Stories
The fact that all historical documentaries are stories of a “useable past” can be illustrated with several examples.
When the Russian revolution was young, filmmaker Esfir Shub created a critical history of czarist rule in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927)—entirely using footage from the czarist archives, including the czar’s home movies. Shub had made what would come to be called a “compilation film.” Indeed, the czar’s family would have been shocked to see their records of luxurious living juxtaposed to images of poverty and misery. Shub had transformed the meaning of the material by her choice of assembly and juxtapositions, from loving records of a privileged family to a damning condemnation of an overthrown government.
Cold War histories from opposite sides, using government archives that had burgeoned with governments’ substantial investment in propaganda during World War II, also demonstrate the “usability” of history. Stories were told appropriate to the audience—Communist or capitalist—and to the time. In the new East Germany, the German couple Andrew Thorndike (a German American born and raised in Germany) and Annelie Thorndike produced many works based largely on archival footage, including a celebratory and panoramic view of Russian history, The Russian Miracle (1963). In the United States, Henry “Pete” Salomon, a retired U.S. Navy public relations man at NBC networks, worked with the navy to use its footage for Victory at Sea, a long-running, twenty-six-part series celebrating the navy’s role in the Pacific in World War II. Scored by Richard Rodgers to orchestrate emotional response to the silent film, the aptly titled Victory at Sea portrayed the United States and its allies as unselfishly battling for freedom, unstintingly heroic, and of course, ultimately victorious. Both the East German and the American makers worked hard to tell meaningful, emotionally rich stories honestly. Their work also fit neatly within the ideological missions of their governments and era. In later years, when the ideological assumptions of the moment had shifted and thus made visible earlier ones, they were seen as tendentious.
Ken Burns’s series The Civil War (1990) was also a highly crafted narrative, not merely a recounting of facts. One of the most popular programs on U.S. public television, the series tells us that the Civil War created, for the first time, a unitary American national identity. It employs meditative, moving-camera views of still photographs and the testimony of experts to make this argument. The facticity of the photographs, among other things, gives the viewers the sense that they are merely watching a recital of the facts.
Some southerners might contest the validity of The Civil War’s central theme, but the theme reflected, as Gary Edgerton wrote in Ken Burns’s America, the center of consensus history of its time, a “liberal pluralist perspective” focused on preservation of the Union. Burns faced criticism by historians who espoused other interpretations, and by those who said that the series’ real sin was obscuring the fact that it was interpreting rather than reciting history. Burns simply sidestepped this criticism by calling himself not a historian but an “emotional archeologist.” He said he had searched in the historical record for the “kind of emotion and sympathy that reminds us, for example, of why we agree against all odds as a people to cohere.” In other words, he chose characters and incidents that helped him tell the story he chose to tell about the past.
Commercial considerations shape documentarians’ decisions about both subject matter and story line. Television documentaries, designed to entertain, have often featured the lighter side of life, including the entertainment industry itself. Fluffy items such as David Wolper’s Hollywood: The Golden Years (1961) and the French series The Mad Twenties were exemplary productions of the network television era. In the multichannel era of television, historical documentaries have filled many hours cheaply, without any claim to providing comprehensive or balanced perspectives, or covering the most significant aspects of a historical era. Their strung-together sequences of public domain material from governments, along with low-cost archival material (often linked with portentous narration), led to the trade term “clip-job.”
Limited access to material also constrains the choices of historical documentarians. As copyright terms have been extended for generations into the future, historical documentaries using extensive archival footage not in the public domain have become more and more expensive. Authoritatively researched historical documentaries have always been some of the more expensive of the documentary categories, but copyright clearance costs skyrocketed at the end of the twentieth century as archives merged and large media corporations developed more zealous control of their resources under the threat of digital reproduction. Peter Jaszi and I showed, in our study Untold Stories, that some documentarians feared even to undertake ambitious projects. Documentarians in the United States addressed this problem with the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, a guide that dramatically increased filmmakers’ abilities use their rights to quote limited amounts of copyrighted material for free and thus expand the range of what they can make.
Biographies
Biographical documentaries—a particular kind of history—boldly reveal the same choice making that reveals all historical work to be an interpretation. Biography is an immensely popular kind of documentary; it features a close focus on a particular person, promising viewers that they will learn about someone who is recognized as important (a politician, a celebrity, an artist, a sports champion), unsuspectingly important (an unknown inventor, an unsung social worker, an untutored artist), or a witness to history (a Holocaust survivor, Hitler’s secretary). These stories are character-driven by definition, but the filmmaker must interpret that character for the viewer.
Entire biographical series have showcased on television; PBS’s American Masters series and A&E’s Biography Channel are two examples. They have clearly recognizable styles, and could not be more different. American Masters provides a narrative of an American life within a particular social moment; individual narratives are given a social location with surrounding information on events and trends that shape and are triggered by individual actions and choices. The narrative builds around not only the events of the person’s life but the significance of those events within a wider frame. For example, Diane von Furstenberg and Daniel Wolf’s Andy Warhol recognizes the American artist who was famous for impudent art stunts and parties as a serious artist with a critical passion for American culture. Respectful but not reverential, the film makes the claim that the viewer will now be able to understand the significance and legacy of Andy Warhol.
A&E’s biographies, on the other hand, are tightly structured personality profiles, in two varieties: good (often entertainment celebrities) and bad (often criminals). Scholar Mikita Brottman notes that stories are sanitized to represent celebrities as likeable, upstanding citizens, and contradictory evidence is suppressed. For instance, in a biography of Dean Martin that was part of a series on the “Rat Pack” of celebrities around Frank Sinatra, Martin is represented as a dedicated family man, in spite of a wealth of evidence on his womanizing and partying.
However different, each of these series uses filmic techniques intended to bring closure to the viewer’s understanding of the character featured. Authorities are quoted reinforcing the story line; selected historical footage emphasizes the point; the end of the film brings together the themes so that viewers will know the significance, the importance, and the meaning for them of this person’s life. Some biographies, by contrast, use film techniques to call attention to the constructed nature of the biography, and call into question the viewer’s comfortable assumptions. For instance, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s Derrida (2002) is a challenge to the established form of biographical documentary; it cleverly enacts the difference between experience and documenting, and reveals the power of the storyteller to assert reality—in part by showing how difficult it is to construct a story. Jacques Derrida, whose life work involved “deconstructing” our assumptions about knowledge, repeatedly refu
ses to cooperate with the filmmakers, revealing instead their presence. These acts in themselves are also revealing of the character and perspective of the philosopher. The film challenges the viewer to ask the questions Derrida asked about reality and expression. The work of Errol Morris demonstrates another approach to undermining simple associations between biographical truth and documentary. For instance, in his Fog of War (2003), Morris permits Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to describe his own life and controversial political and personal decisions at length, and without comment. The complexities and contradictions of McNamara’s life are held up for viewers who must wrestle with their own judgments of McNamara.
Revisionism
One of the most interesting ways to see the power of storytelling is in revisionist history films. These are films that challenge the dominant version of the historical record. Documentaries that questioned received wisdom on World War II have greatly affected public knowledge of that history and, in the process, have also produced new primary-source documents for historians. In some cases, they are unique records of first-person accounts of history.
The British series The World at War (1973), produced by Jeremy Isaacs for the commercial network Thames TV (during an era when British commercial networks were required to do substantial public service), marked a historic shift in interpretation of World War II. The twenty-six-hour series combining historical footage with eyewitness interviews is still beloved in Britain and has shown all over the world, including on the History Channel. It was revisionist in several ways. The World at War took a global view of the war, rather than a national or regional one, and it depended on eyewitnesses. A cadre of dedicated historical researchers—some of them academic historians—found compelling interviewees who could reach Isaacs’s goal of showing how war “actually affected ordinary people.” Its core message was that war is hell, not that victory was ours. Shocking images of brutal atrocity and death helped to make that message vivid. It had a powerful resonance at a time when the fear of superpower-triggered nuclear war and the reality of superpower-triggered proxy wars were both very much a part of the zeitgeist.
Around the same time, French documentarian Marcel Ophuls reframed international understanding of France’s experience of World War II. Ophuls’s method was that of investigative reporting, which he applied in The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) to the question of collaboration with Nazi domination. He found previously undiscussed depths of unquestioning cooperation with the fascists. The controversial four-and-a-half-hour film was composed largely of interviews in the small town of Clermont-Ferrand, and it revealed that the heroic image of the French Resistance was a myth in France’s middle class; it was the working poor who led Resistance efforts. (The filmmaker was later criticized for selecting a town where the Communist Party was unusually poorly represented, since the CP had been a key organizer of Resistance efforts.) Although it was co-produced by French state TV along with West German and Swiss government television and shown in Germany and Switzerland, the French prime minister ordered it banned on French television. After a triumphant U.S. tour, it was shown in French theaters and on the British BBC.
Following in this style of implacable reexamining of World War II history, Claude Lanzmann, a French Jew, produced a nearly tenhour series, Shoah (1985). Depending entirely on interviews with survivors and surviving agents of the Holocaust—usually the technicians and functionaries—Lanzmann methodically pursued the question not of how it could have happened, but exactly how it did happen (or at least how people remembered it). Shoah provided an unprecedentedly specific public record of the mechanisms of mass murder. With its procedural approach, it shocked and moved audiences, and spurred debate on the ethics of interviewing. Were hidden cameras justifiable for recalcitrant subjects? Was restaging an interview appropriate? How much context should be given a viewer?
World War II revisionism not only offered a different perspective with new information but also introduced new elements to the story. In Japan, Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1988), in cinema verité fashion follows a maniacally obsessed veteran trying to expose cannibalism among troops abandoned in New Guinea after the war and, subtextually, holding the emperor accountable for war crimes that had simply been denied. The veteran’s story, grisly and unique, also stands for the denial of war crimes in general. In the United States, feminist filmmaker Connie Field, in making The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), told a hidden history of women whose wartime jobs changed their lives; it also chronicled the coordinated governmental effort to get these women to give up their jobs and return to the home after the war. Field brought women and workers back into a history that had been dominated by male soldiers and politicians.
One of the most striking examples of bringing new elements into the historical record is Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize (1987, 1990) series. This breakthrough series on American public television traces the civil rights movement as one that upheld the best values in American culture, often against the racist status quo of the time and not without deep internal conflicts. Teams of paired African American and white producers, working with academic historians as advisors, crafted their stories using rare archival footage drawn from small and large archives, personal collections, and the vaults of local television stations. The series brought to national viewers images and incidents that had been seen by a local television news audience perhaps only once in the past. It created nationwide public awareness of the profound impact of the civil rights movement on American history. The series became a staple in American schools and served as a model for later historically revisionist series such as the four-hour series Chicano! (1996) and A Question of Equality (1996), this latter a history of the gay and lesbian rights movements.
Revisionist documentaries themselves may, of course, leave out crucial information, whether purposefully or not. For example, in American independent documentaries made in the 1970s and 1980s recalling political movements of the 1930s—union organizing (Union Maids, 1976), strikes (With Babies and Banners, 1978), the Spanish Civil War (The Good Fight, 1984)—baby boom-era documentarians often did not reveal the extent of the Communist Party’s role in the events or they took at face value the self-reporting of CP members. Depending on oral histories to salvage suppressed elements of the past, and seeing themselves as legatees of political activists they admired, these filmmakers could have easily become prisoners of the limitations of oral history as a sole source of information.
Memory and history
With the growth of home film and video archives and ever-simpler video cameras, the memoir or personal film has made important contributions to historical documentary. In such works, the private and personal are exposed and sometimes contrasted with the official or public record. Individual memory is juxtaposed with and often challenges public history. New stories surface, and individual experience enriches public understanding of the past.
Filmmakers use a variety of techniques to represent memory. One common trope, according to filmmaker David MacDougall, is putting “signs of absence”—images of loss, of objects abandoned, of a photo to be explained—at the center of the film and of the problem to be solved with memory. For instance, the makers of Into the Arms of Strangers (2004), about the Kindertransporte that whisked Jewish children out of Nazi Germany, sought out and used as symbols the actual objects children had brought with them, rather than merely displaying a similar object. Many times, personal filmmakers also use an ironic or reflexive approach to familiar objects or images, forcing a reanalysis of them: collages, blank images, text that startles or asks questions, and repetition—all of which forces viewers to reflect upon or reinterpret the meaning of a sound or image.
In some cases, filmmakers have drawn from avant-garde and experimental filmmaking from earlier eras. The work of American avant-garde filmmaker Yvonne Rainer offers many good examples. Gay African American filmmaker Marlon Riggs structured Tongues Untied
(1989) as a visual poem that had the narrative arc of a journey toward owning his identity. Ross McElwee’s life’s work (Sherman’s March, 1986; Six O’Clock News, 1996; Bright Leaves, 2003), which tracks the evolution of the filmmaker’s (or his persona’s) sense of self, draws from McElwee’s own training among experimental filmmakers using the body and their own lives as subject matter.
Personal films contributed to the development of cultural identity movements worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s. Political changes and economic globalization created vast new diasporic movements of South Asians, Southeast Asians, “overseas Chinese,” and Africans. Self-consciously diasporic cultures began to emerge and find self-expression in film, with support from institutions encouraging that self-expression. In Britain protests by independent filmmakers, demands of ethnic minorities in the wake of riots, and the launching of the new private (but funded with public revenues) Channel 4 TV coalesced into the formation of special workshops to cultivate filmmaking by minorities.
Among the successful results were the so-called black film workshops, including Sankofa, one of whose celebrated filmmakers was Isaac Julien, and Black Audio Collective. These workshops generated enormous and productive political debates about the self-representation of various minorities and the role of women. One prominent result was John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986). Unapologetically experimental, it poetically reworked images of riots, slums, newsreels, and colonial historical footage into a personal essay on history and identity. Another heralded work was Body Beautiful (1990) by Ngozi Onwurah, the daughter of a Nigerian father and a British mother. The film combines fiction and documentary, using an actress to represent the filmmaker and with the mother playing herself. It contrasts the mother’s and daughter’s body images and their personal histories, as conditioned by the ordinary racial, gender, and age discrimination of British society.
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