Controversy
Cinema verité became a source of immense contention, partly because of the totalizing nature of its supporters’ claims to truth. (Robert Drew blithely dismissed most previous documentaries with the simple word “fake.”) In March 1963 at a film conference in Lyons, France, filmmakers debated the new approach. Enthusiasts decried the paternalistic and didactic model of Griersonian documentary, and celebrated the integrity and accuracy of cinema verité. Others resisted.
The Dutch activist filmmaker Joris Ivens resented the implicit claim in the term “cinema verité” that not only did it tell the truth but earlier forms of documentary did not. He followed that the claim skimmed over such important questions as “which truth and for whom? Seen by whom, and for whom?” The fantastic capacities of lightweight equipment also ran the risk, he said, “of skimming reality instead of penetrating it.” And sometimes you needed to stop observing, he said, and “make militant films.” The radical French director Jean-Luc Godard charged that cinema verité advocates had chosen to deny themselves the benefit of selection and reflection: “Deprived of consciousness, thus, Leacock’s camera, despite its honesty, loses the two fundamental qualities of a camera: intelligence and sensibility.”
Since then, debates have not stopped. Even the name for this approach has been contentious. Although Rouch had given cinema verité its name, he and other French filmmakers began calling their work “direct cinema.” Meanwhile in the UK, where direct cinema had originated, cinema verité became a catchall term, as it did in the in the United States, for anything that involved no narration, a handheld camera, and the capture of action.
Some filmmakers reject the term, others the entire approach. “Cinema verité is the cinema of accountants,” German filmmaker Werner Herzog told D A Pennebaker. Fred Wiseman called his films “reality fictions,” arguing that he did not intend to represent reality objectively but to show what he saw and what he found interesting in that. Even this phrase was, he said, a “parodypomposity term” invented to poke fun at the pretensions of cinema verité. The American documentarian Errol Morris inveighed against cinema verité, for claiming “that somehow if you juggle a camera around in your hands, sneak around in the corners of rooms and hide behind pillars, the Cartesian riddle will be solved as a result. That somehow epistemology will no longer play a role in what you do. That this is truth cinema, truth incarnate as revealed by a camera!” Lindsay Anderson, one of the pioneers of Free Cinema, believed that direct cinema was “just an excuse for not being creative and being pretentiously journalistic.”
Filmmakers who proudly call their work cinema verité still grapple with the question of what kind of truth cinema verité offers. Jean Rouch stated that the filmmaking process is “a sort of catalyst which allows us to reveal, with doubts, a fictional part of all of us, but which for me is the most real part of an individual.” Canadian cinematographer and inventor Michel Brault neatly sidestepped the issue when he told critic Peter Wintonick, “You can’t tell the truth—you can reveal.” Canadian filmmaker Wolf Koenig (Lonely Boy) reverted to a familiar argument when he told Wintonick, “Every cut is a lie but you’re telling a lie to tell the truth.” These many twists of phrase recall the wry comment of theorist Noël Carroll: “Direct cinema opened a can of worms and then got eaten by them.”
Critics have challenged the claim that filmmakers are showing unvarnished truth, even a subjective one. Jeanne Hall has shown how D A Pennebaker, in his pathbreaking verité portrait of Bob Dylan on tour, Dont Look Back, in fact carefully shaped the documentary to convey the filmmaker’s own criticisms of the media. Thomas Benson and Carolyn Anderson charged that Fred Wiseman’s films involve a contradiction, since he plays the role of author, and has created a work full of meaning but then withholds his meaning from the audience, thus demystifying institutions but mystifying his own role. A. William Bluem explored the possibility that the very spontaneity and emotionality of verité can obscure perception.
Others have pointed out that the approach can have effects opposite from the one that documentarians may hope for. Peter Davis’s Middletown (1982), supposedly a summary of sociological research, ignored the research’s conclusions in order to focus on crisis and peak moments in a season of the town’s life. The cinema verité approach he chose, as Brian Winston mentioned, favored conflict in the day-to-day rather than the sociological insights of the report. After 1968, the French radical filmmaker and theorist Guy Hennebelle argued that some seemingly transparent practices—for instance, verité scenes of workers talking, which film activists believed might mobilize them for revolutionary action—could simply recapitulate the “false consciousness” of the workers themselves. “It is better to admit frankly the manipulation and make it agreeable to the eye and the ear by making use of the whole arsenal of the cinema,” he declared.
The ethics of a verité filmmaker’s relationship with the subject has often been raised. Filmmakers may inadvertently change the reality they film, and they may agonize over how much to intervene. The makers of Kartemquin Films’s Hoop Dreams (1994), tracked two, poor, African American families over more than five years and sometimes contributed to family income; they believed modest contributions were part of a good-faith relationship with the struggling families. The mother of the Loud family bemoaned that her family might never live down the publicity given to them in An American Family (1973), and indeed the Loud family continued to be targets of unwanted attention for decades. When the Maysles brothers filmed a concert of the Rolling Stones for the film that became Gimme Shelter (1970), the Hell’s Angels were paid to keep order. But an altercation with a fan resulted in a death, which the film team captured on film, to some amount of criticism. Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb (1995) exposed the private lives of the psychologically disturbed family of cartoonist R. Crumb for theatrical entertainment; Zwigoff had the consent of Crumb and his family, but some questioned the ability of the more disturbed family members to provide that consent.
7. Kartemquin Films used cinema verité to tell untold stories, including those of African American children (Hoop Dreams, 1994). Produced by Kartemquin Films.
Cinema verité is no longer revolutionary. It is the default language for music documentaries, and for all kinds of behind-the-scenes and the-making-of documentaries; it is part of the DNA of cop shows and docusoaps and part of the credibility apparatus of reality TV shows. It is built into expectations for grassroots video projects to expand expression, such as the BBC’s Video Diaries project of the 1990s. The career of British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, whose sensationalist peerings into the lives of the famous and notorious are internationally successful, has depended on it. Cinema verité techniques are commonly used in political advertisements, to lend freshness and credibility. The approach has lost its novelty but not its ability to convince viewers that they are present, watching something unconstructed and uncontrovertibly real.
Chapter 2
Subgenres
We have established that documentary is a film genre in which a pledge is made to the viewer that what we will see and hear is about something real and true—and, frequently, important for us to understand. The filmmaker must, however, use a wide range of artifice in order to assert that claim, and many of them do their work in a commercial or semicommercial environment that constrains their choices. As documentary has evolved, so have standards, habits, conventions, and clichés around how filmmakers do their work.
We now turn to several subgenres to see how differently filmmakers have addressed the problems of representing reality within various subject areas.
Public Affairs
A good place to start looking at documentary’s many subgenres is the public affairs documentary, which survives in the public television science series Nova, specials on such issues as poverty, government welfare programs, corporate corruption, and health care, and other public service programs. Such documentaries typically undertake an investigative or problem-oriented approach, feature sober e
xposition with narration and sometimes a host, make liberal use of background footage or b-roll, and focus on representative individuals as they exemplify or illustrate the problem. They promise an authoritative, often social-scientific view of an issue, speaking as professional journalists on behalf of a public affected by the problem.
This has been a socially influential and aesthetically durable form, which grew out of the early experiences of documentary makers and in the traditions of journalists. It is also the source of many viewers’ expectations of objectivity and sobriety in documentary, and the reason why so many are surprised by the wide variety of work produced in the short history of documentary.
The broadcast TV public affairs documentary had its heyday from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, largely on commercial television. Major funders of public affairs documentaries were broadcasting companies, which produced these films in order to win prizes and prestige, to justify their use of airwaves they got licenses for from government, and as part of public service mandates explicitly imposed by regulators. As television became the primary vehicle by which people learned about the world beyond their own experience, the power of television broadcasters to affect public opinion—and therefore elite decision making—grew. And as it expanded, broadcast executives became ever-more implicated in elite politics.
Public affairs documentaries evolved as a more seasoned, thoughtful version of news—a kind of feature magazine to the news’ headlines. For Fred Friendly, the legendary producer who worked with Edward R. Murrow and later became a leader of public television, the job was “interpretation, background and understanding at a time when comprehension is falling behind the onrush of events.” The men and (much less frequently) women who produced these documentaries saw themselves as journalists, often investigative journalists. They believed in the role of journalism as a Fourth Estate: a watchdog on power. At the same time, cautious executive producers needed high ratings to survive and were acutely aware of close scrutiny by powerful politicians, who held the ability to revoke licenses and mandates.
History and culture
The advent of television in the 1950s dramatically changed the opportunities and challenges for documentarians. Early documentaries had been made by filmmakers; now people flooded into television from radio and print journalism. The BBC launched Special Enquiry (1952-57) and Panorama, which continues. Granada TV, a British commercial channel, launched World in Action (1963-98). In the United States, the three networks each had series: CBS’s See It Now (1951-58), followed in 1959 by CBS Reports, and NBC’s White Paper, followed later by ABC’s CloseUp! (1960-63). The Australian Broadcasting Corporation launched Chequerboard (1970-72), and Four Corners, which is still running. Because they were produced in series through major news and information outlets, such public affairs documentaries implicitly asserted that the topics they covered were the most important topics of the day.
The public affairs documentary series has been threatened by nearly every business development in television. Growing audiences raised the ratings stakes, and competition from the advent of multichannel cable television, satellites, and the Internet made it ever-harder to justify high budgets. Deregulation and privatization vastly reduced public interest obligations. In the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. networks dropped series and turned to specials, sometimes outsourcing them to freelancers ranging from Hollywood-centric David Wolper to scruffy independent Jon Alpert.
The 1970s also saw the rise of newsmagazines, such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. These highly formatted shows further undercut television public affairs documentary, while drawing on their prestige. Producer Tom Spain, who started out working on Twentieth Century under Richard Paley’s CBS, believed that the “good days”—what others called the “golden age”—ended “when 60 Minutes started to make money … we thought of ourselves as, maybe, Mr. Paley’s kennel full of well-bred dogs—he could show us off, have us do tricks, and be a kind of loss leader.” By the 1990s, public affairs documentary on the “golden age” model was a rarity on commercial television everywhere. Public service television continued to produce high-end public affairs documentaries, but producers also began searching for ways to make significant work on much lower budgets and with different models. For instance, in the United States the public affairs series Frontline, always an innovator, continued to produce its prestigious programs and also experimented with low-budget programs, sometimes showcased on the World Wide Web, produced with the latest digital equipment.
Public TV
Public television in the United States was born, in part, out of the frustration of large foundation executives with the limits of public affairs documentary on commercial television. The Ford Foundation bankrolled an effort that found traction in the White House; by 1967 an entity had been created to channel federal funds (never to become more than a fifth of public television’s funding, however) to hundreds of local stations throughout the country. The foundation funded controversial documentaries, including Banks and the Poor (1970), which criticized bank lending policies that excluded whole neighborhoods. One of the lenders criticized was a major donor to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. Nixon waged war on public affairs on public television and was stopped only by impeachment.
The experience left station managers leery of all public affairs. Foundations funded documentarians who could negotiate the anxieties of the Public Broadcasting Service and its member stations. Expert journalists such as Bill Moyers, Roger Weisberg, Hedrick Smith, and Alvin Perlmutter executed heavily researched and highly professional works on large topics such as education, gentrification, and even death and dying. Investigative journalism on timely political topics was more controversial and even harder to fund.
As cheaper production fueled a dissident generation in the 1970s, independent producers organized to insist on space on public television. Series such as Frontline, which featured investigative journalism, and P.O.V., which showcased work in a personal voice, resulted. In 1991, independent producers eventually succeeded in dedicating federal funds within public television for the Independent Television Service, which largely produces documentaries.
Influence and significance
Network public affairs documentaries often have attracted enormous attention. Intense controversy circulated around the several episodes of See It Now in which Edward R. Murrow challenged the antidemocratic intimidation of Communist witch hunts, and he finally took on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, one of the most publicity-hogging of the witch-hunters. (The 2005 feature film Good Night, and Good Luck draws on this history.) The 1968 CBS Reports program “Hunger in America” exposed the failures of the federal welfare system and generated so much public reaction that the Senate held a hearing and funds for the programs were increased. The Defense of the United States (1980), a terrifying CBS documentary on U.S. nuclear military policy, was widely seen in Europe and may have soured European governments on U.S. military plans. The work of British filmmaker Adrian Cowell for British commercial television on Brazilian rainforest devastation—the Decade of Destruction series (1980-90)—informed a successful campaign by nongovernmental organizations to reform World Bank environmental policies. The BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares (2004) by Adam Curtis, which argued that the rise of Muslim fundamentalists had been aided by neoconservative zealots in the United States, raised an international uproar.
At the same time, broadcasters have often avoided being on the bleeding edge of an issue. Ed Murrow waited a full two years, for example, before he took on McCarthy. The BBC hesitated to show The Power of Nightmares and initially aired it without publicity. Until the later 1960s, the U.S. networks studiously avoided the Vietnam War; they also avoided any recognition of documentaries done around the world, including in Cuba and Vietnam, on the subject. Several Canadian documentaries by internationally renowned broadcast journalists such as Michael Maclear and Beryl Fox were not shown in the United States, presumably because executives chose not to ruffle politicians’ feathers or because t
hey themselves participated in the same social circles and internalized the political elite’s distaste for dissent.
CBS’s Morley Safer’s Vietnam (1967) finally broke the silence, with uncommented but damning footage showing a war far different from the one represented by the government, and this film seemed to open up possibility. CBS commissioned the British journalist Felix Greene to make a film about North Vietnam, but the network then apparently lost courage and canceled the contract. However, the new public broadcasting service picked up the show. Greene’s Inside North Vietnam (1968) showed a determined, even happy people, whose nationalist ambitions reminded some reviewers of American colonists’ aspirations. The film outraged some congressional representatives, one of whom threatened to cut funding for public television.
As antiwar protest and public opinion grew, U.S. networks gathered more courage. In 1971 CBS aired The Selling of the Pentagon, sometimes regarded as the apex of this kind of public affairs documentary. It revealed the extent of the U.S. military’s public relations machinery and even criticized the network’s own (occasional) complicity. The airing drew so much attention—including outrage from the administration and the Pentagon—that a second broadcast drew higher ratings than the first. The Pentagon withdrew some of the public relations materials criticized in the reporting.
Independent filmmakers meanwhile made very different work, which was not broadcast. Their work often eschewed the soberly objective stance and claim to comprehensiveness of broadcast documentaries. Antiwar activists used Michael Rubbo’s Canadian documentary Sad Song of Yellow Skin (1969), in which the small crew followed three U.S. journalists around Saigon, to mobilize support for their cause. Emile de Antonio created an analytic history of the Vietnam War as a continuation of imperialist policy in In the Year of the Pig (1968), which was shown in theaters. In 1974 Peter Davis, who had produced The Selling of the Pentagon, made Hearts and Minds, a pointed, heartbreaking document showing what Davis believed was the betrayal of fundamental U.S. beliefs and ideals in the Vietnam War. Where the CBS film had been a tough and damning piece of reporting, Hearts and Minds was an expression of grief and rage.
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