Interactive documentaries show the process of interaction taking place. The act of gathering information by means of interviews is clearly shown, including the negotiation of the terms and conditions under which the interview is to take place. The result is that the spectator can see what effect the interview is having on the interviewee. Unlike expository or observational documentaries, the interactive documentary shows the process by which it is made. We must remember that 164
in all documentaries, there is a power relation involved, between the film-makers and those who are filmed. This power relation is masked by the expository and observational documentary, but is apparent in the interactive documentary (as well as the reflexive documentary, to be discussed below).
The ethical question about filming someone is made apparent in the interactive documentary. But the film-maker can, nonetheless, simply use the interviews for his or her own purposes. Interaction and juxtaposition of shots and scenes, together with the use of archival footage, constitute the main tools of the interactive documentary film-maker. The film-maker uses these tools in order to present an argument. What is important from an ethical perspective is the manner in which the film-maker presents the interviewees. How does the film-maker prompt the interviewee?
Is the film-maker provocative? Or does the film-maker allow interviewees to put their case fully? How are the interviews used in the final film? We shall begin to approach these questions by looking at one of the most controversial interactive film-makers working today, Michael Moore, and consider two of his films, Roger and Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2002).
A description of the content of Roger and Me cannot convey the irony, humour and anger that the film can arouse in the spectator. But briefly, the film is about the decline of the town of Flint in Michigan, which was dependent on the continuing presence of General Motors to sustain it. But the chairman of General Motors, Roger Smith, initiated a series of closures of General Motors factories in Flint in order to move production to Mexico, where the workers are paid less than their American counterparts. The result was that Flint became one of the poorest towns in America. The film depicts Moore’s repeated attempts to interview Smith about the closures and to invite him to Flint to see the effects his policy is having on the town.
Interspersed with these repeated attempts to interview Smith are Moore’s interviews with various people in Flint.
Most of Moore’s attempts to interview Roger Smith fail. But these moments are not left out of the film. Indeed, the process of attempting to interview Smith adds humour to the film. But humour is also added by the constant presence of Moore on 5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 165
screen as he interviews various people in a deadpan and ironic manner. Roger and Me is far from the observational mode of documentary. Moore is not an observer, but a participant. He therefore has no intention of remaining neutral and hidden (not least because he was born and grew up in Flint). His film represents the victims of 1980s corporate activity and he tries to make the chairman of one such corporation accountable for his actions. The difficulties Moore has in interviewing Smith strengthen the film’s message that chairmen and women of large corporations simply avoid being accountable for the social devastation that their policies bring about.
Moore conveys this strong social message by means of editing.
He comments on the rich and famous people of Flint by
juxtaposing interviews with them with scenes of the poor people of Flint being evicted from their homes. The first time this editing strategy is used is approximately 18 minutes into the film, where Moore interviews a number of wealthy people at the Annual Great Gatsby party, held at the home of one of General Motors’ founding families. When Moore asks what are the positive aspects of Flint, the final interviewee replies, ‘Ballet, hockey. It’s a great place to live.’ Moore then immediately cuts to the sheriff’s deputy, Fred Ross, evicting a poor family from their home.
The second time this editing strategy is used is approximately 27 minutes into the film, when Moore interviews Miss
Michigan. Asked to comment on the job losses in Flint, Miss Michigan simply replies, ‘I’m for employment and working in Michigan.’ This is then followed by another eviction
(after Moore has shown the result of the 1988 Miss America contest, which was won by Miss Michigan). The third time, approximately 49 minutes into the film, is when Moore cuts to the evictions directly after interviewing a group of upper-class women playing golf.
But the most poignant use of this editing strategy is saved for the end of the documentary, when Smith is shown giving a speech on the spirit of Christmas, which Moore intercuts with shots of a family in Flint being evicted from their home on Christmas Eve. Moore uses the images of eviction as a form of 166
critical commentary, to show how the rich and powerful (most notably, Smith) do not understand the effect of unemployment on the poor.
Despite its strong social message, the film has been criticized for
‘manipulating’ and ‘misrepresenting’ events. In some ways, the agenda of Roger and Me resembles the agenda of the British documentary movement – to represent the underclasses on film, those who do not usually have a voice. But, just as the British documentary movement romanticized the lives of the working class by elevating their lifestyle, we need to see how Moore has used the events in Flint for the purposes of his film.
Moore has been criticized for manipulating the chronology of events in Flint. The discrepancies in the film’s chronology became apparent in an interview with Moore conducted by
Harlan Jacobson in the journal Film Comment (November/
December 1989). Corner sums up the four main discrepancies: 1 Ronald Reagan, depicted visiting laid-off auto workers, was a presidential candidate, not the president, when he made his visit. (The film does not describe him as president, but the assumed chronology of the scene and the projected effect of the footage works with the idea that he is.)
2 The evangelist who is depicted visiting the city after the Great Gatsby society party in 1987 actually visited in 1982, several years before the crucial 1986 lay-offs.
3 The three big civic development projects which are seen in the film as more or less concurrent attempts to counter the effects of the 1986–7 lay-offs (Hyatt Regency Hotel; Autoworld theme-park; Water Street shopping pavilion) had all closed before these lay-offs.
4 The number of jobs lost during the 1986–7 closures seem to be far less than indicated in the film. The spread of losses from 1974 onwards is closer to the film’s estimate. (The figure of 30,000 is given in an edited clip from a CBS news broadcast, which may be referring to motor industry closures of which those in Flint are only a part.)
The Art of Record, pp. 165–6
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In the interview with Jacobson in which these discrepancies became apparent, Moore argued that the film is about a town that died in the 1980s; it is not just about the 1986–7 lay-offs.
And other reviewers argued that the broader picture presented in the film (corporate greed, wasteful capital expenditure) is more important than the fine details.
However, Roger and Me does raise questions about the implicit boundaries that govern the making of documentaries and
whether the film-maker should make the spectator aware that the rules (such as sticking to the chronology of events) are being broken. It is not immediately apparent in Roger and Me that the rules of documentary are being broken. In his equally controversial Bowling for Columbine, Moore is seen going through a process of discovery. In his usual laidback, sarcastic manner, he appears larger than life for most of the film, creating awkward situations for those involved with promoting the USA’s love affair with guns – from militia and National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston, to public relations spokespeople at Kmart (the store that sold ammunition to the teenagers who carried out the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999). Mo
ore’s invasive interview technique gets results. The Kmart spokespeople eventually announce that the store will stop selling ammunition. Similarly, Heston decides to walk out in the middle of his interview with Moore rather than discuss or justify the USA’s obsession with gun culture.
Yet Moore does not end up calling for gun control as he
discovers that Canada has as many guns as the USA. He
therefore begins to dig deeper into the American psyche to find out why more Americans shoot one another than any
other nation. Moore doesn’t have any definitive answers, but is shown on screen almost thinking aloud, following dead ends, broadening his scope to include US foreign policy, investigating the news media’s obsession with gun violence, creating unusual montage sequences, and showing the actual footage of the shooting at Columbine.
In the end, it is not so much a coherent argument but simply Moore himself who becomes the key element that holds the film together. As Philip French wrote in his review of the film: 168
[Moore’s] chief instrument is his own personality – an apparently ordinary guy in unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses, bowling jacket, plaid shirt, blue jeans and baseball cap, more than a little overweight and sporting facial hair that’s a long way from designer stubble, but still short of being a bohemian beard. He’s a blue-collar, politically-committed Louis Theroux, capable of getting anyone – from backwoods militia men to bank managers handing out free rifles to new depositors – to open up to him.
‘Oh Yeah – You and Whose Armoury?’ The Observer, 17 November 2002
Reflexive documentary
Reflexive documentary arose from a desire to make the conventions of representations themselves more apparent and to challenge the impression of reality which the other three modes normally conveyed unproblematically.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 33
In the interactive mode of documentary, we saw that the filmmaker on screen participates in the events being filmed. In the case of Roger and Me, Moore interviews the people of Flint and attempts to interview Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors. In interactive documentary, therefore, the film-maker does not attempt to conceal his presence, unlike the practice in expository and observational documentary.
In reflexive documentary, the film-maker goes one step further than interactive documentary, attempting to expose to the spectator the conventions of documentary representation, with the effect of challenging the documentary’s apparent ability to reveal the truth. Rather than focus on the events and people filmed, the reflexive documentary focuses on how they are filmed. In the reflexive documentary, the properties of the film and the film-making process become the main focus of attention.
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The reflexive documentary does not pretend to simply present a slice of reality, since it also tries to demonstrate to the spectator how film images are constructed. Whereas the interactive mode makes the film-maker’s presence known to the spectator, the reflexive documentary makes the whole process of film-making known to the spectator.
Reflexive documentary challenges the documentary’s status as objective and illustrates the subjective choices involved in filmmaking. But a lack of objectivity does not necessarily reduce the significance or impact of a documentary. A documentary that acknowledges its limitations and its own perspective is more valuable than a film that pretends to be neutral and objective. Moore makes no attempt to be neutral or objective and his personal involvement in the story – he was born in Flint – partly explains why he decided to make Roger and Me.
A reflexive documentary goes much further than the interactive documentary in making the spectator aware of all the stages involved in making a documentary. One of the most celebrated examples of a reflexive documentary is Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1928).
Vertov is generally regarded to be the father of radical documentary, a type of film-making that challenges normative and common-sense views of reality. Like the British
documentary film movement, Vertov’s work was funded by
the state. But whereas the British documentaries of the 1930s reflected the opinions of centre-progressive pressure groups (‘middle opinion’), Vertov, an iconoclast of Soviet film-making during the revolutionary period, attempted to change the audience’s perception of everyday reality through radical techniques that attempt to raise each spectator’s consciousness.
In terms of content, Man with a Movie Camera is a documentary because it shows unstaged events, scenes from everyday life that add up to represent the working day, from waking up, going to work and, finally, to leisure activities.
However, Vertov does not simply film these events, but
transforms them by means of specific film techniques. He not only shows everyday life, but also shows how it has been filmed.
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Throughout Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov shows the camera recording events, the editor rearranging shots on the editing table, a film being projected and an audience in a cinema watching a film. In addition, he uses the specific qualities of film – montage, fast and slow motion, freeze frame, out-of-focus shots, double exposure and reverse motion – to remind us that what we see is a reconstructed reality mediated through film.
Vertov’s working methods are therefore divided up into two principles, what he calls the ‘Film-Truth’ principle, the process of capturing life-as-it-is, and the ‘Film-Eye’ principle, the procedure of constructing a film out of these shots by means of the specific qualities of film. In Man with a Movie Camera, each shot itself is a fragment of reality. But Vertov treats each shot as the raw material from which to make a film. Vertov calls the individual shots the ‘bricks’ of film. The film-makers then have a choice of building a modest house or a mansion from these bricks.
Vertov is interested in building only the filmic equivalent of a mansion. He offers us another perspective on reality, a perspective filtered through the specific qualities of film.
Moreover, Vertov does not hide the fact that the view he gives the spectator is constructed, since he shows the spectator the process of construction. This is why Man with a Movie Camera is a reflexive documentary.
Performative documentary
Performative documentaries (1980s–90s): stress subjective aspects of a classically objective discourse.
– possible limitations: loss of referential emphasis may relegate such films to the avant-garde; ‘excessive’ use of style.
Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, p. 95
The fifth and final category, performative documentary, has a paradoxical status because it deflects attention from the world and towards the expressive dimension of film. That is, reference to the world is marginalized and the poetic and 5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 171
expressive dimensions of film are emphasized. The performative documentary does not capture the world in the same way as the other forms of documentary. It aims to represent the world indirectly.
The performative documentary evokes the mood or atmosphere traditionally found in fiction films. It aims to present its subject matter in a subjective, expressive, stylized, evocative and visceral manner. The result is that the subject matter is rendered in a vivid way that encourages the spectator to experience and feel it. But, at the same time, we have to ask ourselves whether the events become distorted as a result of the way they are represented.
The subject matter in the performative documentary remains intact, but its meaning is shown to be variable. In The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988), for example, the subject matter is the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood in 1976. A drifter named Randall Adams was convicted of the murder, while the chief witness against him, David Harris, had been sentenced to death for another murder. Who actually shot Robert Wood, and how this event took place, is open to question. The film is based on the testimony and memory of witnesses who purportedly saw the events. But these testimonies and mem
ories do not add up. They are faulty and inconsistent.
Morris explores these inconsistencies by re-enacting the murder. Each time a testimony reveals a new or inconsistent fact about the murder, Morris shows a re-enactment which incorporates the new or inconsistent fact. The Thin Blue Line is not, therefore, about what really happened, but about memory, lies and inconsistencies. Furthermore, these re-enactments are rendered in a vivid, stylized and evocative manner characteristic of performative documentaries.
The first re-enactment of the murder takes place in the first five minutes of the film. I shall therefore describe the film’s opening: 3
3
Shots of the cityscape of Dallas at night (four shots).
3
3
Shot of Randall Adams talking about his journey to Dallas in 1976.
3
3
Close-up of a police light flashing. It creates a visceral, pulsating effect.
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33 Shot of David Harris talking about his journey to Dallas in 1976. He talks about stealing a car and a pistol. Cut to…
33 a photograph of a pistol.
33 Shot of Harris talking.
33 Cityscape of Dallas at night (three shots).
33 Shot of Randall Adams. He talks about how he met David Harris (Adams’s car ran out of gas and he was picked up by David Harris).
33 Aerial shot of Dallas (Harris’s voice appears over the image).
33 Map of Dallas.
33 Closer shot of the map (followed by two additional closer shots of the map, creating a jump cut effect as the camera focuses on the street in which Adams and Harris met).
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