the thing work. But I  don’t, I  don’t enjoy them. And I  certainly don’t enjoy writing them. I don’t like the mental process of trying to come up with ways to animate human beings. I love making fiction. I love editing fiction, and I certainly love watching great fictional films. But the process doesn’t work for my brain . . . I’m drawn towards an in-between state. And documentary, non-fiction is necessarily an in-between state. I think my films emphasise that in-between state, the tension between the creative impulse and the resistance to the creative impulse that is the real world. I love that tension. I love that structural tension. I love the thing that that creates. I love it. In my practice I come to the films with fully fleshed-out ideas – like ‘I want this shot. I want it to feel this way. I want it to do this thing. I want, conceptually, for this thing to mix with this thing’. I have a lot of concepts, and when the film becomes magical is when my concepts get blown up. Over the last four films I have really felt like, oh, that is what I [actually] intended, which is bizarre because the concept gets blown up many times. But then in the end I’m like, yeah, I made the film that I meant to make, which is why I love that process. I have the concept. I have the thing I want to do. Then I hold on to it for dear life as reality takes me in all the ways that it takes me and takes the collaborators that I’m working with in all the ways that it takes us. And then often times we end up with something that feels very much like the thing I had in mind in the first place. I just love that feeling. I love all that. RL:

Looking at your body of work it seems you’ve always really wanted to play with form from a very early point and been really consistent with that. What is that about? Wanting to play with documentary non-fiction form? RG: There’s the therapy response, of that in-between space. As a survival mechanism from my working-class childhood, I  probably created a character of myself and being aware of that. Then when I turned on the camera, the documentary camera, I instantly was attracted to the same things that I saw in films that I love, like Cassavetes films and Fassbinder films and Godard films and Frederick Wiseman films and Chantal Akerman films and all these movies where there is an awareness of the tension between performance and reality, and how those things intersect. It was like a discovery. I  can trace it. My first film was Owning the Weather (2009), I was interested in how people were playing the role of Savior, trying to save the world. But then it was really Kati with an I (2010) where I’m filming my sister and I’m watching her portray the role of young adult for the camera. And it’s

192  Beyond tragic to me because she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. It’s the pains of working-class adolescents, specifically in the American South, that I can see through the camera and then through the editing. I could see it. I could see that she was acting. And then for me that was such a discovery and it was like I didn’t realise until Eric Kohn in Indiewire said Kati gave one of the best performances of the year and I was like, that’s what I want to do. Like that’s it – right there. The interest in form really comes from that frisson between that sense of performance and reality. What is it about non-fiction about the performance in non-fiction and how they talk to each other? That’s the movement from the observational that uses performance with Katie with an I and Fake It so Real (2011) to Actress (2014) as a transition, into the later more formal films like Kate Plays Christine (2016) and Bisbee 17 (2018). It’s an organic movement into trying to get at what the possibilities are and recognising the potential of performance. RL:

Watching your work and I  know you’ve talked about this before, there really is a big shift between Kate Plays Christine and Bisbee 17. It seems to me that Bisbee 17 and Procession (2021) are still exploring performance, but they’re much more emotionally anchored, and it feels like what was something that you were exploring possibly formally has become something much more complex and much more emotional and much more human. RG: I think the earlier films are very grounded and intimate and driven by my relationships with the people. So Kati is my sister, Chris the wrestler in Fake It so Real is my cousin, and these are people I know. It’s like a milieu that I came from – the working-class south. Brandy Burre and Actress (2014) changed everything for me because the collaborative work that we did together was so transformative for me. Why I love it so much still because it is about ideas. Absolutely. But it’s still got that intimate experience aspect of it. Right. And then I was what do I do next? Kate Plays Christine is driven by a very upset place. I didn’t believe that I should make the film on some level. I didn’t maybe think anyone should make films anymore. It’s an attack on certain ideas that I felt like were internal to me and then also writ large in documentary filmmaking. I feel like it’s a bomb that I wanted to drop to blow up things. And then the last two films are probably like, I  got over that impulse, right? So they’re more mature. They’re more rooted in the actual human beings that I’m working with rather than the conceptual ideas. I  want to help, I want to make things that are positive things, and even though I think Kate Plays Christine was driven by something positive, which is like a very rigorous questioning of the process of taking people’s lives and making films

Adventurers  193 out of them, there’s an anger to it or something. And I think Bisbee 17 and Procession probably feel more like a love that I want to put the world, if that makes sense. RL:

To get to the elephant in the room. The word hybrid. I realised you wrote Die Hybrid Die (Greene, Sight and Sound 2016) in, if I  can describe it, as the dark year of your soul in 2016. Do you still feel that? RG: I just liked to be feisty! I do think the idea that hybridity is some sort of innovation is just really, really misguided. I mean, the first documentaries were hybrids. The first works of cinema are hybrids. All great fiction films and all great documentaries are hybrids. To me, what the problem really was, was when it gets reduced to mixing – this is your premise – when it gets reduced to mixing of fiction and non-fiction – then we’re having the wrong conversation. I understand why people are frustrated in Kate Plays Christine, by not knowing what’s real and what’s not real, but that is not at all interesting to me. I have no interest in that. That film is about depression and that feeling of anxiety and fear and paranoia, it’s not about oh, you don’t know what’s real. I’m so clever. Like, that’s just so stupid. To me, the name hybrid just led to this thing that I thought was boring, basically, and I wanted to try to be feisty about it a little bit. But I guess I’ve cooled on the idea, but I will say when everyone’s like, ‘I’m making a hybrid film’, my first thought is, well, you’re probably doing something ethically dubious because you’re probably not thinking enough about how your ideas are intersecting with the real world. I usually think it’s a mask. It’s like, I love Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth idea, but any bro that comes and tells you that he doesn’t care about ethics because he cares only about ecstatic truth, I’m like, okay. You’re not real. You know what I  mean? Like it’s like you’re not really making work that I care about. If you’re just hiding behind these ideas that you don’t have to do good ethics or something because you’re making a hybrid film or whatever, that’s where I am with it now. RL:

I agree that early documentary filmmakers seemed much more adventurous about form and the better ones, like Jennings, had a strong sense of the fidelity to the participants and of the ethics involved and to the truth. I guess what I’m saying with hybrid, if you’re mixing fact and fiction, to me, it’s just fiction. It’s something else because otherwise what does that mean? It’s like being a little bit pregnant, right? If you have the word documentary attached to it. It comes with the shed load of responsibility, obligation and moral behaviour that you can choose to ignore or uphold.

194  Beyond RG: I want to have those discussions. I’m desperate to have those. I want a fight with people about these discussions. I want to push boundaries. I want to make films that are deeply, deeply rooted in ethics. Kate Plays Christine was accused of ‘you made a fiction film, you’re just saying it’s a documentary’. And I’d be like, ‘Why in the fuck would I ever say that’? Like, in what universe would it benefit me to claim something is a documentary when it’s when it’s not or something. And to me, it’s a moral and ethical claim. Period. Erika Balsom wrote a pretty scathing review [see Chapter 5] of the film and I love her, I think she’s brilliant. I was just kind of chewed up . . . because I teach her article, The RealityBased Community (2017). It is one of the most important articles I’ve ever read. I teach it. I teach it every fall. And it is a crucial, crucial thing and part of what changed between Kate Plays Christine and Bisbee 17 was that article. Her response to Kate Plays Christine, which I thought was absolutely on the money and also maybe missed the point of some of the things I was trying to do. But then when Erika Balsom misses the point, it means that you didn’t get the point across. She’s brilliant and she’s ten times smarter than I’ll ever be. That transition away from the gamesmanship that is Kate Plays Christine, to something a little bit more emotionally grounded, is a lovely way to frame it. But I also think I was just a little more grounded in the next two films. A  bunch of people were like, ‘Oh, I  liked your [earlier] films, but I  didn’t know what was happening. I was confused. It was a mind fuck’. You can’t go make Bisbee 17 with the approach I took in Kate Plays Christine. The work that I want to do has everything to do with the town. The town of Bisbee matters to me, it matters deeply to me, and the people who are in that town matter to me, and they don’t matter to me out of some sort of fake humanity or something. It matters because I fucking like them. It’s insane that, that story [about the violent deportation] was buried for so long. And I want to honour what that town that I love is, and I really like all the ideas that everybody came up with that we made together. And I want them to be proud of it. And Procession literally only works if it’s the [subjects] film. They have to be able to say this is my film. That’s the only way it works. The choices have to be driven by those very real relationships. To me, it’s not about authenticity or truth. It’s about credibility. The credibility with the people who are working in the film and working through the film. It has a lot to do with ‘why do these films at all’? For me, you have to make a positive effect on the people who say yes to being filmed. That’s it. And it’s just super important to me. RL:

I’m really interested in is your relationship with those men in Procession and how you regard them in terms of as co-creators, as crew members, because they literally are crew members location scouting, building and crewing on each other’s films within the documentary.

Adventurers  195 RG: I mean, its six very different relationships. . . . It’s because of [learning from] mistakes that I’ve made in the past, I just knew that I could work with them – confidence and humility – the combination of that, which is all you need. I just knew that I could do what they needed and not lose my voice as a filmmaker, I knew that I could let them guide the process and not lose my own ideas. Because Brandy (Actress) taught me that, because Fernando (Bisbee 17) taught me that, and I  knew that I could be better at it. And once again with the overwhelming feeling making a movie is fun, doing this work together is fun. Every time it got off the rails or got scary, it was always like pulling it back to this [idea] we can make it and it’s yours. It’s not just mine. It’s one of the things you learn in very collaborative processes is that you need to do your job really well. First, they needed me to be a good editor and they needed me to be a good director. And if I abdicated those responsibilities, I  wasn’t being a good collaborator. That’s one thing. Second thing, it wasn’t just about upsetting the hierarchy [which is what] Symbiopyschotaxiplasm (1968), is about right? It’s the greatest film ever in some ways. It’s one of the greatest films ever made because it’s about hierarchy in the way that most films just don’t even talk about. It’s not upsetting the hierarchy by saying it’s all of ours or that collective action is really important, but it’s actually being smart enough to use the perception of hierarchical power for therapeutic means. What I mean by that is don’t give up that power of being the director. Use that power to give, to impart power onto someone else. It is not the same thing as saying we’re all equal. It’s like saying no, you have power, you have actual power. And what that means is there is money attached to your decisions. We’re going to Lake Viking – that costs money, but we’re doing it because you’re in control, and that sort of validation is using that hierarchical power structure for good rather than just for glory, right? And that’s what makes [Procession] what it is – it comes from teaching and comes from my students and comes from Brandy. It comes from all these places of finally using all these things that I know are true about the documentary process that are under-discussed, under-cared-for. And, you know, no one talks about these things and how to use them to make a difference to these specific guys in [Procession]. With the understanding that at any point the filming process can go off the rails and go badly, in which case we pull the plug, or we turn it into whatever we had at that point. RL:

Okay, let’s put your teacher’s hat on. What are your thoughts on the canon of documentary theory from the late 1980s onwards and the debates about post modernism. RG: I think that Renov era of discussion was critical in responding to the dilemma of direct cinema. I think a lot of it pours in and out of that.

196  Beyond I teach Primary (1960) – direct cinema. First time they’d ever used cameras like this. [I say to the students] but what do you know about JFK? Well, he’s the first president to win because of television. He’s literally an actor and it’s the only way direct cinema works in those early years. And how do we know that? Well, we know that because the Maysles made Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1975) as a response to the limitations of direct cinema. The postmodern theoretical response is a response to the proclamations of truth that Bob Drew was making. But if you listen to what Bob Drew [was actually] saying, he says ‘it’s a play without playwrights and a stage without actors’. He’s talking about hybridity right there. That’s all he’s talking about. So to me, there is no, like, hierarchical, like, you know, ‘reflexive is great and direct cinema is bad’. It’s all reflexive. You go back to Flaherty. Flaherty called himself an artist, then behaved horrifically in a lot of his actions. A lot of the student responses are something to the effect of, ‘well, that’s absolutely horrible’. How can a documentary filmmaker do all those things?’ [I’m] like, well, because he didn’t. There was no such thing as documentary filmmaking until John Grierson said there was. Right. Well – what’s Grierson say? Well, then you got a Night Mail. Night Mail is all staged. Then [student’s say] ‘it’s not a documentary’. Of course it’s a documentary, they had to stage it, it’s staged because that’s all it could be at the time. It’s a hybrid and it’s Griersonian, and it’s absolutely Griersonian in every way, he’s doing the fucking voice-over. And then you keep going. And literally what I  teach is that every single stage is hybrid, every single stage is hybrid. The filmmakers who then responded to the crisis of direct cinema, even though direct cinema was also hybrid, are Shirley Clarke and filmmakers like that, even Wiseman who calls his films Reality Fictions, they’re all responding. That leads all the way up until someone hurt Werner Herzog’s feelings, and he declared himself the standard bearer for, you know, for ecstatic truth – he’s just a carnival barker. I love him and I love his movies, but he’s just a loud, obnoxious person who’s running his mouth about cinema verite when in fact, he’s talking about direct cinema. Cinema verite is way more radical than any Herzog film ever made. Probably, right? Cinema verite as a movement was so much more in tune with it, with ecstatic truths, you know, quote unquote. Right. And it does lead to Erika Balsom, which I think she does such a brilliant job of basically saying, ‘isn’t that all so boring now?’ We’ve had those debates, and so let’s think about a reparative relationship with the real. You look at Hale County (2018), Strong Island (2017), Camera Person (2016), Garrett Bradley’s, Time (2020) these are the films [trying to do that]. In some ways my films are trying to answer to that too. We don’t have to have the same debates that Jean Rouch answered for us in 1961, but we continue to have them because of the nature of documentary form and because Renov and all these folks made a ruckus of it.

Adventurers  197 I have all the [documentary theory] books I’ve read through all the books. I do not assign them to my [student’s] reading lists. I do not. I teach that the hybridity is intrinsic, so now – what do we do? (I asked Robert about his incendiary article ‘The best documentaries of 2016: cinematic non-fiction in the year of the nonfact’ that opens;) ‘As the world lurched into the new Post-Truth Supremacy, documentary film artists got busy layering on ever more levels of formal awareness and hall of mirrors complexity. Was this artsy irrelevance, irresponsible obfuscation – or our best shot at chasing the white rabbit of truth around the media maze? . . . But if Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and the postmodernist gang can be even circuitously blamed for Trump and the post-truth era, so might the more outré movements of documentary. The play between truth and lies, after all, is our obsession . . . If the history of documentary cinema can be looked at as one long, Quixotic quest to properly display Truth onscreen, much of our work in 2016 suggested the jig is up and the game finally lost. For many, the era of post-truth documentary is manifest. Which brings us back to the question of blame: has our endless picking at the sweater helped make the ugliest holes? As we adventurous documentarians continue to push for new ways to challenge basic assumptions of truth in our work, are we really no different than Republicans who are now using the term ‘fake news’. (Greene BFI, Updated 21 June 2018). RL: What role does truth have in our work? RG: That article, I  almost barely remember it and the reason I’m saying that is not just because it was written years ago. It was written in crisis, actively in crisis. For me and for the world. For me as a human being and as a filmmaker. I do think pre Brexit, Trump, etc. I think when someone would say things like, well, there’s no difference between fiction and non-fiction, I was genuinely excited by that in the sense that it pushes us to think about what’s really there. Then the world changed, it actively changed. I  think Erika Balsom put it in the best words in that article The Reality-Based Community. We’re just missing what was happening and missing the culmination, really, of 50, 60 years of documentary debates. Really 100 years, at this point, of documentary debates. And so for me, truth is essential. And I go back to Balsom’s phrase, reparative relation with the real in that it meant everything to me. I’m getting emotional thinking about it because I found her scathing review of Kate Plays Christine hurt, like it actually hurt me because she’s writing about all the things I care about in the world. And it wasn’t just her. There were other articles like Miriam Vale wrote an article that said I was, like, splashing around

198  Beyond in shallow waters. And I was like, ‘she’s right. I was’. And a lot of that has to do with these documentary debates. And I almost felt like I was found out or something. So what do you do with that? Well, I don’t abandon the ideas, but I do take up that challenge of what is the reparative relation with the real you know, then I go back and say, Well, what did I like about Kate Plays Christine, it was about a real feeling and that feeling is very real. And I still think that feeling is conjured in the film. I can defend that. I can’t defend the running time or the fact that half of it doesn’t make any sense. But I can defend that feeling of the real. What does the methodology that I’m excited about, this ‘let’s go make a movie’ feeling, how does that relate to the Erica Balsom’s reparative relationship to the real? I can start working towards that and to Truth itself with the capital T. I don’t even know how to think about it because it’s like a lot of times, like, you know, students after they take my classes and I’m so proud I’ve just rewired their brains a little bit and they write, documentaries can’t be objective and they’re not about truth. They’re about the subjective feelings of the filmmakers, but they’re trying to tell real stories or something like that. And I’m like, Well, that’s all true. The truth is the camera’s there. The truth is we’re trying to do something. The truth is, Dan agreed to do the film because of a thing. And the truth is, I edited him in a way so he can see himself as a character on screen. That’s not, not true. That’s deeply true and it’s deeply real. So that’s where I get to. It’s like what is actually real and what’s actually true about what’s happening, what is actually true about what we’ve done and tried to so in the film. When I read [postmodernist] theory from the 1990s on, you know, like Renov and all that stuff, I’m like, ‘oh, y’all are slow’. Contemporary documentaries when they are great are so much more advanced than the theoretical arguments. Like, how do you judge truth in Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Ross 2018). It’s a deeply true film that is absolutely recognising and, making you aware of the real – of Erica Balsom’s reparative relationship with the real. But it’s also making you aware of its limitations and making you aware of your own perceptions as viewer. Deeply true, but it has nothing to do with these sort of old debates about postmodernism, right? So that’s kind of where I am. There are deeply true things that we can make the films about and let’s have real credibility about those things. Let’s forget the idea of authenticity. Because my thing about authenticity is it’s a product, right? You can create the sense of authenticity with how you edit something, which means you can manipulate viewers into thinking something is authentic, straight, obvious, right? It’s a product, right? I  don’t want to make my films about that. I  want to deny that apparatus because it creates relationships between camera,

Adventurers  199 participant, me and audience that are fucked up, and that I don’t like. I want to do something else. I want to go for something else that I think is deeply true. Note 1 Helen’s War (2004). Anna tracks her crusading anti-nuclear activist aunt Dr Helen Caldicott through post 9/11 USA.

Bibliography Balsom, E. (2013). The Reality Based Community. E-flux Journal (83): 1–13. Baum, C. (2020, August 6). Is Lynette Wallworth Our Most Influential Filmmaker? https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/is-lynette-wallworth-our-mostinfluential-filmmaker-20200721-p55e3h.html. Bradley, G. (Director). (2020). Time. Concordia Studios. Hedgehog Films. Outer Piece. The New York Times. Broinowski, A. (Director). (1995). Hell Bento. Tetrapod. Broinowski, A. (Director). (1997). Sexing the Label. Froxoff Films. Broinowski, A. (Director). (1998). Romancing the Chakra. Froxoff Films. Broinowski, A. (Director). (2004). Helen’s War. Sonja Armstrong Productions. Broinowski, A. (Director). (2007). Forbidden Lie$. Liberty Productions. Broinowski, A. (Director). (2013). Aim High in Creation. Unicorn Films. Broinowski, A. (Director). (2016). Pauline Hanson: Please Explain. CJZ. Broinowski, A. (Director). (2022). Uluru  & the Magician. Magus Films. Brindle Films. Drew, R. (Director). (1960). Primary. Robert Drew and Associates. Ford, Y. (Director). (2017). Strong Island. Netflix. Greaves, W. (Director). (1968). Symbiopyschotaxiplasm. William Greaves. Greene, R. (Director). (2009). Owning the Weather. 4th Row Films. Greene, R. (Director). (2010). Kati with an I. Icarus Films. Greene, R. (Director). (2011). Fake It so Real. 4th Row Films. Greene, R. (Director). (2014). Actress. 4th Row Films. Pre War Cinema. Greene, R. (Director). (2016). Kate Plays Christine. 4th Row Films. Pre War Cinema. Faliro House. Greene, R. (2016, Updated September 2019). Die Hybrid Die! Unfiction. Sight and Sound. British Film Institute. https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/ comment/unfiction/die-hybrid-die Greene, R. (2016, Updated 21 June 2018). The Best Documentaries of 2016: Cinematic NonFiction in the Year of NonFact. Unfiction. Sight and Sound. British Film Institute. https://www2.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/best-docume ntaries-2016. Greene, R. (Director). (2018). Bisbee 17. Grasshopper Film. Greene, R. (Director). (2014). Procession. 4th Row Films. Concordia Studios. Artemis Rising Foundation. Johnson, K. (Director). (2016). Camera Person. Big Mouth Productions. Maysles, A. & Maysles, D. (Directors). (1970). Gimme Shelter. Janus Films. Maysles, A. & Maysles, D. (Directors). (1975). Grey Gardens. Janus Films.

200  Beyond Ross, R. (Director). (2018). Hale County This Morning, This Evening. The Cinema Guild. Wallworth, L. (Artist). (2001). Hold: Vessel # 1. ACMI. Wallworth, L. (Artist). (2010). The Evolution of Fearlessness. Vienna Festival. Forma. Wallworth, L. (Writer and Director). (2013). Tender. Scarlett Films. Wallworth, L. (Writer and Director). (2016). Collisions. Coco Films. Wallworth, L. (Writer and Director). (2018). Awavena. Coco Films. Interviews Broinowski, A. (2022, November 30). Interviewed by Rachel Landers. Greene, R. (2022, December 19). Interviewed by Rachel Landers. Wallworth, L. (2022, December 5). Interviewed by Rachel Landers.

9 New visions Acclaimed debut hybrid documentary makers – Payal Kapadia, Kirsten Johnston

Payal Kapadia Payal Kapadia is a filmmaker who makes both documentary and fiction. Her short drama Afternoon Clouds was selected for competition at Cannes in 2017 when she was in her final year of film school in India. Her first feature A Night of Knowing Nothing was screened as part of the Director’s Fortnight in 2021 and won the Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award for best documentary at the 74th Cannes Film Festival. The film tracks the growing student protest movements against Modi’s BJP government policies along with the backlash against them. It uses the conceit of the discovery of a cache of (invented) love letters from one film student to another found at the school, to frame the actual unrest, violence and social upheaval. RL: What is your background in film? PK: I studied at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), which is very much featured in A Night of Knowing Nothing. I was a student there for five years – it’s our state-funded film school. That’s where my interest in non-fiction also began because we had to do a lot of different exercises. It’s a very old school film school. We had a lot of these bizarre restrictions on how you could make films because the pedagogy was geared towards celluloid. Even if you were shooting non-fiction, they would limit how long you could shoot, how many memory cards you could have and things like that. And that became interesting for me because we would always be trying to find creative ways around their rules. It was also a time where we were exposed to so many different kinds of films. It was a school that was set up in the same model as the erstwhile Soviet film schools, because at the time it was established (1960), India was allied with the USSR. So, we had a lot of old Russian films. We watched Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and we studied them in class. It was very much part of a film school life and it was a very enriching experience. I think it wasn’t just to say that, okay, we are going to do non-fiction, I’m going to do a documentary. It was just that we were making films, and this was one way to do it. DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141-13

202  Beyond With A Night of Knowing Nothing we started shooting while I  was at film school, we had one 5D camera, and we decided that it should look like 16mm. So we put a stocking in front of the lens and voila, it was 16mm!– I really enjoy working on film in the way that there’s a lot of trial and error and experimenting, as if you’re making something with your hands and it breaks sometimes and it doesn’t quite work. And then you try again. That idea of filmmaking was something that maybe came from the situation that we were in. It’s a nice process to work in and you learn a lot along the way. RL: Why did you start to really be interested in playing with form in nonfiction? What was it about traditional form that you just didn’t think you could express? PK: I  think it also came from my background. My mother is an artist. She’s a video artist. So I  come from a lot of very abstract, visual thought in that way. When I  was just out of university, I  started going to this film festival called Experimenta. They showed filmmakers like Len Lye, Chris Marker, Maya Deren. There was no internet in a big way at that time. You were not finding these things or even knowing where to look. So this festival was really important for me because it would get these experimental animations from Canada and screen Stan Brakhage’s work. The curator is Shai Heredia, she would be really trying to find experimental things to show. There were other film festivals in India, but it was still very, very, arthouse films, not experimental in that way. So Experimenta was this space where I  decided, okay, I  want to do this. But when I  went to film school, I  got training for narrative storytelling. [But] somewhere there was this still this experimental past with the formalistic side. The film school wasn’t really promoting experimentation necessarily, it wasn’t really the philosophy of the school. There were just some people who were doing it, but it did give you space to try things. So that was nice. RL: A Night of Knowing Nothing, it’s a very political, very passionate, very powerful film. Can you describe to me how you came to develop the conceit of the love letters you used. PK: When we started making the film and I say we, because Ranibar Das was the cinematographer and the editor of the film – we were doing it together, we were both students at FTII, and we were shooting this film, with this camera contraption that we had made. And we had this one sound recorder. We had been part of the strike – it was a very interesting time because, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had been in power for a year, and we were one of the first institutes to have such a big strike. After our strike several institutes [also went on strike]. It’s not to say that we were pioneering something or anything, it was just that we were the first at that point. So the BJP had just come into power, and the things that were happening on campus

New visions  203 after the strike was sort of a microcosm of what was happening outside [in India] as well. And we wanted to document that – the smaller protests, the problems with the fee hikes. So we started shooting. In most of my work, I’m interested in personal stories about love. In India, love is very political, and if you’re making a film about young people in their mid-twenties or late twenties it is going to come up. We were interviewing all our friends and, inevitably with friends, we would talk for a long time. It’s like you’re drinking chai and talking. So we had these interviews that were maybe two, three hours long. Inevitably, questions about their relationships and personal conflicts and the anxiety of having to go back after the school finished and explain to their parents that they’re falling in love with somebody not of the same caste or their religion, or even thinking that the relationship that they are having might have to end. Unfortunately, it’s everyday life. Unfortunately, it’s just how it is. Everybody was talking about this. At the time we thought the film was supposed to be these interviews with our friends about love and then what’s happening with the politics. But we knew that there was some connection because – politics is not devoid of social reality, and it is because of the problem within the family structure of India, how it is structured with the caste system and the religious bigotry and the inequalities that are there deeply entrenched in this society. So the two things were related. It wasn’t so different. The bigotry exists amongst us and our families. And there was a kind of a self-reflexivity also – what does one do to challenge these things and how can one do so? Because [young people in these situations are] afraid that they will be thrown out of their houses. How do you, kind of, navigate all this? I think that’s where the idea first came, and the film developed from that seed, but became something much bigger. We didn’t really think it was a film, we were just shooting. We had no real end goal in sight. We finished film school in 2018, and we left and realised that we needed to expand the film to various other institutions because so many other protests had happened. Students had been at the forefront of various protests. We somehow managed to get footage from other friends who had also been shooting in those universities. We collected this footage spanning five years. Along with that we collected some footage that is off the internet. So it was like this growing archive of memories of five years of these protests that we had also been a part. It was emotional, in a sense, to have all this. And so earlier we had imagined that we would use the interviews we had taken to sort of string the film together, but because it went beyond the film school it became difficult. Then we started working on a voice-over, which was a fictional voice-over. In the middle of this, I discovered that Chris Marker was all of the four people who were credited in his film Sunless/Sans Soleil [not as credited in

204  Beyond the  film: Sandor Krasna – Cine/Writer, Chris Marker – Director, Michel Krasna – Music]. This film and its ‘invented’ letters from the fictitious cinematographer Sandor Krasna to the female narrator completely changed things for me. You know, one could find other ways. I  was also watching other films like Miguel Gomes’s Redemption. It is another film which really helped me a lot to free myself about ideas of non-fiction. Then we decided to take a lot of the ideas from these interviews and make them into one character, and I started co-writing with one of my classmates, Himanshu Prajabati. We had gone through a lot of shared experiences and then a lot of his own thoughts, a lot of friend’s experiences and things that we had recorded. Taking all that and watching the footage, we would come up with how to put all this together. [The love letters were] a good device because you could, temporally move back and forth quite easily. I don’t think you get a real sense of the time in the film, and the voice-over helps to cover a lot of ground. We were so close to the protests, and it was such an emotional time that I just felt that if I had gone the route of, having a lot of facts, I myself would feel a different kind of distance from it emotionally. Fundamentally, the idea was that we wanted to evoke a feeling, rather than give information about exactly what was going on, but sort of feel that emotion and anger and vulnerability that a lot of us, and a lot of the other students had felt at the time, and this device seemed to make sense but my intention was not to fool anybody. It was to use it as a device that would perhaps get to some kind of emotional truth. All the material that is shot is actually shot as non-fiction. It wasn’t restaged. We filmed the dance parties that were going on. We shot them. There’s nothing that is staged, per se, in the film. The protest footage, what we shot, we shot it or was given to us by friends. The CCTV footage is on the internet. All the material came from reality, so it wasn’t re-enacted in any way. It was only the voice-over that was fictionalised. I prefer to call it a hybrid non-fiction. But this hybrid, of course, is a strange word. So let’s say non-fiction. RL: I’m not going to ask you to define hybrid, but how, what are the traits you think it has? PK: I mean, this thing of fiction and non-fiction just sits so comfortably next to each other and, creates meaning, which is greater than the sum of its parts. And I find it’s mostly curators – those who want [a film] to get into some section in a festival or when you apply for a grant, you have to be really specific. A film is a film at the end of the day. I think it’s just reality. When fiction and non-fiction can sort of seamlessly sit next to each other, and you don’t question it in any way, and even if you do question it, it’s that conflict or that moment of them being together that is so much part of the film and so much the narrative of the film. I think this thing about hybrid – I did my thesis research project which was called Cinema Inbetween. I was interested in hybrid form of films like, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) or Miguel Gomes Arabian Nights and the

New visions  205 video artist, Omer Fast. So for me, there’s some genuine honesty and truth in what these films do and about the political position that they have. (These films are inventive, provocative, kaleidoscopic refractions about the political realities facing the cultures they spring from like Gomes’s using his ingenious, chaotic mashing together of archive, fable, verite and enactment to create a searing indictment of Portugal’s 2015 austerity measures. They have been described as experimental documentaries or docufantasies.) PK : I was hoping to try to do the same in A Night of Knowing Nothing to be truthful to my politics and my position. In a sense, we wanted the film to have this kind of strong emotional reaction and to sort of be able to re-engage those emotions that a lot of us had felt. RL: What guides your practice? Do you have a kind of philosophy? PK: I think form in itself can’t be the reason to make films. It’s just a kind of tool that gets us there in some sense. . . . I’m working on a fiction film now. But I see, I see myself trying to bring more non-fiction into it because politically I  feel that non-fiction, the politics of shooting without construction – is also politics. I come from some amount of privilege, and going to the film school was something that opened up my mind a lot, not just formalistically but also politically. Being part of the strike helped me engage with a reality that I  was not engaged with before and could have not questioned had it not been for film school. And I think that has become important for me in my work now. RL: And do you think you’ll go back to non-fiction? I mean, do you think you’ll move back and forth? PK: Yes! I miss it so much because I started writing this fiction almost four years ago, and it took a long time to find funding for it, but with fiction, it’s just a different process. And you don’t have that kind of lightness that you have with non-fiction when it comes to it, because there’s so many people involved, and it becomes suddenly about answering to a lot of people. With non-fiction, there’s just you and a few other people, and there’s a kind of a home-grown nature of things which I really like. I want to approach fiction like that as well, but unfortunately it gets bigger than we want it to be. So I really think this hybrid form is for me. Kirsten Johnson Kirsten Johnson has had a rich and varied career in documentary. She had directed several documentaries but primarily worked as a documentary ­cinematographer (Derrida 2002), (The Oath 2010), (Citizenfour 2014). In 2016, she directed the celebrated documentary feature Cameraperson in

206  Beyond which she reviewed a professional lifetime of footage (often observational) with a sharp reflective gaze. Her next film Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020) played with the delicious hybrid conceit of killing off her very much alive father multiple times in an attempt to grapple emotionally with his inevitable  demise. At the time of this interview, she is directing the drama film ­Sontag starring Kristen Stewart, which will incorporate elements of documentary footage. RL: What brought you to documentary? KJ: I would say that I was imagining a life in fiction filmmaking and then I got the opportunity to work as a camera person on a documentary. And that was working with Amy Ziering on the documentary about Jacques Derrida called Derrida. And the experience kind of blew my mind on every level. So I would say that I had respect for documentaries, and I was interested in them, but fiction films were much more in my mind as my hope and ambition. RL: Okay, then why did you stay? KJ: Well, I  mean, because the complexity of the universe is present in documentary. I had an incredible introduction to the history of cinema through my time at La Femis, which was the French National Film School. Once I’d learnt that the Femis existed and that it was possible for non-French students to attend, I wanted to apply. I got wonderful advice that I would have a much better chance of being accepted if I didn’t apply to the Directing Department and went for one of the technical departments. Applying to the cinematography department seemed like the wisest course for me, even though I didn’t know much about it at the time. And so honestly, in some ways, preparing to try to get into the Femis was the beginning of a huge education in world cinema. And then once I  was in, it was just exposure to all kinds of cinema that I had never imagined from Iranian to Japanese cinema. But in particular, I think right now of a wonderful, beautiful man named Michel Fano, who taught sound. And he in some ways opened me up to the density of information that one finds when observing or listening. I credit him with opening me up to how listening is such a profound part of cinema. And there were also all kinds of other people who were showing a cinema that was not Hollywoodian fiction filmmaking and that was observation-based. But the initial and very powerful encounter with a philosopher as brilliant as Derrida in relation to film just immediately put me in confrontation with questions about what does it mean to film. In the end we ended up filming Derrida over many years, and I got the chance to film many other documentaries in the meantime while we were still working on the Derrida film. I’ve been struck every time I’ve gone back to that film by how much the questions he was asking me about what it meant for me to be there. Filming him has

New visions  207 been a constant provocation throughout my entire life as a cameraperson. What’s interesting to me is that right away I was confronted with Derrida’s constant questioning of the camera’s presence. What does it mean to have a person with a camera here? And to have the person I was filming being someone who was such a great thinker was a great provocation to my thinking about my own filming. RL: In Cameraperson you start playing with form. What was that you wanted to articulate and explore? What was happening to you and how did that lead to the conceit of Dick Johnson Is Dead. KJ: I came from a place of being very interested in visual abstraction. And then I started watching all kinds of movies. I would say that my own desire to experiment with form comes from a deep love of the many kinds of artistic expression and cinematic expression. And so I’m drawing from novels, paintings, dance, theatre, all of that excites me. And so that’s why I question: why stay with known form when you can push into new territory? You know, making Cameraperson was a very deep and necessary process for me in which I was very unsure that the process would actually add up to a film. And for most of the making of it, I felt like it was likely that it wouldn’t add up to a film. But the need in me was so great that I continued, and I was learning things and sort of discovering from my own footage a perspective on myself that I hadn’t had and a kindness I hadn’t given myself. And this great pain, this great sadness of losing my mother to dementia was something that I was also carrying during this period. I was completely in grief during the time I was making Cameraperson. And I was also completely fascinated by what her Alzheimer’s was doing to my mother’s mind. My mother was an incredibly strong and powerful and loving person, and she was so changed by the dementia. And I, at the same time, was being so changed by how much I was travelling and filming. You know, I filmed in 86 countries. During the period that I was travelling so much as a cinematographer and my mother had dementia, I  started not being able to remember where I  had been even a few weeks before. So it might have been that I was in Darfur, and then I had travelled to Liberia, and then I had gone to Kansas, and then I was on my way to New York City, and then I was leaving again for Brazil, and I would literally have no idea where I had just been – I would get to the airport, and I wouldn’t know where I had come from or where I was going. And looking at it now, I believe I was identifying with my mother, and I was sort of trying to join her in the ever-present time. And I do think that camera work asks that of the cinematographer – to be in the present. The director or the producer has to worry about when we’re going to have lunch and where are we going next and when will we film with these people again? But you, the camera person, have to stay in the moment-by-moment negotiation with the complexity of

208  Beyond life that comes with filming. So I was so attentive as a camera person during this time, but I was also completely detached from my own memory and the larger context of my own life. And so, when I was starting to feel the need to make Cameraperson, I was trying to take a hold of what I had lost and sort of what I vaguely remembered and what might be there. But I also knew there were a lot of things in that set of things that I was deeply afraid of. When I film I really feel love for people, it’s almost like you sort of fall in love with a person when you film them, even though it might be just for a day and then you have to leave. But then to revisit that intensity of connection in the footage and, and realise like, oh, I may never see that person again. And that was true for, you know, that man who did the face dancing in that village in Uganda. As much as that was differently true of my mother who was dying from dementia and so, you know, it was almost like doing an archaeological dig through my own intense emotions. What I was doing in making Cameraperson was digging back into these places of strong emotion. And in some cases, I found evidence of the connection and the love and the energy and the moment. And then with my mother, I just realised that I had like almost no footage of her and who she had been and I couldn’t believe it. Like, here is this person who is the most important person in my life and I have no filmed evidence of her. So that was just like a knife to the heart. And then I had to cope with the fact that the little footage I had of her was footage of her with Alzheimer’s that she really wouldn’t have wanted me to show to anyone. So obviously this became part of the core questioning at the heart of Cameraperson. This set of questions in relation to what are you allowed to show of the experience of others? How do you honour other people or betray other people through the images that you make of them, that you make with them? So, you know, I  just had these two tiny fingernails worth of imagery of my mother, and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I really questioned what it would mean to her and what it would mean to me to put this imagery of her in a movie. So that experience, which was deeply painful and that I do believe is a form of betrayal of my mother, because I  know she would not have wished to have that imagery of her with dementia seen by others. But I knew I needed to include her in Cameraperson, despite what a wrenching choice it was. So the thought that I  could actually make something with my father with his permission, that we could create lots of evidence together, felt like, oh, this is what I must do now, and this is the moment to do it. I often say is that the original idea for Dick Johnson Is Dead came from a dream I had where a man sat up in a casket and said, ‘my name is Dick Johnson and I’m not dead yet’. But there is an origin story to that origin story, which is about my dad’s mother, my grandmother. She was a very serious and very religious person. When she died, my aunt and my mother found this very extravagant, colourful, beautiful dress in her closet and they decided, ‘let’s bury her in this dress!’

New visions  209 That dress was just so not her. She usually wore very dark and sombre clothing. When they found that dress in her closest, it was as if they had found something that revealed a whole different part of her. So, at her memorial service, she was in an open casket, wearing that gorgeous dress. . . . And we, the family were in a glassed-in room, observing the funeral. And then when people started to come down to pay their last respects, I heard my mother start laughing hysterically. And then my father started laughing hysterically. And then I  looked, and there was an old woman wearing the exact same dress that my grandmother was wearing in the casket. And everyone, because we were in this glassed-in room that was reserved for the family, we could all laugh with no one hearing us. And we were all laughing and crying hysterically. And then this woman made it up to the front and looked down into the casket at my grandmother wearing the same dress she was wearing and she just shot out of there. And we never saw her again. And we have no idea why she wore this beautiful, bright coloured dress to the funeral. And have no idea why my grandmother had it either . . . So that experience – that a funeral can be a place of comedy, that everyone can laugh in the midst of extreme grief in relation to my dad maybe starts there or maybe earlier, but that’s one of the opening salvos of where the idea comes from. I can still remember how great it felt to be laughing with my whole family in that moment of my grandmother’s funeral. RL: Would you describe Dick Johnson Is Dead as a hybrid documentary? KJ: Something that interests me is using multiple or even contradictory words to describe things. So the word hybrid works for me, but it isn’t the only word I would use. I find the idea of a hybrid provocative and interesting. I like to use the word ‘film’ because I feel very attached to the history of cinema. But, you know, someone called Dick Johnson a ‘docufantasia’, and I was just like, right on! Love it. I love inventing new words to describe things. And also I  like questioning words and noting the ways a word can be problematic. I like to draw attention to the words that are full of problems, like the word ‘mastery’. When people ask me to do ‘master classes’, I wonder whether we can find a different way to describe it, because I don’t aspire to the concept of ‘mastery’ in camerawork. I’m always trying to pay attention to and break apart the problematic histories embedded in our, history, in the history of cinema, as well as also loving the invention of fantastical names. So I never think one word is enough. RL: Do you have more or less control as an observational cinematographer or a hybrid (docufantasia) director? KJ: I’m not interested in having control. I’m interested in experiencing things that I don’t know or understand yet. However, in the case of the relationship with my father, I do know it deeply. I’ve experienced

210  Beyond it for the 57 years of my life. It’s incredibly meaningful to me. But then, suddenly the dementia was taking our relationship away from me. So, my thought was, ‘how can cinema help me to rebuild this thing that is crumbling?’ I also thought, ‘How can cinema help me survive a second experience of dementia with a parent?’ Because I’m not sure I know how to do that and maybe cinema can help me. So I think of it as a process, not as a relationship to control. And that process allows you to engage with things that are just out of your reach. When I was first pitching the idea, I would say that the documentary part of the project is what can be observed. And death can only be imagined, right? The present is what can be observed. The future is what can only be imagined. And so that that line, that space between those things where those two things meet, where what you’re observing hits where what you’ve imagined happens in these truly unexpected ways. My experience with bringing the footage of my mother into Cameraperson after she was already dead was an experience that taught me that cinema can bring people back to life in some way. I mean I actually feel like cinema is a form of quantum physics, and we have some capacity to engage with quantum physics when we make films. This conceit of filmmaking in which my dad might die, and then we could bring him back to life over and over again, was something that I recognised as something that I desperately needed to experience. And I became determined to figure out how to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Now, what was powerful, of course, and hilarious, was that I had all of these ideas of what I wanted to do with him, like putting him on an ice floe, or throwing him out of a building, or catching him on fire. But when the stunt coordinator came to spend some time with my dad, it was instantly clear that my dad couldn’t do any of that. He couldn’t walk down the street safely. He couldn’t step up a curb safely, literally. So there was just no way to create the kind of controlled environment that a stunt person needs to survive an epic stunt. So it immediately felt like the out-of-controlness of life reasserted itself. And that is what life is. RL: I  always feel very strongly that this kind of work needs anchors, or the conceit or the construction can just run off with itself or it just becomes a bit sort of silly or detached from . . . were you conscious of that? KJ: Absolutely the anchor is my relationship with my father. I know what dementia is. He knows what it is. He’s a psychiatrist. We’re doing this together and this is happening and neither of us have much capacity to change it. We know how little control we have. And that was the

New visions  211 anchor. At some point, I met someone who suggested: ‘Oh, you could hire someone to play your dad’. And I was like, and what would be the point? Like there is no point to making the film with someone else. Because it’s all about the very real stakes of it – the life and death stakes. My father’s lifelong reputation, my father’s actual life, the fact that my father really could have been killed for real making this movie. All of that was at stake. But in some ways, you know, anytime you do anything, someone could get killed, and we just don’t like to think about it, and we do everything in our power to make things safe, but we can’t actually control everything, no matter how much we wish we could. In the context of films, I  think that most truths are actually quite complicated to reveal, and it takes a lot of context, a lot of observation, a lot of evidence. And still, we will be missing things. But I think that the obligation of the maker is to indicate where that line of simplification of the complexity has happened, so that to the best of our knowledge, we are sharing as much context as we can, the most evidence that we can provide, and this is what we are presenting as what we believe to be the truth of the situation. The very language of film provides us clues to understand who made it, why and in what context. So when those things are hidden purposefully by the makers, for me, that is when truth is being obscured. And it’s usually less interesting. It’s usually a simpler version of what’s happening. And you think, ‘Why didn’t you include that added context through your cinema language?’ It’s actually not that hard. So, with Dick Johnson Is Dead, I  was searching to share as much as I could about what was true for me. And what I also built into the process of making the film was that there would be a dedication to constant change. I knew I would not be able to imagine the film in advance or construct the film in advance, and that it would be necessary to make and break it until the very eleventh hour, which I, in the beginning, said was going to be my father’s actual death. That’s what I said. ‘I’m going to make a film about my father dying over and over again until he really dies for real’. That was the pitch. But I made that pitch before I knew he had dementia, right? So that once I was able to admit to myself that he had dementia, I needed to change the pitch. What became true for me then was that I could only continue to make the movie as long as it would be safe for him as the dementia actively chipped away at his capacities, because he is my father and I love him, and I need to take care of him in new ways because of the dementia. But we deliberately and specifically built an unconventional process with commitment of the producers and the editor that we would all be willing to keep changing the film all the way to the end. And we kept that commitment,

212  Beyond and we kept changing the movie until the very, very, very last minute in the sound mix. RL: You talk about your relationship with your father as a co-creator . . . KJ: Yeah, my dad totally is a co-creator of this movie. For one thing, my father really is a psychiatrist. I didn’t make that up and not only is he, and I’m going to say ‘is’ in the present tense, even though it hurts me to say it, because there’s so little of that capacity left in him. But he is also incredibly open to other human beings. He’s incredibly self-aware and he loves me like a house on fire. And so he was always incredibly game to take this on. So when I first told him my idea, he laughed and said ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ And then when I said to him, ‘Okay I’ve just had this idea, I want to do your funeral and we have to do it at the Green Lake 7th Day Adventist church’. And again, immediately his response was ‘Let’s do it’. So it went beyond him giving me permission, he had an ongoing excitement about it and a sort of ‘let’s see what happens’ sense of curiosity. And then there was also, of course, real trepidation. I mean, I remember him taking the first steps to go down the aisle of the church at the end of the funeral, and he was scared. You could see him being scared of the enormity of all the feelings. But he trusted me, and he went into his fear. (Given Kirsten’s long experience working in observational cinema, I was curious what she made of the critiques of direct cinema and Nichols et al.’s idea of favouring reflexive documentary over the observational.) KJ:

I’m so excited about this way of working because I think it’s so alive for me. I give my props back to Dziga Vertov and to Chris Marker and to Claire Denis – it’s hard to do this work, and we can’t quite imagine it and it demands bravery – and those people did it! So, their work encourages me to try. Other people’s films that make us gasp and give us enough so that we can’t stop thinking about them . . . Those for me are the films that remain the most meaningful. And I don’t care what kind of film they are, what genre they are, but the ones that are dense enough to provoke me to reconsider my own humanity – that’s what I love.

So it’s not like, Oh yeah, that’s a genre of films. No, that’s individual films in many different categories across history. I do think that observational films require time and a willingness to not know that I find very interesting, endlessly interesting. And I think that often with constructed films, parts of them are shortcuts, parts of them are not as complex as life really is because the people who have made them have attempted to control too much. And so, for me, those films which are really interesting in the moment but then are almost immediately forgotten, those are the ones that lack a density of complexity that is often found in observational films.

New visions  213 There’s plenty of evidence in the history of cinema of people being so playful and so inventive that their films are always relevant and revelatory. Those movies just continue across time and the way they matter just goes on and on. That’s definitely what I aspire to in filmmaking. And I do feel heartened by what’s happening in so many different places in the world right now. I see an explosion of creativity and playfulness as well as a rigor and a sense of responsibility and ethical questioning coming from other filmmakers that I think is just magnificent. Bibliography Dick, K. & Ziering, A. (Directors). (2002). Derrida. Zeitgeist Films. Gomes, M. (Director). (2015). Arabian Nights. BOX Productions. Johnson, K. (Director). (2016). Camera Person. Big Mouth Productions. Johnson, K. (Director). (2020). Dick Johnson Is Dead. Big Mouth Productions. Kapadia, P. (Director). (2017). Afternoon Clouds. Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). Kapadia, P. (Director). (2021). A Night of Knowing Nothing. Petit Chaos. Another Birth. Poitras, P. (Director). (2010). The Oath. Zeitgeist Films. Poitras, P. (Director). (2014). Citizenfour. HBO Documentary Films. Participant Media. Praxus Films. Weerasethakul, A. (Director). (2000). Mysterious Object at Noon. The Criterion Collection. Interviews Johnson, K. (2022, December 18). Interviewed by Rachel Landers. Kapadia, P. (2022, December 10). Interviewed by Rachel Landers.

Index

Academy Awards 67 Act normal: hybrid tendencies in documentary film (Moody) 14 Act of Killing, The (film) 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 75, 76, 106, 136 Actress (film) 192 Adams, Randall 17, 23, 157, 159, 160, 161 Adams, Robert M. 24 Afternoon Clouds (film) 201 Aim High in Creation (film) 106, 188 Aisles, Roger 79 Aldridge, Frank 145 – 147 Al Jazeera 135 Allegory of the Cave (Plato) 88, 107 All the Presidents’ Men (film) 24 – 25 Ambassador, The (film) 15, 136, 137 American Dharma (film) 23, 155, 161 American Splendor (film) 185 Anderson, Lindsay 44, 47, 55, 79 Arabian Nights (film) 204 Arbor, The (film) 8, 105 Aristotle 33, 84, 106 Armadillo (film) 107 Armitage, Simon 69, 163, 166, 167 Art Gallery of New South Wales 172 artistic immorality 75 Ashtray, The (Morris) 23, 155 – 156, 161 – 162 At Midnight (film) 128 Atomic Blast 174 Australia, documentary industry 34 – 39 Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) 35 Australian Content Standard 35, 36 Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) 98, 101, 102 Australian Film Industry 34

Australian Indigenous filmmakers 86 Australian Taxation Office 36 Awavena (film) 106, 171, 178 Ayala, Violetta 134, 135, 136 bad apples, focus on 78 Ballad of Abu Ghraib, The (Gourevitch and Morris) 155 Balsom, Erika 19, 84, 137, 184, 196, 197, 198 Bannon, Steve 155 Barnard, Clio 105 Barry, Bec 90 Barsam, Richard 60 Bass, Tom 118 Battle for Russia, The (film) 61 Behrendt, Larissa 125, 132 – 133n15, 139 – 141 Believing is Seeing (Morris) 155 Beneath Heaven (film) 128 Benjamin, Walter 46 Beresford, Bruce 69 Berlinger, Joe 110n3 Bhabha, Homi K. 26n1 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 202 Bisbee 17 (film) 190, 192 – 195 Blair Witch Project, The (film) 12 Blanchett, Cate 180 Blowen, Dylan 110n1 blurry boundaries debate, persistence of 18 – 24 Bombay Beach (film) 15 Born into Brothels (film) 77 Boyhood (film) 10 Brakhage, Stan 202 Brault, Michel 64 Brexit 22 British Documentary movement 40, 44, 45, 46 – 47, 56, 79

Index  215 British Film Institute 13 Broinowski, Anna 102, 105, 110n1, 110n8, 180 – 189 Broomfield, Nick 16, 82 Brügger, Mads 136, 137, 138 Bruzzi, Stella 6, 20, 21, 27n6, 31, 32, 81 Burns, Ken 36, 86 Burre, Brandy 192 Bush administration 76 Butler, Martin 106 Caldicott, Helen 182 Camera Person (film) 196, 205, 207 – 208, 210 Cannes Film Festival 201 Capra, Frank 61 Carroll, Noël 6, 8, 22, 77 Cartel Land (film) 107 Cassavetes films 190 Casting Jon-Benet (film) 8, 106, 136, 137 Casting Oksana Baiul (film) 106 Cavalcanti, Alberto 40, 42, 46 Chapman, Jane 6, 20 Charlton, Cassie 100, 110n4, 114 – 115, 121, 122 – 123, 145 – 147 Chasing Buddha (film) 100 Chivers, Jill 141 – 145 Chronicle of a Summer (film) 12, 31, 51, 62 – 70, 132n14 Chubbuck, Christine 137, 138 Cicada (film) 8, 100 – 101, 105, 121, 124 CILECT (International Association of Film and Television Schools) 85, 86 Cinema Quarterly (magazine) 35, 40, 42, 45 Citizen Kane (film) 10 City of God (film) 10 Claiming the real II (Winston) 37, 79, 81, 82 Clan (film) 125, 128, 139 – 141 Clarke, Shirley 196 Claymation 107 Coal Face (film) 21, 44 Cohen, Joshua 24 Cold War 107 collaboration: dropping emotional anchors in production and post 126 – 128; finding the narrative and hybrid form 116 – 125; impact festival and filmmakers 128 – 129; non-hierarchal 113; street casting 113 – 116

Collisions (film) 106, 171, 174, 175 Connection, The (film) 77 contemporary documentary theory 5 – 6 Conway, Kellyanne 110n11 Cop Movie, A (film) 8 Costa, Pedro 10 Courtin Wilson, Amiel 100 – 102, 105, 106, 121, 122, 124 Cove, The (film) 9 ‘Creative Non-Fiction’ 27n5 Creature Comforts (film) 105, 107 Critias of Athens 90 Crown Film Unit 45, 47, 50, 51, 61, 71n15 Cullen, Ruth 110n1 Culloden (film) 51, 66 Cunnamulla (film) 77 Curry, Marshall 110n3 Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs 52 Daily Worker (newspaper) 61 Damanhuri, Sereena 147 – 150 Dark Grey Zone 90 Das, Ranibar 202 Daughter’ Rite (film) 10 Davis, Thomas 43, 70n2 Dean, Bentley 106 Death of a Princess (film) 71n9 de Beauvoir, Simone 85 Denis, Claire 212 Deren, Maya 202 Derrida, Jacques 206 Desert Victory (film) 61 Dialogues (Plato) 90 Diary for Timothy (film) 46, 47 Dick, Philip K. 162 Dick Johnson is Dead (film) 8, 206 – 209, 211 Die Hybrid Die (Greene) 193 Di Iorio, Sam 64 docudrama, term 66 documentary: creative treatment of actuality 40; definition of in court 34 – 39; engaging in war about theory of 32; ethics 75 – 88; ethics class 135 – 136; ontological immaturity of 34; term 34; word 7 Documentary, Graduate Diploma in 98 Documentary Explorations (Levin) 79 Documentary Film (Rotha) 44 documentary theorists, persistence of blurry boundaries debate 18 – 24

216 Index Documentary World’s Identity Crisis, The (Wiedeman) 87 Donne, John 155 Dreams of a Life (film) 75, 105 Drew, Robert 7, 17, 21, 196 Drifters (film) 45 Drinking for England (film) 31, 61, 69 – 70, 105, 163, 166 – 167 Drovers Boy, The (film) 110n9, 128 Eisenstein, S. M. 46 Eliot, T. S. 46 Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (EMBFU) 41, 42, 45, 70n5, 70n8 epistemological conflict, war imagery in 32 ethics, documentary 75 – 88 Ethics Lab 85 Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir) 85 Ethics of Care (Gilligan) 85 Evolution of Fearlessness (screen installation) 179 Fahrenheit 9/11 (film) 21, 182 Fake it so Real (film) 192 fake news, Trump-era phenomenon 183 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The (film) 43 Fallshaw, Dan 134, 136 Fano, Michel 206 fascism 53, 56 Fassbinder films 190 Fast, Omer 205 Feltham Sings (film) 70, 105, 167 Ferrarini, Lorenzo 11, 12, 16 festival 128 – 129 Festival di Poploi 63 F For Fake (film) 12 Fifer, Hollie 101, 110n5, 124, 126 – 127, 129 52 Tuesdays (film) 106 Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) 201 film festival circuit, hybrid documentary 5 film festivals, 130n4; filmmakers and 128 – 129 filmmakers 153; Hill 163 – 170; impact festival and 128 – 129; Morris 155 – 163; see also hybrid documentary makers film school environment 97 – 98 Fires Were Started (film) 21, 46, 47, 58

First Nations 82 Fischel, Victor 50, 51 5 Broken Cameras (film) 81 Five Came Back (Harris) 70n4 Five Obstructions, The (film) 105, 121 Flaherty, Robert 42 Fog of War (film) 83, 155 Folman, Ari 105 Forbidden Lie$ (film) 8, 105, 182 – 188 Forbidden Love (Khouri) 182 Ford Transit (film) 9 Forster, E. M. 46 Frameline Film Festival 110n9, 128, 140, 149 Frank (film) 121, 131n11, 145 – 147 Fraser, Nick 1, 12, 76, 136 French National Film School 206 Fringe Dwellers, The (film) 69 Gates of Heaven (film) 155 – 157 Germany Year Zero (film) 19 Geva, Dan 33 – 34, 85, 86, 87 Gibney, Alex 86 Gibson, Ross 171 – 172 Gide, André 46 Gilligan, Carol 85 Gimme Shelter (film) 196 Godard films 190 Godmilow, Jill 83 Goebbels, Joseph 42, 72n28 Gomes, Miguel 204, 205 Gomes, Shaylee 141 – 145 Good Woman of Bangkok, The (film) 77, 91n4 Gourevitch, Philip 155 Graduate Diploma in Documentary 98 Grapes of Wrath (film) 53 Great Barrier Reef 172 – 173 Greaves, William 122 Green, Kitty 106, 137 Greenaway, Peter 11 Greene, Robert 11, 13, 14, 26n4, 137, 190 – 197 Greengrass, Paul 106 Green Porno series (film) 105 Grey Gardens (film) 196 Grierson, definition of creative treatment of actuality 77 Grierson, Edith 32 Grierson, John 7, 35 – 39, 45, 80, 196; definition origin story 39 – 43 Grierson, Ruby 32 ‘Grierson Effect, The’ 38, 41

Index  217 Hail (film) 100, 105, 106, 121 Hale County This Morning, This Evening (film) 196, 198 Hall, Camilla 150n5 Hangmen Also Die (film) 61 – 62 Harlan County USA (film) 83, 107 Harris, David 159, 161 Heartland Film Festival 146 Hegedus, Chris 110n3 Helen’s War (film) 181 – 182, 199n1 Hell Bento!! (film) 181 Heredia, Shai 202 Hermocrates of Syracuse 90 Her Smell (film) 190 Herzog, Werner 17, 193, 196 Hetherton, Madeleine 110n1 Heydrich, Reinhard 50 Hill, Brian 11, 69 – 70, 79, 105, 163 – 170 Hiroshima Mon Amour (film) 62 Hoffman, Karen D. 11, 15, 16 Hoop Dreams (film) 83 Horner, Arthur 51, 61 Hoshino, Masashi 48, 54 Housing Problems (film) 21 How Green was my Valley (film) 53 hybrid, term 1, 5 hybrid documentary 1, 13; 20th-century classic antecedents 62; academic and industry definitions 106; assessment task 103 – 104; briefing and schedule 102 – 109; case studies 105 – 106; cross disciplinary hybrid exercise 104; description of 7 – 9; fusion of non-fiction and fiction 25 – 26; inaugural syllabus for teaching 99; incubator 31 – 34; model for teaching workshops on 97 – 102; Plato and 88 – 91; production module/workshop 97 – 98; recent theorists/commentators describing 9 – 18; spectrum of 1; teaching and producing 2; throwbacks 13; way out of the schism 24 – 26 hybrid documentary makers: Broinowski 180 – 189; Greene 190 – 197; Johnson 205 – 213; Kapadia 201 – 205; Wallworth 171 – 179; see also filmmakers; Hill, Brian

hybrid documentary prototype, The Silent Village 43 – 48 hybrid forms 13 Hyde, Sophie 102, 106 Idiots, The (film) 9 imagineNATIVE Film Festival 110n9, 128, 149 Imagining Reality (Macdonald and Cousins) 47 Imposter, The (film) 8, 9, 106 Indonesian genocide (1965) 75 Industrial Britain (film) 45 informed consent: models for 82; myth of 80 infotainment 37 Institute of Advanced Studies 110n11 In the Land of the Headhunters (film) 44 In this World (film) 9 Issues on Contemporary Documentary (Chapman) 20 Ivens, Joris 42 Jackson, Tabitha 106 Jennings, Cecily 71n24, 72n27 Jennings, Humphrey 31, 43, 44, 79; The Silent Village 43 – 48, 50 – 61 Jennings, Humphry 19 JFK (film) 22, 27n10 Johnson, Kirsten 205 – 213 Jones, Alex 22, 23 Jones, Daniel P. 100, 124 Journal of Cinema and Media studies (journal) 19 Kalanda-The Knowledge from the Bush (film) 12 Kapadia, Payal 201 – 205 Kate Plays Christine (film) 106, 136, 137, 192 – 194, 197 – 198 Kati with an I (film) 190 – 192 Khouri, Norma 182, 183 Kill the Documentary (Godmilow) 83 Kim Jong-il 187 Kino Eye (film) 43 Knox, Malcolm 182 Kony 2012 (film) 83 Krasna, Sandoor 204 Krasner, Michel 204 Kripke, Saul 24, 160, 170n1 Kuhn, Thomas 23, 27n9, 155

218 Index La Dolce Vita (film) 62 Lambert, Stephen 165 Landesman, Ohad 9 Land Without Bread (film) 44 Lang, Fritz 46, 61 LaRocca, David 18 Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia, The (Davis) 70n2 Lavarch, Michael 130n8 Law and Order (film) 79 Leacock, Richard 21 le Carre, John 158 Lecoq, Violette 91n6 Legg, Start 41, 42 Le Guin, Ursula 171 Leigh, Mike 121 le Porz, Loulou 91n6 Leth, Jørgen 105, 121 Leviathan (film) 13 Levin, Roy 79 Lewis, Scarlett 23 Li, Lucas 118, 130n7 Lies, Damned Lies and Documentary (Winston) 75, 81 Listen to Britain (film) 46, 47 Logan, Phillip 52 Loridan, Marceline 63 Los Olvidados (film) 10 Luddy, Tom 156 Lush, Shannon 36 Lush House (film) 36 – 37, 38, 39 Lye, Len 202

Migrant’s Tale, A (film) 12 Ministry of Information 51, 59 Miracle in Milan (film) 62 Mirror, The (film) 12 Mirrors Without Memory (Williams) 23 Mitchum, Robert 158 Moana (film) 12 Moffat, Tracey 79, 105 Moffat, Tracy 24 Moholy-Nagy, Lászlo 45 Monsiour Hulot’s Holiday (film) 62 Moody, Luke 14, 15, 26, 48, 90, 106, 136 Moore, Henry 46 Moore, Michael 9, 82 Mordaunt, Kim 106 Morin, Edgar 10, 63, 79 Morley, Carol 105 Morris, Errol 9, 11, 23, 27n9, 76, 88, 99, 105, 108, 109, 155 – 163, 186 Mrs Miniver (film) 61 Mucha, Logan 130n5 Mumbai High: The Musical (film) 163, 167 Murray, Tom 110n1 Murray Center for Documentary Journalism, University of Missouri 190 Musee de l’Homme 65 My Red Guard (film) 118 Mysterious Object at Noon (film) 204 My Winnipeg (film) 105

McAllister, Stewart 46 McCarthy, Liz 131n12 McHugh, Margaret 103, 110n9, 118, 120, 128, 130n10, 147, 150 Maddin, Guy 105 makeover program 37 Malcolm, Janet 159 Malin, David 172 Man of Aran (film) 42 Margins of Reality (Ward) 20 Marker, Chris 11, 15, 202 – 204, 212 Mass Observation Movement 46, 71n16 Media Arts and Production and Animation Production 2 Meditation XVII (Donne) 155 Medium Cool (film) 9, 18 Mendel, Gregor 1 Merewether, Janet 11, 106 Midnight Gospel, The (film) 8 Mighty Times (film) 77 – 78

Naming and Necessity (Kripke) 170n1 Nanook (film) 42 Nanook of the North (film) 9, 12, 44 National Board of Review Award for Best Documentary 61 National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) 101, 110n6, 180 Nazi Concentration Camps, The (film) 91n6 Nazi Germany 48; invasion 55; occupation 54; propaganda 55; rule 56 Nazi Plan, The (film) 91n6 Netflix 86 New Documentary (Bruzzi) 20, 81 New Documentary Nexus (Wiehl) 13 Newman, Brian 126 Newman, Corinna 126 – 127 Newman, Therese 126 New York Times (newspaper) 137, 160

Index  219 Nice Coloured Girls (film) 24, 25, 31, 62, 68, 69, 105 Nichols, Bill 6, 7 – 8, 18, 21, 37, 66, 70n2, 76 – 79, 83, 158 Night Cries (film) 105 Night Mail (film) 42, 196 Night of Knowing Nothing, A (film) 8, 201 – 202, 205 Nomadland (film) 19 NonFiction Film Theory and Criticism (Barsam) 60 North Korea 187 – 188 Nuremberg Trials 91n6 Nyarri (Indigenous Martu elder) 174 – 176, 178 – 179 Ocean’s Eleven (film) 186 Ocean’s Twelve (film) 186 Office, The (film) 12 Onibus 174 (film) 10 Only Connect (Anderson) 47 Only Context (Stollery) 44 On the Bowery (film) 63 Oppenheimer 174 – 175 O’Rourke, Dennis 11, 77 Out of the Past (film) 158 Overington, Caroline 182 Owning the Weather (film) 190 Pabst, G. W. 46 Pandemonium (Forster) 46 Pandora’s Hope (film) 107 Parer, Damien 45 Park, Nick 105, 107 Pennebaker, DA 79, 110n3 Peralta, Dan-el Padilla 85 Performing the Archive (film) 15 Philosophical History of Documentary, A (Geva) 33 Philosophy of Documentary, The (LaRocca) 18 Picture Post Magazine 58 Pine, Diana 32, 58 – 59 Pit Lodge Committee 52 Plantinga, Carl 6, 8, 18, 22 Plato 107; hybrid documentary and 88 – 91 Playboy (magazine) 83 Please Explain: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (film) 186 – 187 Polisario Liberation Front 135 Polley, Michael 16, 17 Polley, Sarah 11, 16

Ponech, Trevor 6, 66 – 67 Pornography the Musical (film) 105, 167 Postmodernist and the Drowning Man, The (Morris and Kearney) 159 Potts, Rowena 106, 110n10, 120 Powell, Colin 183 Powerhouse Museum 110n10 Prajabati, Himanshu 204 Preloved (film) 141 – 145 Prelude to War (film) 61 Princeton 24 Procession (film) 8, 190, 192 – 194 Provisional Film Committee 51 Qualifying Australian Production Expenditure (QAPE) 35 – 36 Rabbit ala Berlin (film) 8, 105, 107 Rain (Ivens) 42 Ramsay, JonBenet 137, 138 Randell, Michael 161 Reality-Based Community, The (Balsom) 194, 197 reality program 37 Red Chapel (film) 15, 136 Redemption (film) 204 Renov, Michael 6, 8, 18, 158 Representing Reality (Nichols) 18 Republic, The (Plato) 88, 89, 90, 107 Resha, David 20 Robbed of the Truth (film) 135 Robertson, Zoe 10 Rocco and his Brothers (film) 62 Rocket, The (film) 106 Romancing the Chakra (film) 181 Rosco, Jane 12 Rosenberg, Adam 117, 119, 130n6 Roston, Tom 9 Rotha, Paul 7, 21, 41, 42, 46 Rouch, Jean 10, 11, 15, 63, 65, 79, 196 Rove, Karl 110n11 Rowley, Stephen 27n10 Royal Voluntary Service 61 Rubeli, Ella 116 – 117, 119, 130n4 Ruin (film) 106 Salam, Fetim 134 – 135 Saludos Amigos (film) 61 Samson and Delilah (film) 25 Sandy Hook, Jones and 22, 23 San Francisco Pride 140 San Soleil (film) 160

220 Index Saturday Night (film) 165 – 166 Saunders, James 139 – 141 Saving of Bill Blewitt (film) 47 Schiotz, Jacob 119 – 120, 130n9 Screen Australia 38, 91 – 92n16 Sellors, C. Paul 20, 24 Sen, Ivan 106, 121 7.30 Report, The (film) 135 Sexing the Label (film) 181 Shitlova, Elivetta 32 Shub, Esfir 7, 32, 43, 82 Significant Australian Content (SAC) 36 Silent Village, The (film) 19, 31, 43, 46, 90, 105; hybrid traits of 48 – 62; traits versus definition 48 – 49 Slugan, Mario 18 Slumdog Millionaire (film) 19 Socrates 15, 89, 90, 107 Songbirds (film) 163 Sontag (film) 206 South Wales Miners Federation 51, 52 Spice, Evelyn 70n5 Spurlock, Morgan 188 Stam, Robert 9 Standard Operating Procedure (film) 76, 105, 109 Stanford Law school 24 Stevens, George 91n6 Stewart, Kirsten 206 Sting, The (film) 186 Stolen (film) 134, 135 Stollery, Martin 44, 56 Stone, Oliver 22 Stories We Tell (film) 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 19, 106 street casting 113 – 116 Strong Island (film) 196 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn) 23 – 24, 155, 160 – 162 Studies in Documentary Films 19 Subject (film) 150n5 Subjective Realities (ebook) 27n5 Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellow 190 Sundance Film Festival 190 Super Size Me (film) 21 Sweetgrass (film) 10 Sydney International Film Festival 134 Sylvania Waters (film) 164, 165 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (film) 122, 195 Tanna (film) 106 Ten (film) 9

Tender (film) 171, 176 Thatcherism 164 Theorising Documentary (Renov) 18 These Birds Walk (film) 13 Thin Blue Line, The (film) 9, 12, 17, 20, 23, 27n10, 27n7, 105, 108, 109, 155 – 161, 163 Tiexiera, Jennifer 150n5 Timaeus of Locri 90 Titicut Follies 70 Toomelah (film) 106, 121 Top of the Lake, China Girl (film) 147 Touching the Void (film) 21, 185 – 186 training see collaboration; workshops Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl) 39 Trump, Donald 18, 110n11 truth, philosophical definitions of 5 Twain, Mark 190 twenty-four 24 City (film) 9 Two Murders in Dallas (Rowley) 27n10 Uluru & The Magician (film) 188 United 93 (film) 106 University of Missouri 190 University of Sussex 71n16 University of Technology Sydney 139 Vale, Miriam 197 Varda, Agnes 10 Venice Film Festival 100 Vernon, Florida (film) 157 Vertov, Dziga 7, 11, 212 Vietnam War 162, 163 Vigo, Jean 11 Vinent, Joyce 75 Viola, Bill 118 VIRGIN AIRLINES 140 Virgin Spring, The (film) 62 von Triers, Lars 105, 121 Wallworth, Lynette 171 – 179 Waltz with Bashir (film) 105 Ward, Paul 20 War Game, The (film) 31, 51, 62, 66, 67, 90, 105 Watkins, Peter 51, 66, 79 Watson, Paul 82, 164 We are the Lambeth Boys (film) 63 Weinstein, Harvey 79 Wells, Orson 12 What Do You See? (film) 110n9, 127, 128, 147 – 150

Index  221 What in the World Distinguishes Fiction from nonfiction Film? (Sellors) 24 What is a Photocopier (film) 88 White, David 181 Wiedeman, Reeves 87, 150n5 Williams, D. G. 51 Williams, Linda 23, 159 Winston, Brian 6, 7, 8, 32, 37, 47, 70, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 91n5, 136, 158 Wise, Norton 163 Wiseman, Fred 160 Wiseman, Frederick 10, 79,  190 wonderful, horrible life of Leni Riefenstahl, The (film) 187

Woolf, H. Bruce 71n10 Words for Battle (film) 47 workshops: hybrid ideology and structure 100 – 102; inaugural syllabus for 99; teaching hybrid documentary 97 – 98; see also collaboration World Film News 45 World War II 44, 45, 47, 56, 61, 70n4, 88, 91n6 Wormwood (film) 23, 155, 161 Wright, Basil 40, 45, 79 Wrong Man, The (film) 10 Ziering, Amy 206