33 Shot of a hotel sign (motivated by the voice-over of Harris: ‘I followed him [Adams] to his room’).
33 Interestingly, behind the motel sign is a billboard that reads
‘Change your life’. The events being narrated certainly
changed Randall Adams’s life.
33 Shot of Harris speaking.
33 Shot of a drive-in movie sign (Harris: ‘We went to a movie that night’).
33 Shot of Adams. He says, ‘I get up. I go to work on Saturday.
Why did I meet this kid? I don’t know. Why did I run out of gas at that time? I don’t know. But it happened. It happened.’
33 This is then followed by the re-enactment of the murder of Robert Wood. The re-enactment begins with:
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a high-angle shot of a police car that has pulled up behind a car parked on the side of the road. At first, it seems that this car may be Randall Adams’s car that has run out of
gas. After all, in the previous shot, Adams mentions that he ran out of gas. So the editing initially links the car to Adams. This is followed by:
5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 173
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an abstract shot inside the parked car. The shot consists of the rear-view mirror, and a hand readjusting it. The
shot is heavily backlit, turning everything in the shot
into a silhouette. (The use of backlighting is a technique favoured by Hollywood directors such as Steven
Spielberg.) Cut to…
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the police car. The first police officer gets out. The police lights on top of the car shine directly into the camera as they spin round, creating a strobe lighting effect that turns the screen red at brief intervals. The lights are emphasized even more by the soundtrack which, together with Philip
Glass’s hypnotic music, consists of a swishing sound
synchronized with the lights. The overall effect is visceral, pulsating and hypnotic.
33 Close-up of a hand on the steering wheel inside the parked car. Again, it is heavily backlit.
33 Shot of the police car. The second police officer gets out.
She shines the torch at the parked car/in the direction of the camera. The flashing lights on the police car have the same prominence as previously.
33 High-angle shot of the road, heavily backlit. The shadow of the first police officer enters from the top of the image as he walks towards the parked car.
33 Extreme low shot of the parked car’s back wheel, filmed from underneath the car. The police officer’s feet are seen as he walks by.
33 Close-up of a gun pointing towards the camera’s direction.
The gun is fired.
33 Shot of a drawing of a hand, showing a bullet entry point.
33 Shot of the gun firing.
33 Shot of a drawing of a body, showing bullet entry points.
33 Close-up of the gun firing.
33 Another close-up of the gun, this time as it points
downwards and fires a shot.
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33 Shot of a drawing of a body, showing bullet entry points.
33 Close-up of the gun, pointing downwards and firing a shot.
33 Close-up of a drawing of a body, showing bullet entry points.
33 Shot of the gun being withdrawn into the car.
33 Close-up of a car’s pedal and the driver’s foot.
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Shot of the police officer lying in the road. The car pulls away.
33 Head-on shot of the police car. The second police officer enters the centre of the frame and fires her gun.
33 Low shot of the car pulling away.
33 Close-up of the police officer’s gun, with the flashing, pulsating police lights in the background.
This re-enactment is followed by an additional drawing
showing the bullet entry points, two portraits of the actual murdered police officer (one shot of him alive, one shot of him dead), two shots of his police uniform, showing the bullet entry points, a shot of a newspaper whose headline reads ‘Officer’s killer sought’ and, finally, three extreme close-ups of extracts from the newspaper story.
The dominant performative elements in these opening
minutes include the following: the re-enactment itself;
close-ups of guns, maps, newspaper headlines and pulsating police lights (whose prominence creates a vivid effect that far exceeds their function); rapid editing (the jump cut effect created by the closer shots of the map; the cutting from the gun discharging to the shots of the drawings is very rapid); exaggerated camera positions (high camera angles, low
camera positions); and the soundtrack (Glass’s hypnotic
music; the swishing sound synchronized with the lights,
the loud gun shots). Other performative elements appear
elsewhere in the film, including the filming of some events in slow motion, together with the fact that the re-enactments are repeated on several occasions.
5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 175
The performative elements of The Thin Blue Line create the same mood and atmosphere found in Hollywood thrillers –
suspense and poised anticipation, complete with highly
stylized images and soundtrack. Through these techniques Morris encourages us to experience and feel the events, rather than simply watch them from a distance. However, by doing so he also hypes the events for entertainment purposes. This raises an ethical question about Morris’s manipulation of the events. Does he lose sight of the events themselves in favour of giving the spectator a thrilling experience? That is, does he lose sight of the documentary’s purpose of being informative and authentic?
Despite its performative elements, Morris’s film did influence the reality it filmed. The Thin Blue Line shows that the testimonies of the main witnesses are unreliable and inconsistent,
particularly Harris’s original testimony. Indeed, at the end of the film, Harris indirectly admits to committing the murder of Robert Wood. Soon after The Thin Blue Line was released, Adams’s conviction was overturned.
I hope that this chapter has dispelled the common-sense
idea that documentaries are simply objective records of real events. It may sound extreme, but it is possible to argue that the documentary film has no privileged relation to reality since both fiction and documentary films employ the same technologies – mechanics, optics and photochemistry. A fiction film such as The Maltese Falcon is therefore an ‘objective record’ of what a group of actors, such as Humphrey Bogart, and film technicians, such as director John Huston, achieved on a Warner Bros. sound stage in 1941. What distinguishes fiction from non-fiction is the belief that the events filmed in a documentary are unstaged and therefore non-fictional.
Furthermore, by using the work of Nichols, I have tried to emphasize that the realm of the documentary consists of five modes or genres with their own invariant traits that distinguish them from one another.
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Digdeeper
Aitken, ian, Film and Reform (london: Routledge, 1990).
A well-researched, in-depth study of the British documentary film movement.
Corner, John, The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary (manchester: manchester university Press, 1996).
Accessible case studies of classic documentary films from the 1930s to the 1980s. A good starting point for anyone who wants to pursue documentary further.
Nichols, Bill, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: indiana university Press, 1994).
A companion volume to Representing Reality, offering case studies (the Rodney King video tape, reality television, eisenstein’s Strike, Oliver Stone’s JFK, and performative documentary). As with Representing Reality, a difficult but important book.
Nichols, Bill, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloom
ington: indiana university Press, 1989).
An important but densely written book. the chapter on
documentary modes of representation has been used as the foundation for this chapter. my aim has been to make this important chapter of Nichols’s book accessible to the general reader.
Rothman, William, Documentary Film Classics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge university Press, 1997).
this book contains a series of close, detailed readings of a select number of important and well-known documentaries: Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922); Land Without Bread (luis Buñuel, 1933); Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955); Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and morin, 1961); A Happy Mother’s Day (Richard leacock and Joyce Chopra, 1963); and Don’t Look Back (d A Pennebaker, 1967).
thompson, Kristin and Bordwell, david, Film History: An Introduction, Second edition (Boston: mcGraw-Hill, 2003).
thompson and Bordwell’s comprehensive history of world cinema.
5 The non-fiction film: five types of documentary 177
focuspoints
✲ It is often assumed that the documentary film-maker simply observes and makes an objective record of real events. But documentary film-makers do not simply point the camera
towards their subject and let the camera roll; they employ a wide variety of techniques in putting their films together.
✲ The expository documentary employs the following
techniques: a disembodied and authoritative voice-over
commentary, plus a series of images that aims to be
descriptive and informative.
✲ The observational documentary tries to present a ‘slice of life’, or a direct representation of the filmed events. The film-maker attempts to be completely invisible, that is, an uninvolved bystander.
✲ The interactive documentary makes the film-maker’s
presence prominent, as he or she interacts with the people or events being filmed. These interactions primarily take the form of interviews, which draw out specific comments and responses from those who are filmed.
✲ The reflexive documentary attempts to expose to the
spectator the conventions of documentary representation.
Rather than focus on the events and people filmed, the
reflexive documentary focuses on how they are filmed.
The effect is that the reflexive documentary challenges the documentary’s apparent ability to reveal the truth.
✲ Performative documentary deflects attention from the
world and towards the expressive dimension of film. That is, reference to the world is marginalized and the poetic and expressive dimensions of film are emphasized.
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6
The reception of
film: the art and
profession of
film reviewing
Inthischapteryouwilllearnabout:
33 the four main functions of film reviewing
33 the four main elements of a film review
33 how film critics evaluate films
33 how film reviews of theenglishpatient
and Interstellar were written.
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The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work than they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized. He is not necessarily a bad critic if he makes errors of judgement. (Infallible taste is inconceivable; what could it be measured against?) He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others.
Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies, p. 308
Film reviewing, indeed criticism in general, is commonly called
‘professional fault finding’, particularly by those whose work is frequently reviewed. My aim in this chapter is to analyse the functions and components of the film-reviewing profession and the conventions that determine how reviewers evaluate films. The first part of the chapter will outline four functions of film reviewing and its four components. The final part will consist of a comparative analysis of three reviews of Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), with the aim of charting the
similarities and differences in the film’s reception. In academic terms, this chapter takes a reception-studies approach to films.
That is, it does not analyse films themselves (the internal approach to film studies, explored in Chapters 1, 2 and 3), but investigates the way a film is received and evaluated. Reception studies explores various responses to films, both written and oral (including interviews with individual spectators).
In this chapter, I have limited the responses to Interstellar to one privileged group of spectators, namely, professional film reviewers, who earn their living by writing on current film releases. That their work is defined as ‘fault finding’ is simply an outsider’s view of their profession, a profession that has its own standards, conventions and rituals. My aim here is to begin to make these standards, conventions and rituals more explicit.
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The four functions of film reviewing
In his book Making Meaning (p. 35), David Bordwell argues that a film review can have up to four functions. It can act as: 3
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journalism
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advertising
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criticism
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rhetoric (writing).
Spotlight
A ‘Quote Whore’ is a journalist who will provide a studio with a positive sound bite to advertise a new film, regardless of the film’s quality. The practice is, of course, mainly used to bolster the publicity for bad movies. Sometimes the studio that produced the film will write a short quote, and then ask a willing journalist to put their name to it. The practice is strongly condemned by professional film journalists.
As journalism, film reviewing presents to the reader news about the latest film releases and, more specifically, significant aspects of a particular film. For example, the film may have a noteworthy theme (topical subject matter, for instance); it may have a significant star (an old star returning to the screen, the debut performance of a new star, or an established star taking on a significantly different role); or the production may be noteworthy.
For example, the fees of the film’s main stars may be very high, or the cost of production excessive, as with Interstellar, the budget was officially listed as $168 million, and this does not include its
worldwide marketing budget (see www.imdb.com).
More specifically, we can identify two types of film journalism: 3
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Journalism of opinion, in which the journalist presents a carefully thought-out position on a film, backed up with a set of arguments and background information.
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Journalism of taste, in which the journalist presents a simple evaluation of a film.
6 The reception of film: the art and profession of film reviewing 181
In-depth reviews of films combine these two types of journalism.
Below I shall outline in more detail the various components of a film review.
As advertising, a review functions to publicize a film and encourage its readers to go to the cinema. Film reviewing can therefore be seen as a service industry, since it functions as a service to both the studio that financed and produced the film (by advertising its film), and as a service to filmgoers, by functioning as a consumer’s guide to the best and worst films currently available.
Occasionally, a reviewer may write a condescending review, allowing the reader to feel superior to the film. The review therefore informs the
reader of films he or she should know about, but without recommending that the reader go and see it. Here, the review is certainly not functioning as advertising, quite the reverse. This usually applies to reviews of the summer blockbusters in the highbrow press. However, most of the summer blockbusters are review-proof anyway; that is, the audience has already decided to see the film because it has a ‘must-see’ status attached to it and it achieves this status primarily through positive ‘word of mouth’.
As criticism, a review involves the description, analysis and evaluation of films. Much of this chapter will be taken up with the task of describing film reviewing as criticism.
Finally, as writing, reviews become essays and are read
for their own intrinsic literary merits, which may lead to them being republished in a single authored anthology; for example, James Agee’s Agee on Film, Manny Farber’s Negative Space, Pauline Kael’s numerous collections, Andrew Sarris’s Confessions of a Cultist, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, and so on. See Greg Taylor’s book Artists in the Audience (described at the end of this chapter) for an account of the literary and artistic merits of the film reviews of Manny Farber and other critics such as Parker Tyler.
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The four components of film
reviewing
Above, we saw that film journalism can be divided into a journalism of opinion (informed reviews) and a journalism of taste (which simply passes judgements). In this section, we shall identify in more detail the major components that go to make up a film review.
Bordwell ( Making Meaning, p. 38) emphasizes that a review usually consists of the following four components:
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a condensed plot synopsis
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background information
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a set of abbreviated arguments about the film
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an evaluation.
The condensed plot synopsis is simply a description of the film’s plot. Most synopses tend to emphasize the big moments in the film, although being careful not to reveal the film’s ending.
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