Academy Award for best documentary.
In the following sections, we shall see how Bill Nichols has divided up the documentary cake into five slices. Each type of documentary is defined and distinguished according to how it shapes the events being filmed by means of particular techniques selected by the film-maker. This is similar to the process of genre study outlined in the previous chapter. Whereas particular genres are defined in terms of their invariant iconic 5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 155
and narrative attributes, types of documentary are identified according to the particular techniques they use. I shall follow Nichols’s theoretical discussion of the five types of documentary, although I have endeavoured to summarize and simplify his conceptual discussion and have added case studies to give substance to each category.
The five categories Nichols identifies are: the expository, observational, interactive, reflexive and the performative documentary. I shall illustrate each respective category with the following: Coalface (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1935), High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968), Roger and Me (Michael Moore, 1989), Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002), Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) and The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988).
Expository documentary
Voice-of-God commentary and poetic perspectives sought to disclose information about the historical world itself and to see that world afresh, even if these views came to seem romantic and didactic.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, pp. 32–3
Nichols’s definition of expository documentary emphasizes its typical characteristics: a disembodied and authoritative voice-over commentary combined with a series of images that aim to be descriptive and informative. The voice-over addresses the spectator directly, offering a series of facts or arguments that are illustrated by the image track. The voice-over either provides abstract information that the image cannot carry, or comments on those actions and events in the image that are unfamiliar or presumably unintelligible to the target audience. The aim of the expository documentary is to be descriptive and informative, or to provide a particular argument. For example, it may celebrate a set of common values, or a particular lifestyle. Below we shall see how Coalface celebrates a day in the life of the miner.
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Expository documentary is the ‘classic’ mode of documentary, which is now more commonly used in TV documentaries, where abstract information is conveyed via the voice-over commentary.
The overall effect of the expository documentary is one of objectivity, of direct and transparent representation.
The British documentary film movement (1927–39), founded by John Grierson, made expository documentaries that were also poetic and aesthetic, rather than simply descriptive and informative. The movement operated in two government
departments: firstly, the Empire Marketing Board and then, from 1933, the General Post Office. The most prestigious films of the movement include Alberto Cavalcanti’s Coalface (1935), John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), Humphrey Jennings’s Spare Time (1939), Harry Watt’s North Sea (1938), Basil Wright’s
Song of Ceylon (1934) and Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936). Due to the financial restrictions imposed upon it by civil servants, the documentary film movement also made films for outside bodies, such as the gas board and the Ceylon tea company. The aim of all these documentaries was to function as a public service, to inform the ‘general public’
about the everyday working of the industries and corporations that shaped their lives. These documentaries therefore served to improve the public image of large corporations.
The prevailing ideology of 1930s Britain in some ways
resembled the ideology prevalent in 1980s Britain. In 1929, the Balfour Committee on Industry and Trade recommended
that the government encourage corporate expansion,
rather than state control. That is, the emphasis shifted towards unregulated capitalist expansion, rather than state intervention. The setting up of a documentary film movement, funded and regulated by the government, ran contrary to this ideology. This explains the difficulties the movement faced when it came to funding and, indeed, with its very existence.
However, it also explains the rise in large corporations commissioning public relations films.
The position of the documentary film movement can be
identified with centre-progressive pressure groups (‘middle 5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 157
opinion’) of the 1930s, which held the following beliefs as shown by Ian Aitken:
In the first place, there was a belief in the essential soundness of established society; in the second place, there was a belief in the need for State regulation and intervention; and, in the third place, there was a rejection of the option of a socialist or fascist transformation of society. These political and cultural parameters framed what some critics have described as a ‘social democratic consensus’, which developed in opposition to orthodox economic liberalism and marxism during the inter-war period, and which became the most influential reform movement of the period.
Film and Reform, p. 168
However, these pressure groups communicated their ideas to a middle-class audience:
… the documentary movement was primarily dedicated to the communication of ideas to governing elites and intellectuals, and although Grierson used a rhetoric of mass
communications, the reality behind the rhetoric
was that the movement functioned, inevitably, as a
means of minority, and not mass communication.
Film and Reform, p. 173
The middle-class bias is particularly evident in the way the movement represented the working classes. One can argue that, in films such as Coalface and Spare Time, the film-makers are glorifying the working classes, exalting them by presenting them as heroic labourers, rather than exploited, degraded and poorly paid workers, living with extreme social hardships.
Coalface is an expository documentary. It consists of an authoritative voice-over that rapidly presents to the spectator statistical data on the British coal industry (the location of collieries, the amount of coal produced, the number of miners employed, injured and so on). A number of the images simply illustrate the voice-over. But others go far beyond the aim of 158
being descriptive and informative. In a sequence depicting the miners underground, a montage of shots contrasts
the half-naked bodies of the miners with the coal and the machinery. The close-ups of the miners’ bodies in particular aim to represent their work as a heroic struggle against nature. This reading is strongly reinforced by the soundtrack, which consists of singing (the Colliers’ Chant by W H Auden) and orchestral sound effects (the musical score by Benjamin Britten).
At the end of the shift, there is an extraordinary sequence of shots depicting the machinery of the pit, particularly the winding gear that brings the miners to the surface. These shots do not aim to be descriptive and informative. They are close-ups of the machinery abstracted from their surroundings, which has the effect of isolating the rhythmic movement of the machinery rather than illustrating its function. Moreover, the cutting is very quick – 32 shots are presented in only 39 seconds – which again emphasizes movement and rhythm, rather than function. These shots represent an abstract film inserted into the documentary. A standard expository documentary would simply consist of a few functional shots of the winding gear. But the use of close-ups and rapid cutting in this sequence from Coalface creates an abstract effect that takes this sequence far beyond the merely descriptive and illustrative.
The following sequence shows the miners leaving the pit and walking home. It consists of the following shots:
3
3
Three shots of miners leaving the pit.
3
3
Two shots of a street of identical houses; the camera angle emphasizes the similarity of the houses.
3
>
3
One shot of a house situated in an open space; a washing line is to the right.
3
3
Two shots of chimney stacks and winding gear silhouetted against the sky; in the second shot, the camera pans left to tree branches blowing in the wind.
3
3
One shot of a washing line, smoke stacks appear in the
background.
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3
One shot of a coal mine; the camera pans left to a tree
blowing in the wind.
5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 159
3
3
One shot of a ruined house, with winding gear in the
background.
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3
One shot of the tree blowing in the wind; the camera pans up to the sky.
As with the previous sequence, the shots are not merely
descriptive and illustrative. They evoke a number of pastoral and romantic clichés: silhouettes, the wind blowing through the trees, ruins, the ‘end of the day’, and so on. These shots offer a counterpoint to the voice-over, which does not talk about the wind blowing through the trees, but offers a series of statistics, or specific knowledge, such as the way the Davy lamp works. In summary, these shots do not merely depict the life of the miner; they present a pastoral, almost a mythological, image of a ‘good and honest’ life.
Does the film privilege the coal industry or the miners? As with the other films of the British documentary movement, Coalface does not attempt to present the miners as individual people, but simply as examples of a particular type of worker, together with the way they interact with their workplace and their home setting. Some critics argue that the film represents the coal industry in terms of necessity and inevitability (John Corner, The Art of Record, p. 61). What this means is that a coalminer’s job, however harsh, is necessary. Coalface therefore exalts and glorifies those who carry out the work. More generally, the aesthetic approach of the British documentary movement presents a distanced view of working-class culture, a view that treats it as both exotic and strange.
The prestigious films of the documentary film movement are constructed according to modernist or formalist aesthetics; that is, they exploit the transformative nature of film, rather than its mimetic or naturalistic potential. Grierson’s philosophy consisted of using the aesthetic nature of film for social purposes. He argued that ‘there is every reason to believe that industrial and commercial films require an even greater consideration of visual effects than the average dramatic film.
They have indeed little else on which to subsist’ (Grierson, quoted in Ian Aitken, Film and Reform, p. 100). This privileging of the aesthetic over the naturalistic is evident in Coalface.
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But the centre-progressive philosophy of the documentary movement is evident in its choice of subject matter. The very act of representing the intrinsic values (both positive and negative) of working-class life is radical in itself.
John Corner asks:
‘How far are the two impulses [modernist aesthetics and social theme] integrated in Coalface and how far are they contradictory ambitions, mutually compromising each other’s integrity and success?’
The Art of Record, p. 620.
For Corner, the film combines aesthetic ambitions with public communication: to make visible to the broader public the workings of a vital national industry, and the way the lives of the ordinary workers are influenced and determined by the industry they work for. Due to these two influences, the film itself is inherently ambiguous.
Observational documentary
An observational mode of representation allowed the filmmaker to record unobtrusively what people did when they were not explicitly addressing the camera.
… But the observational mode limited the film-maker to the present moment and required a disciplined detachment from the events themselves.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 33
The observational mode of documentary is characterized by the non-intervention of the film-maker in the filmed events.
The observational mode is more notable for what it does not contain: there is no voice-of-God commentary, no intertitles and no interviews. The emphasis is to present a slice of life, or direct representation of the filmed events. The film-maker attempts to be completely invisible, that is, an uninvolved bystander. The 5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 161
observational documentary film-maker therefore aims to simply observe unfolding events. For this reason, emphasis is placed on recording events as they unfold in real time. This is why observational documentary is also called direct cinema.
In technical terms, the observational documentary tends
on occasions to use long takes (where the camera is filming continuously, as described in Chapter 1). Sound is also direct and is simply recorded while the camera is rolling. These techniques are evident in the work of one of the most famous film-makers of observational documentaries, Frederick Wiseman. In his documentary High School, filmed in the Northeast High School in Philadelphia in 1968, Wiseman aims to observe and capture the typical, day-to-day events that take place in this school. There are no dramatic or unusual events to film here. The aim is simply to record everyday events, primarily of different classes in progress.
The observational mode establishes an ‘intimate’ relation to the filmed events and establishes a sense of place by refusing to manipulate or distort the events. The observational
documentary is therefore attempting to persuade the spectator that the film is an accurate slice of life; that what is filmed is a transparent record of what took place in front of the camera. In other words, it is meant to be neutral and non-judgemental.
These, at least, represent the ideals of observational cinema.
In practice, it is possible to discern a number of strategies that illustrate the director’s intervention in the filmed events in the observational documentary, both within scenes and between scenes. Yet this intervention is played down in the observational documentary. It is possible to detect an implicit agenda at work in a number of observational documentaries. What is Wiseman’s purpose in making High School? Did he simply want to show how schools function, or is he attempting to undermine the school by exposing the teachers as out of touch with the youth of the 1960s? We can look at the way observational documentaries intervene in the filmed events and see how this intervention reveals an implicit agenda.
As Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell point out ( Film History, p. 581), Wiseman films only one aspect of school life, namely, the interaction and conflict between pupils and teachers, with the 162
teachers invariably imposing discipline. Wiseman has therefore decided to emphasize one particular event (namely, conflict) and downplay other events. Moreover, he has made definite choices about how to film these conflicts, with an emphasis on close-ups.
Scene transitions may also suggest an implicit meaning. In one scene, a Spanish teacher is seen to wave her arms about, drilling the students. Wiseman then cuts to a music teacher conducting percussion musicians. The repetition of the action suggests that the students are simply being drilled, rather than taught.
Although Wiseman does not present himself as a political filmmaker, many political commentators detect a socialist agenda in his films, an implicit critique of American institutions such as school. But by using the observational mode, Wiseman
is downplaying his own critical perspective and seems to be presenting the case that, by simply filming inside institutions such as schools and showing the power struggles that take place there, the liberal-minded spectator will inevitably develop a critical attitude towards the filmed events. Because he does not attempt to intervene in the events, Wiseman would not claim responsibility for any typecast images of the people he films; he would argue that such images are already present in the events themselves. For example, the o
ppressive behaviour of the teachers in High School is a result of the American educational system, not of the presence of Wiseman’s camera.
Interactive documentary
Interactive documentary … arose from the … desire to make the film-maker’s perspective more evident. Interview styles and interventionist tactics arose, allowing the film-maker to participate more actively in present events.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 33
The observational mode of documentary attempts to hide the presence of the film-maker from the spectator. By contrast, interactive documentary makes the film-maker’s presence
prominent, as he or she interacts with the people or events being filmed. In other words, all interactive documentaries by definition 5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 163
draw the filmed people and events into direct contact with the film-maker. The content of the interactive documentary is based primarily on interviews, which draw out specific comments and responses from those who are filmed. A well-made interactive documentary will allow the filmed people to express their opinions and views, and the film-maker may juxtapose one opinion with a contrary opinion, therefore offering the spectator a balanced view.
Sometimes the film-maker is the main person on screen, which may serve to hold the documentary together. Compare this with the expository documentary, in which the disembodied voice of the narrator holds the film together, and the observational documentary where the events themselves have to hold the film together, with a little help from the film-maker who edits the shots and scenes together.
There is a number of ways in which the film-maker may interact with the people he or she is filming. The film-maker may appear on screen and will, formally or informally, ask the interviewee questions. Here, both film-maker and interviewee share the same space and the spectator can see them interacting with one another. The film-maker therefore clearly acts as a mediator between the interviewee and the spectator. Or the film-maker may remain off-screen, in which case we may or may not hear the questions. All we see is the interviewee addressing answers to someone just beyond the frame. Furthermore, if the filmmaker remains off-screen, he or she has the choice of allowing the questions to be heard by the spectator or of editing out the questions altogether. Although in these examples the film-maker is not seen and may not be heard, he or she still shares the same space as the interviewee, and still plays the role of mediator, but his or her presence is less evident.
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