These films strikingly contrast with the safari and Disney traditions in nature films because they focus on human action and interaction—not only with animals but with the ecosystems in which we all live. They also help us see what is not in many nature programs and films, and they give us models for new approaches to the stories of our environment.
13. An Inconvenient Truth, in which Al Gore made global warming a public concern, created new expectations for environmental filmmaking. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, 2006.
Significance and ethics
Much critique has focused on the popular films and TV series featuring large animals (BBC’s Big Cat Week and Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, for example), asking questions about the animals’ treatment, the accuracy of the depiction, and the claims of the narrative. Derek Bousé believes most wildlife films are so highly crafted that they effectively become fictions. Gregg Mitman, on the other hand, believes that nature documentaries’ challenges in representing reality are no more complex than they are in other forms of documentary film.
Critics have also questioned whether most popular nature documentaries have positive educational value. Certainly viewers may easily miss a conservationist message. Steve Irwin was a vocal conservationist, but after he was stung to death by a stingray, fans killed and mutilated sting rays up and down the Australian coastline. Bill McKibben charges that when programs show closeups of endangered species, they communicate the opposite message—there are plenty of cheetahs, look at them! They also create expectations that animals in their own natural setting are in constant dramatic motion. Veteran “blue-chip” documentary producer David Attenborough once said that a program “about a jungle where nothing happens is not really what you turned the television set on to see.” Such programs only take a tiny sliver of the animal life—the big mammals, mostly—on the planet seriously. “The upshot of a nature education by television is a deep fondness for certain species and a deep lack of understanding of systems, or of the policies that destroy those systems,” McKibben argues.
The global warming crisis may stimulate a trend in nature documentaries to focus not only on animals but on the systems that sustain life and on human beings’ role in affecting the system. The field has already evolved considerably. Certainly the casual cruelty and fakery of early nature documentaries would be anathema today.
As nature documentaries fill entire new channels and categories in television’s sprawling landscape, they will continue to chronicle, whether deliberately or not, our relationship with our environment. The health of the subgenre is now intimately linked with the health of the global ecosystem.
Chapter 3
Conclusion
The documentary form has evolved with technological possibilities. The advent of sound, color, and 16mm all transformed the way that filmmakers could capture reality and tell stories. The advent of video dramatically changed who could capture reality and expanded the range of people telling stories. IMAX and high-definition technologies brought new spectacle to our screens. Digitization and the Internet once again modify and transfigure possibilities and opportunities. They have made possible mail-order video rental, digital video recorders, broadband television and cell phone movies.
None of these changes made long-form documentary obsolete. Rather, they invested that genre with even more value. Films such as Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room (three months with Al Jazeera news channel during the beginning of the Iraq war) and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (about obesity and fast food) won increased legitimacy from their festival and theatrical achievements in 2004. The market value for high-end spectacle increased, as the growth of IMAX production demonstrated.
These changes have made it possible, however, to imagine documentary on a far wider continuum. Human rights video segments and mini-docs, for example, can be used to spur a Web viewer’s commitment, as the organizations WITNESS and OneWorld TV demonstrate. Nongovernmental organizations everywhere can create video for their members, donors, and constituencies, either on their own or with documentary production firms. Young people can produce video of any length, for any purpose, on their own, or with professionals.
Long-form, amateur, and Internet video can all be combined in the same project. The 2004 Video Letters project in the Balkans, executed by the Dutch team Eric van den Broek and Katarina Rejger, facilitated exchanges of video letters among people whose ties had been broken by war. The makers created half-hour television episodes chronicling the interaction and traveled throughout the Balkans with an Internet-equipped van, allowing people to connect with long-lost friends and acquaintances.
Many political movements and organizations have employed documentaries in their causes. Indians in Mexico who joined the Zapatista movement—which announced itself as the Zapatista Army of Liberation (EZLN) to the world in 1993 via the Internet—partnered with international activists to produce videos about their lives and struggle. The videos have been seen in community and religious organizations as well as on the Internet. Young people attracted to the antiglobalization movement have made films witnessing their demonstrations and proclaiming revolutionary intentions, including Big Mouth Media’s Fourth World War (2004). With small-format cameras, Chinese villagers have documented their outrage at government land confiscation for development projects and attracted international attention.
New technologies do not, of course, solve old problems of truthfulness. The notorious documentary Loose Change, a recitation of discredited conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is still viewed regularly on the Internet. LonelyGirl15’s video blog entries on YouTube, featuring a cloistered religious teen’s first daring steps toward rebellion, attracted a huge fan base before a group of artists admitted it was all fiction.
New technologies vastly increase the volume of production under the rubric of documentary. This volume may create new subgenres or may eventually force rethinking. When political operatives, fourth graders, and product marketers all make downloadable documentaries, will we redraw parameters around what we mean by “documentary”?
As we have seen, the genre of documentary is defined by the tension between the claim to truthfulness and the need to select and represent the reality one wants to share. Documentaries are a set of choices—about subject matter, about the forms of expression, about the point of view, about the story line, about the target audience.
While it may seem obvious, these definitions have also been obscured in much debate about documentary. Documentary’s founders—Flaherty, Grierson, and Vertov—did not so much articulate the tension driving documentary as exhibit it. Each one of them promised access to reality through art, without explaining at what point artistic license broke the implicit contract with the viewer. New technologies, such as 16mm, have regularly been trumpeted as ways out of the quandary, but they only created more ways to explore it. Applying high journalistic standards can work toward accuracy, but those standards do not resolve the problem that a documentary always represents rather than just showing reality.
Documentarians will continue to wrestle productively with questions such as: How does a filmmaker responsibly represent reality? What truths will be told? Why are they important, and to whom? What is the filmmaker’s responsibility to and relationship with the subjects of the work? Who gets the opportunity to make documentaries, how are they seen, and under what constraints?
Filmmakers will work with the tools at hand. These include the formal conventions that register good faith, accuracy, and unique presence to a viewer, conventions that can be anything from a sonorous narrator to a shaky camera. They include expectations that viewers bring with them from established subgenres and include the participation of authorities and celebrities, and the imprimatur of organizations that viewers trust.
Makers will also benefit from studying the struggles of past documentarians to work in good faith, whether it is the political passion of a Joris Ivens or a Barbara Kopple, the cross-cultural pursuits of a J
ean Rouch, the empathic explorations of an Allan King, the historical mission of a Henry Hampton.
The problem of how to represent reality will continue to be worth wrestling with, because the documentary says, “This really happened, and it was important enough to show you. Watch it.” The importance of documentary may be in public affairs or celebrity-driven entertainment. It may be important for fourteen-year-old skateboarders or residents of one apartment building; it may be important until the end of the month or the end of the semester or the end of time. Documentary makes connections, grounded in real life experience that is undeniable because you can see and hear it.
A note on history and scholarship
This book is informed by a substantial body of scholarship, much of it but by no means all created by academics. This note sketches the evolution of documentary scholarship, in the hopes that those captivated by the challenges of documentary may also contribute to its understanding.
Most filmmakers are too busy making their work to describe it, much less archive it and locate it in a context. Journalists rarely have the luxury of historical research and comparative knowledge of the field (with striking exceptions such as J. Hoberman, Ruby Rich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Stuart Klawans); academic work is, therefore, a key resource for documentary. Scholarship identifies important creators and trends, keeps a record of what has gone before, and also sets the agenda for what we think are the main issues or problems in documentary. It is an ongoing and fluid process.
Makers were the first recorders of documentary history, though, and they were predictably biased. For decades, the most prolific and the most widely circulated writers were Griersonians. Leading writer, teacher, and filmmaker Paul Rotha argued that documentary was “instruction for the awakening of civic consciousness among the public,” and Rotha’s writing was part of the missionary work he did to raise that consciousness. His 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 was translated into several languages and widely used in courses. He recounted history—focused only on Europe—as background to his teaching of film production. Learn, he counseled, from the close observation of the romantic Flaherty; from the aesthetic experiments of continental Europeans such as Cavalcanti, Ruttman, and Ivens; from the reportorial passion of Vertov and the propagandistic techniques of Eisenstein and of Grierson, in order to make your socially influential work.
Historical narrative
The definitive narrative of documentary history was established in 1971 by Erik Barnouw. The Dutch-born American scholar, filmmaker, and curator undertook the task of writing a truly international history of documentary, titled, simply, Documentary. His task, undertaken while teaching at Columbia University, took him to more than a score of nations worldwide, including Japan, India, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and countries in Eastern Europe as well as Western European film-producing countries. With a broad humanist vision and healthy curiosity, he asked himself what conditions create the possibilities for certain kinds of work (i.e., propaganda, or avant-garde art film), and he focused on leading and influential figures.
In Barnouw’s resulting unpretentious and authoritative social history, Flaherty, Grierson, and Vertov were no longer warring factions to be judged but historical innovators differently setting history in motion. He used charismatic creators as guides through the history, exemplifying eras and approaches. The book begins with early experiments in nonfiction at the origins of cinema. Barnouw’s founding fathers (the founding was male-dominated, although women provided critically important support in production, editing, and marketing) include Flaherty, the Explorer; Dziga Vertov, the Reporter; young Joris Ivens, the Painter; and Grierson, the Advocate.
The narrative tracks the growth of the powerful advocacy impulse in the early work of German fascist documentarian Leni Riefenstahl, the New Deal work of Pare Lorentz in the United States, leftist filmmaking in 1930s Japan, and the work of the British documentary movement, which culminated in the wartime propaganda of World War II. The book describes use of documentary film in the postwar period as poetry, as history, ethnography, and advocacy. It charts the rise of the sponsored documentary and the TV documentary. An international movement of dissent also develops new expressive techniques. The observational fly-on-the-wall approach exemplified by artists such as Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysles, Frederick Wiseman, and Allan King is compared with the more provocative cinema verité approach practiced by artists worldwide. The narrative ends with a range of dissident film movements: underground films in the new Soviet empire, protest films against the American war in Vietnam, and films protesting industrial growth in Japan, among others.
Unsentimentally and with a wealth of specifics, Barnouw portrayed documentary makers overall as voices of freedom, conviction, and engagement with the world. He showed them exploring the medium to tell stories neglected by the ever-more-powerful mainstream media, which he had earlier analyzed in a three-volume history of television. Documentary was immediately used in film studies classes, which were growing rapidly in popularity. In the same time period, others also produced popular texts developed out of classroom use and production mentoring. Lewis Jacobs created a valuable anthology of writings on documentary, for example. He organized it more or less chronologically, with such themes as innovation (the founder era), conservatism (the postwar moment), and engagement (cinema verité). Richard Barsam developed a framework that looked at documentary as an art within a longer aesthetic tradition of realism, and which also took a broad range of expression into consideration, in Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Jack Ellis, who had worked with Grierson, published The Documentary Idea, which focused on English-language social documentary and unabashedly showed his fondness for Grierson; he later updated it with Betsy McLane. However, the broad geographical and aesthetic range and limpid clarity of Barnouw was unmatched by any other synthetic historian.
Analytical scholarship
Scholarship about documentaries developed as cinema studies, growing out of literature departments, and some students became professors in the discipline. The origins of the field skewed scholarly research toward the analytical focus on texts typical of literary scholars—with the text in this case being the film. As the academic field of cultural studies—the study of the formation of culture, with particular attention to conditions of production and reception—grew, so did studies of how film movements developed and how films were received and used.
Academics have extensively explored the complexities behind documentary’s seemingly simple claim to truthfulness about the real world. Their close readings of films have parsed exactly how filmmakers achieve the illusion of transparent revelation of truth; they have often brought a rich body of biographical and historical knowledge to their close readings as well. In addition, they have challenged and reexamined the reputation and role of foundational figures, particularly those of Grierson and Flaherty.
In this genre, academics have developed their own categories within which to understand and critique the work of documentarians. Categorization lays the groundwork for them to interpret and analyze the work; such categories have value only as they help explain how documentaries work, and as they continue to be invented. Scholarly categories differ sharply from the categories used in the business marketplace, where subject areas (history, wildlife, science, children’s) dominate. They focus on the techniques filmmakers use to represent reality and thus put the problem of representation in such a way that convinces viewers it is not representation at all, but reality. Bill Nichols, for example, described four ways of addressing the viewer in documentary, each with different implications for claims to truthfulness: expository (i.e., a voice-of-god narrator); observational (such as the Maysles brothers’ work); interactive (oral histories and interviews and the like); and reflexive (work that comments on its own form, such as that of Vertov or the film The Ax Fight). Nichols and others critiqued and added to these catego
ries; Keith Beattie added reconstructive (docudrama) and observation-entertainment (reality TV) to the list. Michael Renov described four functional modes of documentaries: recording, persuading, analyzing, and expressing.
Many academics and scholars have dedicated themselves to chronicling and analyzing advocacy and activist documentaries. This reflects in part the historic role of documentarians, so well identified by Barnouw, as voices of dissent and criticism. It also shows a liberal tilt in the academic community as well as in the living center of documentary production in the 1970s and early 1980s when the first wave of documentary studies scholars were completing their first work. This focus on activism has been particularly well represented in the Visible Evidence book series. For instance, work has been done on AIDS activist documentaries from the 1980s on in the United States; feminist, gay and lesbian documentaries, African American documentaries, and “guerrilla” or alternative and oppositional documentaries.
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