Technology and Screen Language

People made the first moving pictures in the mid-1890s from what was immediately around them. As they developed the tools—cameras, film stocks, sound facilities, and editing equipment—film’s language and its ability to move hearts and minds improved, too. All this time the audience’s grasp of screen language was evolving, so filmmakers needed an ever more sophisticated narrative shorthand. It is this evolution rather than the enormity of documentary history that we explore in this chapter.

In just over a dozen excellent films—ones today’s audiences still find moving—you will get the sweep of how technology and documentary developed in response to filmmakers’ need to say something impassioned. To some, old documentaries are dinosaurs from which there is nothing to learn, but this is not true. Every advance in screen language, every technical and ethical issue, remains vibrant today. With each groundbreaking film I have paired a modern example that uses the pioneer language for a modern purpose. You can explore this for yourself by doing any of the hands-on projects that I’ve suggested. Because some of my own and my family’s history has threads in this century-long tapestry, I’ll mention this, too. Cinema is a human art made of intertwined human lives—an important message for documentary making.

Key films or film anthologies are in bold italic print. You can view passages from many of them on your computer by entering titles in YouTube ™ (www.YouTube.com); however, beware personalized versions where someone has re-edited the original.

Beginnings

FIGURE 5-1 Auguste and Louis Lumi è re. (Photo courtesy of Institut Lumi è re.)

In 1895, the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumi è re (Figure 5-1) laid the foundations of the cinema. It all began when their painter and photographer father, who owned a photographic business in Lyon, saw Edison’s Kinetoscope during a business trip to New York (Figure 5-2). It was a moving image in a box, and he thought his sons could get the image out of the box and up onto a public screen. They lived up to their dad’s confidence. With a hand-cranked camera (Figure 5-3) whose film advance mechanism they borrowed from the intermittent action of the sewing machine, they filmed subject matter from their daily lives and began showing 50-second movies. Their technique was to plant the camera on a tripod, stills-camera fashion, and let the action pass in and out of frame. On the DVD The Lumi è re Brothers’ First Films (1895 – 1897, remastered in 1996 from the originals), their work is as fresh as in its infancy. The Lumi è re employees go to lunch in Workers Leaving the Factory, and the family

FIGURE 5-2 Edison’s Kinetoscope—moving images in a box. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection.)

FIGURE 5-3 The Lumi è re Brothers’ hand-cranked camera. (Photo courtesy of Institut Lumi è re.)

gardener becomes victim of a hosepipe prank in The Sprinkler Sprinkled. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat records an everyday scene at a station. The passengers who glance at a camera while alighting are unaware that they are making history (Figure 5-4).

FIGURE 5-4 Passengers in the Lumi è re brothers’ film at La Ciotat railway station have no idea they are making history. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Institut Lumi è re.)

Each little narrative, structured around an observed or contrived event, has no cuts or camera movements. Some participants know they are being filmed; Auguste and his wife in Feeding the Baby enjoy showing off their daughter, and the family gardener plainly enjoys hamming it up for his employers. These are the world’s first home movies, na ï ve but beautiful. Notice that film is always now. True, A Boat Leaving the Harbor happened over a century ago, but each time a film starts we are right there in the here and now.

By coupling their ingenious little wood and brass camera with a light source, the Lumi è res made it double as projector and printer. Soon Lumi è re operators swarmed across the world shooting exotic or newsworthy events, their films founding the new paying business called the cinema. Soon somebody broke company rules and took a moving shot from a Venetian gondola. Others followed, shooting from carriages and trains. The race to develop film language was on.

Early footage still turns up. In the 1990s, someone found two unknown Lumi è re films in a French sanatorium attic—left there in a biscuit tin after entertaining inmates a century earlier. In northern England, workmen demolishing a factory found barrels containing 28 hours of footage from the early 1900s. See selections in the DVD Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon (2005, Great Britain). The two photographers filmed busy street scenes and held shows the same night. On YouTube ™ you can see tradesmen jogging past in horse-drawn carts and others idling in the street, mugging at the camera, or running errands by bike. The footage contains one of the earliest shots of someone directing. In a market, one of the photographers moves into shot, plainly instructing people what he wants them to do. My great-uncle Sidney Bird, a Portsmouth cinema projectionist in 1909, may have projected material like this.

Birth of the Documentary

Between 1895 and 1920, cinema audiences saw a vast amount of news footage, including the unfolding tragedy of World War I. But not until Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922, United States; Figure 5-5) did they see an actuality story with a deliberately imposed, overarching meaning. Flaherty was an American mining engineer whose boyhood was spent prospecting with his father in northern Canada, where he learned to love and respect the Inuit people. In 1915, he began an ethnographic record of an Eskimo family using a 16 mm camera. Back in Toronto, editing his film, he discovered that nitrate film and chain smoking don’t go together well. His 30,000 feet of negative went up in flames, and he was lucky to escape with his life.

Seeking the funds to reshoot, he was compelled to screen his surviving work-print many times over. He saw that his film was flat and pedestrian and resolved to shoot another that told more of a story.

Setting out again with his hand-cranked camera and insensitive film stock that needed artificial light and shooting in appalling weather conditions, Flaherty often asked his subjects to do their actions in special ways. By now his main character Nanook (not his real name) really liked Flaherty; both men felt they were making a record of a vanishing culture. Flaherty’s Inuit cast was actors demonstrating a way of life: They watched dailies (material from the previous day’s shooting) and contributed ideas and guidance to the story. Thus, Flaherty came to shoot a factual film in real surroundings but “acted” as though it were a fictional story (Figure 5-6).

FIGURE 5-5 Nanook warming his son’s hands. (Photo courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.)

Even by the standards of his day Flaherty’s shooting style is basic, but his cast is delightful and the Arctic majestically beautiful. His participants (as I shall call those who take part in documentaries) came to trust him so completely that they are free of all self-consciousness. Though the film seems ethnographically authentic, Nanook’s clothing and equipment actually come from his grand father’s time. The igloo has no roof (to allow in light for filming), and the hunting spears are antiques, since the Inuit were already using rifles. Flaherty was in fact reconstructing a way of life already swept aside by industrial society and its technologies. Audiences did not know it, but Nanook, shown cheerfully biting a phonograph record after hearing it play, was no isolated native. He was Flaherty’s astute collaborator who assembled their lighting and filming equipment and developed the footage for screenings.

FIGURE 5-6 From Nanook of the North—a family to feed. (Photo courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.)

Generations of critics have debated the ethics of Flaherty’s artifice, but what makes the film special is that Flaherty’s vision of a family surviving in the Arctic respects its subjects and builds a larger theme—that of mankind’s ancient and deadly struggle for survival against the forces of Nature. Their daily life shows how a traditional Eskimo family is a tightly interdependent unit whose very survival depends on everyone carrying out their functions. Nanook, their leader, is a human dynamo; with irrepressible humor, he improvises housing, hunts food, teaches his children, and tackles each new obstacle along their increasingly isolated and perilous journey. Flaherty does not return the family to safety; instead, the film leaves them huddled in the Arctic wastes, a snowstorm threatening to engulf their all-important huskies. Life at its most elemental, says Flaherty, depends on human resourcefulness, cooperation, and optimism.

Tragically, while New York audiences lined up around the block to see the film, its subject died hungry during a hunting accident. Who can imagine a sadder or more ironic validation of the truth in Flaherty’s vision?

Directly in the Flaherty tradition is The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003, Germany; Figure 5-7), directed by two Munich film students, Luigi Falorni and Byambasuren Davaa. In collaboration with Mongolians living in yurts in the Gobi Desert, the directors made a partly scripted, partly improvised film about Mongolian family life and the annual birth of the Bactrian camels on which they depend.

Naming the Documentary and Facing its Paradoxes

FIGURE 5-7 The Story of the Weeping Camel—a modern tale from the Gobi Desert that is directly in the Flaherty tradition. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection.)

The word “documentary” surfaced during a mid-1920s conversation between Flaherty and John Grierson, a Scots social scientist interested in the psychology of propaganda. Critiquing a cut of Flaherty’s Moana (1926, United States), Grierson said he thought it was “documentary” in intention, and so, retrospectively, was Nanook—today acknowledged as the genre’s seminal work. Laurels didn’t come easily to Flaherty, who came under attack for creating lyrical archetypes. This is undeniably true, for Flaherty was a romantic who never forgot hiswilderness boyhood. Many of his films even use a boy as their central character. Though his critics admired his humanism and poetic photography, they thought it deplorable that he assembled his own photogenic families rather than filming real ones. In Man of Aran (1934, United States; Figure 5-8), he incensed his critics by leaving out the large house of the Aran islanders’ absentee landlord, who was mostly responsible for the islanders’ deprivations. It was their fight with Nature that excited Flaherty, not their victimization by an extortionate social system.¹

FIGURE 5-8 In Man of Aran, Flaherty assembled a photogenic family rather than use one already existing. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Gainsborough Pictures.)

The charges leveled at Flaherty still resound today: What is documentary truth? How objective is the camera? Is what we see literal truth or does what we see represent the spirit of truth? And whose truth should you show? If you juxtapose material to create new meanings, what makes your edited version lessor more truthful? Can you be objective like a social scientist? When can you use poetic and emotive means, as Flaherty did, to evoke feeling? What part should aesthetics play in persuading an audience?

The Russians are Coming

FIGURE 5-9 Dziga Vertov tried to create a specifically cinema eye in Man with the Movie Camera. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/VUFKU.)

After the 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik government found itself administering a vast federation of nations whose least educated citizens could neither read nor understand each other’s tongues. Among those working for the revolution was the poet, musician, and film editor Dziga Vertov, busily compiling newsreels for the Agitprop regional train screenings. Seeing how imaginative editing and camerawork affected audiences, he produced his Kino-Eye manifesto—a prescription for recording life without imposing on it. His silent masterpiece Man with the Movie Camera (1929, U.S.S.R.; Figure 5-9) is a visual symphony. It begins in a movie theater and dashes into the streets to spin many strands of simultaneous narrative—in homes, in the streets among the homeless, in workshops and factories, on the beach—during a tumultuous day among the citizens of Moscow and Odessa. The film works virtually without titles and revels inshowing its ubiquitous cameraman on flying trucks, clambering up bridges, or standing on towering buildings. In his gallery of playful illusions, Vertov includes every form of trick photography. At the end, its virtuoso performance complete, the camera takes a bow on animated, striding tripod legs.

The DVD of Man with the Movie Camera (significantly enriched by Michael Nyman’s obsessive, minimalist score) divides the film into chapters with titles that suggest its ambitiousness: Awakening, Locomotion, Assemblage, Life Goes On, Manual Labor, Recreation, Relaxation, and Cinematic “I” (a play on Kino-Eye). Making the camera reflexively aware of its own capacities, the movie pays homage to the unending possibilities of filmmaking. Through juxtaposing so much action and so many points of view, Vertov believed he had freed the screen from all viewpoints except that of the all-seeing camera. In fact, it is Vertov’s mind and personality delivering what we see, a virtuoso experiment that demonstrates how each action, movement, and shot has its own inherent rhythms. In its form and content, so creatively edited together at a time when no editing viewers existed, we see a music for the eye. Today’s equivalent is MTV and music videos. You will find a creative re-edit of Man with the Movie Camera to a big-band score at www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvTF6B5XKxQ.

From Silence to Sound: The Essay Film

The cinema’s first quarter century produced a richly expressive language of action, movement, and imagery. Accompanied by live music, silent film liberated the audience’s imagination by telling stories and developing ideas visually. Electrically driven cameras freed the operators to be even more mobile and inventive, but when synchronous sound arrived in the late 1920s this momentum petered out. The cinema, including documentary, adopted the more theatrical discourse of words, music, and sound effects.

Sound equipment’s size and power limitations mostly confined shooting to studios. I first saw a sound camera (as they were called) as a 9-year-old visiting my make-up man father in England’s Pinewood Studios in the late 1940s. From the brightly lighted Technicolor^® stage we went to a darkened truck nearby. There in perpetual gloom sat the behemoth that recorded sound photographically on 35 mm film, its unlucky operator linked to the shooting stage by wires and headphones. A year earlier, my father, a recently demobilized sailor, had somehow become a make-up trainee for David Lean’s classic Dickens adaptation, Oliver Twist (1948, United Kingdom). His first assignment was putting a black patch over the eye of Bill Sykes’ dog. One evening at home he tried to get my baffled, 8-year-old self to play Oliver asking the orphanage masters for more food (Figure 5-10). Decades later I realized he was reliving his own orphanage youth. So often what moves us comes from the scars in early life.

FIGURE 5-10 Oliver asking for more in David Lean’s grimly realistic Oliver Twist (frame from film).

The documentary could never afford studios and sync sound, so its makers continued shooting silent (Figure 5-11) and fitted sound afterward during editing. Two of my earliest editing assignments—one concerning international marriage customs; the other, the 1966 soccer World Cup—were shot and cut in this way. Though laborious, editing was satisfying and creative because you had to create an audio “score” of narration, music, and sound effects. Outstanding films can still be made this way.

In Land Without Bread (1932, Spain), Luis Bu ñ uel, the renegade son of a privileged Spanish family, contends that the medieval poverty and suffering in a remote region of Spain results from his own caste’s neglect. The ragged, stunted, inbred villagers we see are ignorant of the waterborne illnesses that are killing them. Bu ñ uel drives us to angry incredulity that church and state could be so indifferent to souls in their care.

Using a detached travelogue narration and a grandiloquent symphony as musical accompaniment, the film’s flat gaze at its catalogue of horrors drives even a modern audience to outrage. Bu ñ uel is a satirist; he makes us angry by showing surreally awful events through the pseudoscientific cant of the travelogue. Like Flaherty, he was not above rigging the evidence—look carefully at the death of the goat when it falls from a ravine and you’ll see a puff of gun smoke. Everything else, however, seems genuine. One of the crew even steps into the frame to help a child who died the next day (Figure 5-12). The dead baby floating down a stream in her little coffin while the grieving family makes its way to the graveyard is indelibly tragic.

FIGURE 5-11 Flaherty shooting silent footage for Louisiana Story (1948, United States). Sync sound remained impractical on location for documentaries until the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.)

Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936, United Kingdom), made by the Post Office Film Unit led by Grierson, features postal workers working overnight sorting letters picked up in London for delivery in Edinburgh. The bucolic vision of fields, cows, rabbits, and ancient churches is an island of tranquility between two grimy industrial heartlands. What you see is a metaphor for a society in flux—wealth and poverty, town and country, night and day, past and present. By orchestrating the beat of words, images, repetitive work, and train rhythms, the film creates a driving sense of forward movement. Key to this are Benjamin Britten’s score and a striding narration by the poet W.H. Auden:

FIGURE 5-12 Poverty, sickness, and death owing to indifference by the ruling caste in Land Without Bread (frame from film).

Night Mail has brief sync dialogue exchanges that may have been post-synchronized; that is, spoken lines could have been recorded and fitted to simulate sync dialogue. Equipment limitations meant filming the letter-sorting and dialogue sequences on a set. The postmen reenacted their work in a replica sorting carriage that was rocked to simulate the train’s movement (Figure 5-13).

The film builds dramatic tension out of the fundamental situation—working against the clock to complete tasks before the journey ends—and out of charged scenes such as the high-speed mailbag drop and pickup along the way. The film’s temporal spine comes from its subject—an epic journey from the smoky metropolis, up England’s backbone through the bucolic countryside, and arriving as the sun rises over Edinburgh, its citizens dozing in their beds:

Notice how the commentary, which started on a quick, sharp, repetitive beat, ends now on a slower, loping beat as the train slows majestically for arrival. Night Mail shows what’s possible with a stirring subject, great photography and narration, and first-rate music. It also shows that film is music.

Color film was expensive and came late to documentary. Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955, France; Figure 5-14) integrates black and white with color and must be the most haunting documentary ever made. In 31 minutes, the film tours what remained of the Auschwitz death camp and imagines the terrified

FIGURE 5-13 Mail sorters reenacting their work on a set for Night Mail. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/GPO Film Unit.)

FIGURE 5-14 Resnais’ impassioned plea for humane watchfulness in Night and Fog. (Photo courtesy of Films, Inc.)

daily existence of the prisoner. What, it asks, lies beneath the brackish water in the ponds, now that it’s all over? Much of the film’s power comes from the restrained, evocative narration by the French poet Jean Cayrol, himself a death camp survivor, and the astringent, ironic score by Hanns Eisler, a German wounded in World War I. Playing against stereotype, the film never dramatizes or heightens. Instead, its questioning narration is in a dry, distanced monotone while the score counterpoints delicate, playful woodwind themes or high, trilling violin notes against archival footage of casual horror. Every mute object in this film speaks, and the film ends by questioning who among us will step forward next time to torture and kill in exchange for a little power. Night and Fog is a pinnacle in documentary filmmaking. It shows that nonsync shooting, coupled with brilliant writing, composing, and editing, can raise a screen essay to the level of a major requiem in meaning and emotion. Today the possibilities of this wonderful technique are little used.

Shooting Goes Mobile

Evolving technologies gave filmmakers the tools to capture actuality as it happened. Magnetic tape recording in the 1950s allowed sound shooting with a portable audio recorder. Film stocks had been getting faster, so cameras could more often shoot in available light. Though camera and sound recorder (eyes and ears) were free to move at will, they remained connected by an “umbilical” wire that occasionally tripped up the crew or corralled members of the unsuspecting public. Then in the early 1960s came crystal-sync technology, which allowed a camera and recorder to maintain sync without connection. With the Éclair NPR camera in 1963 came a 16 mm self-blimped (mechanically quiet) camera.² It was balanced for off-the-shoulder shooting and had 10-minute magazines that could be changed in seconds (Figure 5-15). For sound recording there was the ultra-reliable, portable Nagra^® tape recorder from Switzerland (Figure 5-16).

These advances transformed every aspect of location filming, from news-gathering and documentary to improvised dramatic production. A film’s subjects were free now that a two-person handheld unit could follow wherever their action might lead. The result was immediacy and unpredictability on the screen, and event-driven or character-driven stories replaced scripted and contrived subject-driven ones.

This affected the fiction cinema. I was lucky to work on one of the first British fiction films shot wholly on location. A Taste of Honey (1962, United Kingdom; Figure 5-17) was adapted from an autobiographical play about a girl whose mother abandons her after she gets pregnant. Its director, Tony Richardson, came from the theater and had participated in the Free Cinema Movement, a loose grouping of individuals from several countries who made groundbreaking documentaries about gritty British working-class life in protest against the mediocre, studio-dominated feature films of the day. It was thrilling

FIGURE 5-15 Eclair NPR self-blimped camera wielded by the author. (Photo courtesy of Aran Patinkin.)

FIGURE 5-16 Portable sync sound—a Neopilot version of the Nagra III from the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Nagra, a Kudelski Group Company.)

to see Walter Lassally’s black-and-white photography of sooty, post-industrial Manchester—a city of canals and decaying industrial might. Richardson’s documentary experience of working fast and informally and his actor-centered directing brought a new but short-lived standard of excellence to British cinema.

FIGURE 5-17 A British fiction feature made entirely on location, A Taste of Honey was shot by documentary cameraman Walter Lassally. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/British Lion Film Corporation/Woodfall Film Productions.)

Direct Cinema and CinÉma VÉritÉ

In documentary the new immediacy sparked opposing philosophies concerning the camera and its human subjects. In North America, the Maysles brothers, Fred Wiseman, Allan King, and others favored what they called direct cinema (now called observational cinema). Like ethnographers, they shot unobtrusively and by available light, aiming to capture the spontaneity and uninhibited flow of events as people lived them.

FIGURE 5-18 The Maysles brothers in Salesman filming Paul selling to people who can’t afford to buy. (Photo by Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Maysles Films.)

Observational Cinema

The intrepid Maysles brothers, Albert and David, and their editor, Charlotte Zwerin, made the landmark documentary Salesman (1969, United States; Figure 5-18). They had taught themselves filmmaking and even cobbled their own equipment together. The film follows a sales drive by hard-nosed Bible salesmen—really a pack of hunters tormented by sales-figure quotas. For each sale a salesman must gain entry, befriend the householder, give a demonstration, and make a killing by getting an order signed. To sell Bibles they lie and use all manner of tricks, but their victims live poor and cramped lives and don’t need lavishly illustrated Bibles.

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Here is the reality that Arthur Miller wrote about in his classic play Death of a Salesman. It’s the tragedy of the salesman who must choose between compassion for his clients and fleecing them to support his family. Paul, the kindest and funniest of the salesmen, cannot bring himself to extort from these pitiable families. Like Miller, the Maysles brothers put a frame around the man of heart and conscience who is doomed to fail. No two works expose the cost of the American dream with more deadly wit and accuracy.

In form, Salesman breaks into three parts that follow the classic three-act dramatic structure (about which there’s more in Chapter 18 Dramatic Development, Time, and Story Structure):

• Act I (Boston, snow) is the exposition that introduces the characters and their work, shows their working-class origins, and delineates their “problem” (hunting sales to stay alive).
• Act II (Chicago, packed conference hall) is the sales conference that escalates their “problem.” It announces the goals, pressures, and values and puts the group on notice. Stragglers will be eliminated for “refusing” success.
• Act III (Florida, heat) is the extended race for survival during which Paul, the most likeable of the bunch, falls behind and confronts defeat. This leaves us conflicted: Paul has failed at predation, is suffering, and will somehow have to remake himself elsewhere. Can he find a more constructive way to make a living, or is this all he knows?

Some claimed a certain purity for the “fly on the wall” observational documentary, but unless the camera is actually hidden—ethically dubious at best—participants know it’s there and adjust accordingly. Really, every form of observation produces some change in those under scrutiny, whether it’s a visiting child or a camera crew. An obser vational film makes us feel like privileged observers, but we are seldom seeing life unmediated as transparent films suggest. This is appearance more than reality, for an editor has subtracted everything that breaks the illusion, such as people turning to the camera or putting on special behavior because they know they are on camera.

Observational films are seldom as unmediated as transparent filmmaking suggests. People usually know they are being filmed and adapt accordingly, but never in a way that is out of character.

Try some “fly on the wall” filming with Project 4-SP-12 Make an Observational Film.

For a recent “fly on the wall” observational documentary, see Yoav Shamir’s Checkpoint (2003, Israel; Figure 5-19). It is its director’s first film and records without comment what happens at Israel Defense Force (IDF) checkpoints, where Shamir once served as a guard. In this embattled region Palestinians must constantly pass checkpoints. Some soldiers carry out their policing function with tolerance and even humor, but it is always demeaning for Arabs to wait in line for hours in order to get to a nearby hospital or go to work. The IDF scrutinizes every pedestrian, car, truck, school bus, and ambulance. Each at some time has been a conduit for bombs that killed and maimed Israelis in markets, buses, restaurants, and night clubs.

FIGURE 5-19 Checkpoint, an observational film revealing how power corrupts when soldiers control a population (produced by Amythos Films – Eden Productions).

Some of the uniformed, gun-toting, 19-year-olds who wield absolute power behave with sadistic disregard; while “following orders” they plainly enjoy subjecting Palestinians to senseless aggravation. Every story that Arabs tell them is suspect, no matter how credible and evident the reason for needing to cross. As the film proceeds, the cases get worse and you feel a growing hopelessness and outrage. The film uses no commentary or interior monologues; its points emerge simply from faces, behavior, body language, and by the way it stays for minutes, say, on some elderly man trying in vain to get his sick wife to a medical appointment. You share a deepening sense of rage and frustration on behalf of the humiliated—which is what this Israeli film wants you to feel. How strange that the scrutiny meant to protect a nation is worsening the conditions that threaten it. The film doesn’t need to put this into words; it gathers like a thunder cloud. Checkpoint’s structure is a series of repeating cycles, with each crossing worse than the last. The whole business feels like the advancing screw-thread in a torture device. Ironically, the IDF now uses the film to train guards what not to do.

Facts alone don’t change hearts and minds, but emotions do.

The Rise of Editing

Both vérité approaches had similar drawbacks: their high film shooting ratios and uncertainty of outcome generated masses of footage, much of it unusable. Editors took on a new burden of directorial interpretation and rose to the challenge by inventing new forms of allusion and abbreviation (also called ellipsis). Editing began using freer and more intuitive forms; it counterpointed voice and effects tracks and used impressionistic, even hallucinatory cutting to abridge time and space. These innovations became part of feature film language, too. Somewhere Dziga Vertov sat on his cloud, chuckling.

Video Technology

Video recording promised a cheaper and more immediate process when it arrived in the 1970s. At first it was poor quality and hard to edit, but once cassettes and small-format video arrived, filmmakers had easy shooting. Linear tape-to-tape editing, however, was slow; any editing changes required a ripple of changes throughout the tape. But once nonlinear (computerized) editing arrived, documentarians became free to shoot and edit with ease. The digital camera and computer software handed independent filmmaking the freedoms that word processing had given writers. Today digital technology allows us to title, freeze, text, or slow motion our footage. This means we can comment on actuality. More subjective and impressionistic, this unshackles the screen from the tyranny of real time and the banality of realism.

Eclectic Filmmaking

From the 1980s onward, documentary makers began to more freely draw on allied art forms and disciplines and using mixed documentary forms. Here are just a few examples.

Longitudinal Study

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Interview: Camera on a Tripod or Project 4-SP-11 Advanced Interview: Three Shot Sizes.

Michael Apted’s 28 Up (1986, United Kingdom; Figure 5-20) is a single episode in a series of longitudinal television studies. Every 7 years Apted steps away from his career as a feature film director to revisit the same original 14 English 7-year-olds. We see them grow from kids to young adults and become middle-aged citizens. Composed mainly from sensitive, probing interviews, the Up series concentrates on individual stories and sometimes on the dynamic of a group. Beginning in 1964 as 7 Up, the series has now reached 49 Up, with each succeeding film referring backward to an ever-growing bank of material shot when its subjects were younger.

FIGURE 5-20 Every 7 years Michael Apted steps away from his feature career to shoot another Up documentary episode. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection.)

The premise is the fundamental concept driving a documentary’s story. A good one means the film interprets its characters and events boldly and has something worthwhile to say.

The premise for the series (that is, its ruling idea) is that family and social class implant expectations that children realize in their subsequent lives. 7 Up quotes the Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” Alarmingly, it comes largely true, though not for everyone. Most disturbing in 28 Up is Neil, who blames his home life for making him wind up as a penniless and solitary vagabond, plagued with psychological disturbances. For his sake alone you will want to see 35 Up, 42 Up, and now 49 Up. The DVD for 49 Up has an illuminating interview with Apted, who seems gloomily resigned to continuing the series until he keels over. Some participants are equally weary of putting their lives on record, but all seem aware that the series is the most embracing account ever made of growing up.

A film’s structure is the order and logic in which it tells its tale.

Structurally, each Up film is like an octopus. Each arm is a single story, but all are joined to the body of a recorded past. The commanding determinants of class and race persist. Four decades later the original premise seems truer than ever, especially considering what we now know about the effect of advantages and disadvantages on children’s self-image and expectations.

Brechtian Protest

Through a series of imaginative, elliptical, and disturbingly urgent tellings and performances, Marlon T. Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989, United States; Figure 5-21) conveys what he and others, black and gay like himself, experienced growing up in a white, racist, homophobic society. Riggs, a journalist and poet, has produced a performance art film like Brechtian theater. Sidestepping all recognizable traditions, it hurls us from a finger-popping rap performance to the anguish of losing friends to AIDS; from a sad drag queen telling of her loneliness to stories of gay bashing and a white gay club refusing a black man entry due to his color. From archives come civil rights marchers and Eddie Murphy telling a homophobic joke.

FIGURE 5-21 Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill in Tongues Untied. (Photo courtesy of Signifyin’ Works/Frameline.)

There is no obvious through-line of argument or assertion, only a volley of forcefully stylish performances—everything from dance and body movement to inner monologue, street talk, and rap. Structuring the film’s kaleidoscopic form is a driving, insistent sense of rhythm, as though Riggs is angrily drumming out the remains of his foreshortened life. The film received some national artsfunding and caused apoplexy among conservatives over the use of taxpayers’ money. Riggs died of AIDS and the film is his last testament.

Documentary Noir

Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988, United States; Figure 5-22) is built traditionally on a foundation of interviews but makes imaginative use of music, reenactment, and clips from old detective movies. Creating its own trial structure, the film examines the course of Texas justice on behalf of a man who may be falsely imprisoned. Its Philip Glass score accompanies an opiate mix of fact and fiction that undermines the original trial. The crux is contradictory evidence from a number of witnesses concerning what happened one night during 30 seconds on a Dallas freeway. Someone stopped by Dallas police for driving without lights shot the cop walking over to inform him. We see this encounter reenacted differently according to each witness’s account. Morris uses the lawyers, passersby, drawling Texas policemen, and the two men in the car—both in prison—to argue the flaws in each witness’ version.

With its central characters on death row and so much of its action taking place at night, Morris jokingly classifies his film as a documentary noir. His rock-steady visual style, minimalist score, and obsessive reexamination of key details eventually pays off with new evidence pointing toward the actual murderer. Randall Adams escaped execution because of Morris’ film.

FIGURE 5-22 Randall Dale Adams, convicted for a murder he did not commit, in Errol Morris’ “documentary noir” The Thin Blue Line. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/American Playhouse/Channel 4 Films.)

Diary

FIGURE 5-23 Agnes Varda, director of the intimate documentary journal The Gleaners and I. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/St é phane Fefer.)

Agnes Varda, who directed The Gleaners and I (2000, France; Figure 5-23), is an experienced feature film director whose late husband, Jacques Demy, was France’s most imaginative director of musicals. From paintings of gleaners in cornfields, she develops the theme of picking up and using what others have abandoned—a green habit by which she has furnished her cozy home. In what becomes a travel diary, she journeys to different regions of France in search of junk and more junk.Along the way she meets a rich gallery of characters who glean for food, drink, or materials to make artworks or, as they relate with passion, in pursuit of ecological principle.

Make your own screen journal using Project 4-SP-14 Make a Diary Film.

Like a travelogue, the film is incessantly having encounters. Everything Varda films she connects with states of mind—that is, with childhood, with her beloved husband Jacques, or with herself as an aging woman who sees in the mirror that she too must be dis carded—by life itself. In this tender, good-natured film, Varda’s journeys become metaphysical, and denotation becomes connotation. By the end, this highly circular and autobiographical film conveys a rare sense of intimacy.

Denotation is what something is; connotation is the ideas and feelings it awakens.

Ambush and Advocacy

In a damning indictment of the American medical system, Michael Moore’s Sicko (2007, United States) combines ambush journalism, satire, and leftist sympathy for the ordinary working stiff. Moore is always brilliant at Trojan horse stunts. In Bowling for Columbine, he organized wounded students to appear at the Kmart where the killers had purchased their ammunition, demanding they cease selling bullets. Taken aback, Kmart changed its policy.

Adapt Project 4-SP-9 Make an Essay Film to try a little ambush jour nalism of your own.

Sicko trains its satirical cross-hairs on the U.S. health care system and exposes an appalling litany of failure. Privatized insurance excludes over 50 million U.S. men, women, and children from medical coverage and won’t cover anyone with a “preexisting condition.” (Now, who doesn’t have one of those?) By sampling other countries’ health systems, Moore builds up a series of surreal comparisons that make you laugh in pained disbelief. After exposing the denial of health care to 9/11 first responders made sick by their rescue efforts, Moore loads them into a boat and cruises to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Calling up through a megaphone at some scary U.S. Army fortifications, he asks the military if his patients might get some of the medical care freely available to the “evildoers” imprisoned within. The reply, a warning siren blast, sends Moore scuttling off to Havana with his sad cargo, where they find medical care—free. Cubans, it seems, have better health and life statistics than Americans, and for a fraction of the cost.

Moore’s preferred form for his films is the Everyman quest, for which he dresses in his signature baseball hat and baggy T-shirt (Figure 5-24). His first-person narration starts from a central question and then, as he proceeds, alternates between reasonable inquiry and astonished discovery. Simple disbelief propels him from one anomaly to the next until he’s forced to acknowledge, like a latter-day Candide, a compelling pattern of human greed, graft, and extortion—all underpinned by government policies secured in the first place by health care provider lobbyists. Pursuing analysis, advocacy, and provocation with deadpan effectiveness, Moore paints the American health care system as a theater of the absurd. Using stunts that juxtapose victims and perpetrators, he projects an appalling vision of the profit motive distorting what should be a basic human right.

FIGURE 5-24 Just a regular guy—Michael Moore in Sicko asking a few simple questions. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Dog Eat Dog Films/Weinstein Company.)

Archive-Based Filmmaking

The American experimental filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt plucks the stereotypical moms, dads, and kids from mid-twentieth century films and uses them to represent the suffocating archetypal figures he grew up with—and was, himself. In Phantom Limb (2005, United States; Figure 5-25), he uses interviews and a range of archive material to make a 12-chapter meditation that confronts the most harrowing of personal stigma—the guilt and sorrow that he and his family suppressed after the death of his younger brother. Rosenblatt’s work, and this film in particular, often feels like a muted scream at the suffering we endure while marching in lock-step with the notions of our era. I Used to Be a Filmmaker (2003, United States; Figure 5-26), however, celebrates filmmaking and fatherhood, and you sense a rebalancing between the poles of his emotional life.

Archive footage is a staple for History Channel and Discovery Channel productions, which specialize in factually accurate expositions of scientific and

FIGURE 5-25 Jay Rosenblatt behind his ill-fated brother Eliot in Phantom Limb (a frame from their father’s 8 mm film, courtesy of the filmmaker).

FIGURE 5-26 Exploring the joy of parenthood in I Used to be a Filmmaker. (Photo courtesy of Jay Rosenblatt.)

historical material. A fine combination of testimony and archives is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s impassioned series for PBS, The War (2007, United States). It features World War II eyewitnesses doing what battlefield veterans hate to do, which is to speak candidly about the atrocious and often pointless suffering they witnessed or caused, and the legacy of spiritual pain they must carry evermore.

Going Further

Visit the Lumi è re Museum online at http://www.institut-lumiere.org (click flags for different languages), and see a range of early cinema gadgets at www.victorian-cinema.net/machines.htm

For more types of documentary and the language they use, see Chapters 17 to 20 in Book II, Advanced Issues. For a lively and concise overview of documentary history, issues, and practices, see Patricia Aufderheide’s excellent and pocket-friendly Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007, 158 pp.). Histories of documentary include:

Barsam, Richard M. Non-Fiction Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film. London: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Ellis, Jack C. and McClane, Betsy A. A New History of the Documentary Film. London: Continuum, 2005.