Aiming to change our hearts and minds, documentaries are stories that organize their characters, events, and pressures toward some revelatory purpose. They do this to increase or challenge our knowledge and to alter our emotional frame of reference. This chapter looks at the relationship between the chronology of documented events, their organization into a satisfying dramatic form, and the way a story’s dramatic needs may lead you to reorganize events to give a story more impact.
The filmmaker and philosopher Michael Roemer has made the intriguing suggestion that plot is really the rules of the universe at work.1 This explains why the most fascinating characters are often those contesting—heroically, and sometimes unsuccessfully—the way things simply are. The legion of films about civil rights leaders or returning soldiers overcoming terrible injuries falls under this category.
Plot is the organization of situations, circumstances, and events that pressure a story’s characters.
Heroes are central characters writ large—characters of magnitude who challenge what people consider normal and thus seem to contest the rules of the universe. In 1955, Rosa Parks did this in Montgomery by refusing to yield her bus seat to a white person, an action that helped precipitate the civil rights movement. Conscientious objectors who risk torture and imprisonment by refusing to kill and those who choose prison for racial equality, as Nelson Mandela did, are all plainly the stuff of heroism. In documentary, the hero will often be someone obscure whose special qualities mean they will struggle to accomplish something. The dramatic tension you generate comes from getting us involved with this person (or people) and making us care whether they prevail. Human qualities, principles, and will come under test, and we watch a trial of strength. From this we learn something, and the values by which we live may be a little changed, renewed, or vindicated.
A dramatic hero may be flawed and even pitiable. He or she may contest the way things are from outrage, self-righteousness, ignorance, innocence, obstinacy, conceit, or a host of other reasons.
What do you want your audience to make of your central figures? What are you saying through them? What do you want to say about human nature, human folly, or noble human aspiration?
Plots often have common denominators in their organization. To explain this, the ancient Greeks devised the three-act structure, which remains an invaluable tool for organizing story elements today and was introduced in Chapter 5, Documentary Language, in relation to the Maysles brothers’ Salesman (1961). See the three-act structure as an aid to your thinking, not a formulaic strait-jacket:
The three-act structure is an invaluable tool for organizing story material. Apply it on a micro or a macro level—that is, to a single scene or to the way scenes flow in an extended story.
The three-act structure is plainly visible in a survival program such as Pioneer Quest: A Year in the Real West (2003, Canada) made for Life Television Canada. A group trying to live like pioneers on the prairie has a problem—winter is coming and they must make their own shelter. Constructing a cabin, they must work through all the obstacles that make hand building from local materials so difficult. The resolution is a viable (if drafty) cabin. Next, they struggle to keep warm during the coldest winter in 120 years.
In recent years, many reality-based “time traveler” programs have explored what earlier generations lived through. One I like—because it illuminates my English wartime childhood, I suppose—is The 1940s House (2003, United Kingdom, directed by Caroline Ross-Pirie and shown on PBS). The director, who specializes in historical reality experiments, gets a volunteer family to live with the restricted food and clothing, primitive sanitation, self-entertainment, and daily radio war bulletins that a typical London family knew during the outbreak of World War II. The unspoken question it poses is, “How would we handle the problems and conditions those people encountered?” This is a central question for anyone exploring the past, especially as you awaken to how little you know about the relatives you have lost.
Social experiments make wonderful material for documentary makers. Their situations run on the fundamentals of character, problem, obstacle, struggle, and outcome or resolution. Even at the simplest level you show similar dramatic problems—whether it’s someone opening a front door with their arms full, trying to button a 1940s school uni form, or the family pet figuring out how to open the back door. Dramatists call this cycle of character/problem/escalation/crisis/resolution the dramatic curve or dramatic arc, and its build, peaking, and fall look rather like a fever patient’s temperature chart (Figure 18-1).
The dramatic curve is an invaluable tool when you direct because with it you can interpret the unfolding action you’re filming and decide how to shoot it.
It’s seldom straightforward to forecast how documentary shooting will turn out. Applying the traditional dramatic curve to your ideas, however, is useful during research. It’s vital to your judgment as action unfolds in front of your camera, and it’s outstanding as an analytic tool during editing, which is really the second chance to direct.
The dramatic arc concept comes from ancient Greek drama and represents how most stories first state their problem, develop tension through scenes of increasing complication and intensity, then arrive at an apex or “crisis.” Following this comes change and resolution—though not, let me say quickly, necessarily a happy or peaceful one. In Broomfield and Churchill’s Soldier Girls (1981, United States/United Kingdom), the crisis is probably the point at which Private Johnson, after a series of increasingly stressful conflicts with authority, leaves the army dishonorably but in a spirit of relieved gaiety. The film’s resolution, after this major character quits the stage, is to examine more closely what soldiers need during training to survive battle conditions.
In the Maysles brothers’ Salesman (1969, United States; discussed in Chapter 5, Documentary Language), most people think the story’s apex is the moment when Paul Brennan, the salesman who has been falling steadily behind the pack like a wounded animal, sabotages a colleague’s sale. In the film’s coda, his partners have distanced themselves as if deserting a contagious man. The resolution is Paul gazing off-screen into a void, as if staring at his oncoming fate.
Pinpoint the apex or crisis of a scene, and the rest of the dramatic convention arranges itself naturally before and after the peak of the curve.
No matter what drama you analyze—whether a scene or a whole epic—once you pinpoint the apex or crisis, the rest of the dramatic convention begins to fall into place before and after the peak of the curve. Often you can then divide the piece into the classic three-act structure. Three categories or units precede the climax, and one follows. Let’s examine the idea in more detail so you can apply it to your research:
Few documentaries fall neatly into this shape, but some memorable ones do. Hollywood uses the three-act formula with awful fervor; some screen-writing manuals even prescribe a page count per act, with page numbers at which “plot points” should take the story lurching off at an unexpected tangent. Documentary is too wayward to enable such control, but it still needs to be dramatically satisfying. This remains true for essay, montage, or other forms of documentary, not just those that are obviously about struggle. Indeed, you find this escalation of pressure up to a crisis then lowering down to resolution in songs, symphonies, dances, mime, and traditional tales, because it is as fundamental to human existence as breathing or sex.
What is fascinating is that a successful documentary scene is a drama in miniature; it follows the same curve of pressures building to a climax before releasing into a new situation. During the shoot, the documentary director often sees a scene develop, spin its wheels, and refuse to go anywhere. Then, perhaps with some side coaching (verbal inquiry or prompts by the director from off-camera), the characters lock onto an issue and struggle over it until something significant changes. This fulcrum point of change, called in the theater a beat, is the basic unit of any scene containing dramatic interchange. Even compilation montage films that lack foreground characters, such as Pare Lorentz’s The River (1937, United States), follow the same cyclic sequencing of building pressure, then releasing.
A documentary scene can be a drama in miniature, following the curve of pressures that build to a climax then release into a new situation.
When you see someone go through a moment of irreversible change of consciousness, such as realizing his love is recognized or being faced with incontrovertible evidence that he lied, you are seeing a beat.
Try shooting a series of beats yourself in Project 4-SP-6 Documenting a Process.
Other characters in the scene may not notice anything, but that character (and the informed onlooker) registers that moment of change, and knows that he must now take a different course of action. Two men maneuvering a refrigerator through a narrow hallway will yield a series of beats. Their progress might look like this:
A beat is when someone in a scene registers an important and irreversible change. Often it’s when participants realize they have lost or gained an important goal. A beat signals a new phase of action, so you must film them astutely since they are your film’s most intense and dramatic moments.
Each new obstacle poses a problem that they attempt to solve with a strategy. If it fails, they must come up with a new one. If it works, that particular problem is solved and you have a beat (beats are italicized as failure or success above). Solving a problem leads onward to a new obstacle, and so on. With two people cooperatively trying to do something, each dramatic unit includes:
A scene may have one dramatic unit or several. As you learn to recognize them taking place all around you in daily life, you mentally practice how you’d film them. For the example above, how much attention should your camera give to the fridge? How do you show the obstacles? How much do you dwell on one or other of the two men? What character traits does each manifest during this revealing interaction, and how can you bring them out?
Divide an existing documentary into its parts using Project 1-AP-7 Analyze Structure and Style.
Being able to recognize this dramatic breathing action, being able to cover it sensitively with the camera as it takes place, is the preeminent skill for directors in fiction or in documentary.
Wilkie Collins, father of the mystery novel, said about readers, “Make them laugh, make them cry, but make them wait.” Your films need dramatic tension, so make your audience wait—but not too long.
A successful progression of beats hikes the dramatic tension. It sets up questions, anticipations, even fears in your audience. Never be afraid to make them wait and guess.
As a director or camera operator, you must be able to see the dramatic arc unfolding in everyday activities around you. Often you will be filming spontaneously unfolding life events. Your central figures will grapple with problems and face complications, each from the perspective of his or her own agenda. As the scene develops, it helps greatly to envision your characters’ purposes and estimate how far they are along the dramatic curve. This is an indispensable skill, for it prepares you to catch what matters. Seeing ahead of the characters, you are ready to adapt to what they do. You have become a dramatist and not just a wide-eyed onlooker.
Directing or shooting, you are always trying to see ahead and discern each character’s agenda. How to cover the scene only emerges once you have clues and a hypothesis.
Other times, as you mentally log your characters’ progression, the scene stalls instead of resolving into the change you expected. Perhaps somebody’s aspiration leads to failure or goes off at a tangent, only to initiate a new cycle of problem, complications, and escalation. Perhaps the scene simply hangs up. If you are shooting participatory cinema, you can try breaking the log jam by asking questions or making suggestions about options. You might even cut the camera and confer with them about their options before proceeding.
Generating momentum—and therefore anticipation—will be your most valuable storytelling skill.
All stories need a sense of forward movement if they are to satisfy. The key lies in the agendas of the main characters, and the givens (inbuilt certainties) of the subject matter. Because of givens, you can shoot intelligently whenever you plan to cover particular circumstances, such as the effect of a destructive fire on a family. You won’t know who the family is until the fire engine goes roaring away on its mission, but fires have a predictable course and the givens (in this case, causes and effects) are inevitable, so you can practically guarantee that your story will include:
You can even see where each element might belong in the three-act structure. By shooting astute coverage, you can practically guarantee the elements of a satisfying story.
All subjects for films (that is, events, lives, processes, issues, problems) have stages that the documentary dramatist can make into narrative stages.
Most narratives tell their tale in chronological order. Some do otherwise because there is a compelling reason to organize them differently or because basic chronology is weak, absent, or unimportant to the angle of the story. Most important is to envision what range of outcomes to expect, as these represent the all-important developments that will rescue your film from becoming static.
Use Project 5-PP-2 Story Structure Helper to make any set of story materials into playing cards. With them you’ll discover alternative narrative organizations—perhaps for your next film. To test the potential of different structures for your film, place its major sequences on cards, lay them out in different orders, and narrate each new story line to listeners. To make this more interesting, go to Project 5-PP-2 Story Structure Helper in the Appendix.
Because so much human development is slow, documentaries often fail to show any real change—especially those shot on a short schedule. The power to abridge and to compare past and present is thus important for narrative art to assert that growth and change are indeed possible. In a BBC series called Breakaway, setting out to avoid making any more “non-event films,” we specifically looked for people about to plunge into a major life change.
Following are some common documentary categories whose examples should suggest how you might structure your intended film. The list merely illustrates the relationship between time and structure; it’s not meant to be definitive or embracing.
The stages of the event become the vertebrae in the film’s temporal spine. Expectation and its predictable or unexpected stages provide the sense of forward movement. Once the event has gained momentum you can afford to plug in side-bars like ribs along the spine, knowing that the audience is always ready for the story to revert to the event’s next stage. These digressions might be sections of interview, pieces of relevant past, or even pieces of the imagined future.
Every documentary needs some consuming, ongoing process that generates momentum. This, called the through line in drama, is the spine of your film, the forward movement of quest and revelation that is central to the film’s purpose. Once you have one, you can attach the digressive elements of your story along the spine like so many ribs. Each digression in the story holds the promise of returning to the through line.
Some events, such as a marathon race or a political rally, move fast or have many facets unfolding simultaneously. Leni Riefenstahl’s dark classic, Olympia (1938, Germany; Figure 18-2), relays the Berlin Olympic Games in this way and with seductive virtuosity places Adolf Hitler, godlike, at the center.
When multiple strands of narrative happen simultaneously, you may need several cameras. I once directed a unit among several covering a pheasant shoot, and my team concentrated on the gamekeeper. As always, plan your shooting around what is predictable because you need to anchor the film in its event’s stages. Knowing you can deliver these liberates you to record the unexpected along the way.
Using multiple cameras takes foresight and good organizing. Without, cameras tend to stray into each others’ scenes, duplicate some coverage, and miss others.
Parallel storytelling lets you advance multiple story lines, abbreviate each to its essentials, and create tension between them via astute juxtapositioning.
This type of documentary chronicles a sequence of events during which something is produced or accomplished. Ordinary events such as making a meal, building a shed, taking a journey, or getting married can become fascinating if you treat them as archetypal or metaphorical. Process films are usually modular with each event or unit, having a clear beginning, middle, and end. Usually they follow chronological sequencing but can use parallel storytelling by cutting between multiple events. A father may be at work in a factory, for instance, while his daughter is in school getting the education that allows her not to work in a fac tory. As each sequence advances by steps, the characters and their predicaments develop in a linear fashion.
The more familiar the steps of an event or process, the more you can condense it to essentials. This achieves narrative compression and allows you to open up other, more significant parts of your film to deeper exposure.
David Sutherland’s three-year study, The Farmer’s Wife (1998, United States; Figure 18-3), chronicles the effects of relentlessly growing economic pressure on a Nebraska family farm couple. The process in question is slow starvation. Blow by blow and in extraordinary intimacy we see what Darrel and Juanita Buschkoetter must endure to stave off bankruptcy. The worst casualty is their marriage. During the six 1-hour episodes, Darrel doggedly works multiple jobs while Juanita holds the family together, finishes college—and this is the series’ development—and matures from girl to woman. It’s through her strength of character that they pull through and survive—hence the series title. Culled from 200 hours of footage, the film’s essence lies in many poignant, lonely episodes that play out as sustained interactions. Each is filled with tension, and many are real dramatic experiences such as you hope for in the theater.
Emile Ardolino’s He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ (1983, United States) shows the dancer Jacques D’Amboise teaching New York schoolchildren how to let go and dance; it gives careful attention to the methods and encouragement that he lavishes on his students. He also gives a class for adult nondancers which includes a brave New York cop hoofing it with the rest. Everyone revels in their new ecstasy of movement, and you can see why. Though it deals with a series of processes, you hardly notice because it makes such masterful use of montage and rhythmic editing. This is a film about dancing that dances—form and content perfectly matched.
Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982, United States; Figure 18-4) chronicles the shooting of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a fiction feature about a real-life opera impresario who contrived to bring a river steamer over the Andes. Through Herzog’s own struggle to get a steamer up a jungle mountainside, Blank reveals Herzog’s dictatorial obsessiveness and how a cherished project can become more important to its director than the physical dangers faced by hisworkers. The objectives and values revealed by the process become metaphors for the ruthlessness that often lurks under the guise of making art.
Journeys promise change and development. Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1989, United States; Figure 18-5) sets out to follow General Sherman’s destructive journey during the American Civil War and then, growing bored with its self-imposed task, switches to a parallel and more personal journey by its director. In a witty and extended bid to end his status as a single man, McElwee encounters old and new girlfriends on the road. At the end, starting a promising relationship, he finds that the General is still with him but as a cautionary metaphor. Shot solo using 16 mm film and embodying many hoarse, late-night confessionals, McElwee’s wry and self-reflexive movie triggered an avalanche of imitations—not one of which matched the tone or sophistication of the original.
They say in the film industry that no film about a train has ever failed. The journey’s allure, with its metaphoric overtones, characters in transition who face tests and obstacles, and all the inbuilt rhythms of movement add up to fertile ground for documentary.
Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins (2005, France; Figure 18-6) shows the epic journey that emperor penguins make in the Antarctic in order to breed. Some do not finish the journey, find a mate, or manage to guard their chicks, so the film has a dramatic tension that made it immensely popular. The struggle to survive has such anthropomorphic resonances that the film exemplified “family values” for some. Apparently, the French version had a set of voices speaking as if for the penguins (which sounds truly awful). More conventionally, the English version uses the omniscient, voice-over narration beloved by the National Geographic Society, which coproduced. The film is gripping and worth study for its editing alone, which orchestrates much mass action and movement culled from a year of shooting. Luckily penguins do similar things and all look alike, so you get extraordinarily detailed coverage of each stage of their long and arduous journey.
Jorge Furtado’s 13-minute Isle of Flowers (1989, Brazil) was once voted one of the most important short films of the twentieth century. By following the brief life of a tomato, it starts at the growing site, follows its being made into sauce, and then watches its dregs finishing up in the municipal dump. Because tomatoes here are metaphors for human beings, the film shocks audiences with its message about the despicable way we treat each other. Another film to see for its virtuoso montage.
In Lars Johannson’s The German Secret (2005, Denmark), the filmmaker chronicles his wife, Kirsten Blohm, crossing Europe in search of the Nazi father (as they think) whose identity her mother refused to discuss until near death. Amazingly, 50 years later there are still people alive along the route who remember the beautiful, haughty blonde with the strangely neglected child (Figure 18-7). Piece by piece, the two establish the truth, which shapes up to be far from what they expected. Her hopeful, occasionally funny, and often vividly painful journey delivers only partial liberation from a heritage of doubt and anger. This is a tender and masterful film full of intimate reflection and intense, sustained encounters.
Historical subjects are foreclosed whenever their outcomes are familiar. If you must forfeit the elements of anticipation and surprise that create dramatic tension, try instead to focus more on the processes of history instead of their outcomes.
Strictly speaking, all film is history because as soon as it’s recorded every frame is history. Film ought to be a good medium for historical films but is not always so. More than most story forms, histories must often digress to build their tributary chains of cause and effect. Imagine a film about a plane crash in which all six of an airliner’s safety features failed. You have a known outcome, but your film must spend most of its time explaining what each safety feature is supposed to do, how it failed, and how its breakdown contributed to the disaster. Here time is a minor player in the tale of causality.
Even the makers of screen history themselves aren’t always satisfied, as Donald Watt and Jerry Kuehl have pointed out.2 Many history films, they say:
To this we can add that the screen history, by its realism and ineluctable forward movement, discourages contemplation and often glides over anything it can’t illustrate. Historical meanings are in any case abstractions, and the screen is inherently better at showing the concrete.
We should be cautious when a film uses omniscience to obscure its sources. The all-knowing narrator guiding us through tracts of history is worrisome, especially in those History Channel series that use archive footage to cover vast thematic and factual territory. In Britain, Thames Television’s The World at War of the 1970s and, in America, WGBH’s Vietnam: A Television History in the 1980s both echo the textbook emphasis on facts rather than questions and issues that arise today. Even Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990, United States; Figure 18-8), which counterpoints contemporary accounts and photographs, seems overwhelmed by the repetitive minutia of its period.
The ambitious scope, authorial impersonality, and apparent finality of many history series make them highly suspect. Who is speaking to whom, for whom, and representing whom? Why do they sometimes suffocate historical curiosity rather than awaken it?
Some screen histories succeed, of course. An openly critical one-off film like Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1974, United States) argues by analogy that the American obsession with sports provided a deadly and misleading metaphor for the tragically mistaken U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Here the viewer is on a clearer footing and can engage with the film’s propositions rather than go numb under a deluge of suspiciously uninflected information.
Eyes on the Prize (1990, United States), a PBS series from Blackside, Inc., chronicled the development of civil rights in America and managed to tread a fine line between historical omniscience and personal testimonies that were imbued with commitment. Though crew members were carefully chosen for racial balance, you are never in doubt that the film speaks on behalf of black people so egregiously wronged in equality-proclaiming America.
The War (2007, United States; Figure 18-9), directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is an oral history whose excellently chosen witness/participants tell their stories with multiple voices and viewpoints. Unlike Burns’ earlier, seemingly more linear and event-bound histories, its voice is free from patriotic hubris. The series adds up to a fervently non-nationalistic, antiwar perspective, a timely corrective when embedded journalism presents so many fighting “heroes” during the good-versus-evil simplifications of wartime.
Following a single character through time is a variation on the hero’s journey paradigm of the folklorist Joseph Campbell.3 Point of view plays a significant part, since the central character’s sense of events is often in tension with those around him or her. The progression in which the main character grows up, develops, and meets test after test also generates the kind of momentum that easily allows sidebar excursions along the way.
Stevie (2002, United States; Figure 18-10) is a biographical film about an antihero, an abused boy to whom its director, Steve James, had been a Big Brother a decade earlier. Tracking down the shy rural kid he’d once known, James finds Stevie moving on a downward path through a fog of alcohol and petty crime. During the period of filming Stevie graduates to child molesting and goes to prison. Unjudgmentally the film helps us understand that Stevie was a victim himself until he sexually abused a young girl relative. Once roles are reversed, the abuse gets kicked forward another generation. By the end of this subtle and sympathetic film you understand in detail how so many lives get ruined. There’s not much cause for optimism here but a lot to understand.
Errol Morris’ The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003, United States; Figure 18-11) gives the former U.S. Secretary of Defense a self-serving platform in his old age. From telling of his apprenticeship presiding over U.S. policy in Vietnam, he now dispenses pearls of wisdom for reducing future warfare, such as: “In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.” Along the way he magnanimously admits to a few mistakes. Morris gives MacNamara such a long rope that he is hoisted by his own petard.
Taggart Siegel’s The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006, United States; Figure 18-12) profiles a third-generation Midwest farmer. As a young man, he took over the family land, foreswore agribusiness chemicals, and turned his farm into a thriving commune growing vegetables named Angelic Organics. If that didn’t rile the farming neighbors, then driving his tractor in a feather boa and frolicking with very young girls did. He was fire-bombed as a devil worshiper.
Playfully shocking and great fun, the film darts around in time during its self-presentation by this dada agriculturalist. Its apex is the point where he lost the farm before making a comeback.
This category is seldom event- or character-driven and more likely to pursue imagery and metaphor in exploration of an observation, mood, or belief. All the best documentaries have poetic elements, of course, but too few rely mainly on powerful imagery. Some are discussed in Chapter 5, Documentary Language, the most memorable being Land Without Bread (1932, Spain), Night Mail (1936, United Kingdom), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, United States), and The River (1937, United States; Figure 18-13). Humphrey Jennings, “the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced,”4 made documentaries during World War II while his country was under siege, notably Listen to Britain (1942, United Kingdom), Fires Were Started (1943, United Kingdom; Figure 18-14), and Diary for Timothy (1945, United Kingdom). Their use of emotively loaded imagery and sounds resonated for people at the time but won’t mean much to younger people today. In Fires Were Started, Jennings mixed appallingly vivid firefighting footage with firehouse scenes using rather stilted improvised dialogue.
The common denominator—perhaps a very significant one—is that all these filmmakers shot silent and put imagery first. They composed sound separately and later and based it on inspiration provided by images. How you do things determines what you end up with.
More recently, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi or Life Out of Balance (1982, United States; Figure 18-15), about the rape of the environment by humankind, is realized through music allied to imagery that is original and from archives and that has no relation to time progression. When it first appeared, its premise about humanity causing environmental catastrophe seemed romantic and apocalyptic, but time has proven Reggio prophetic.
Some biographical films I specially admire are difficult or impossible to find. Orod Attapour’s Parnian (2002, Iran; Figure 18-16) profiles an ill-fated family of Tehran archaeologists. Both mother and son suffer from an incurable wasting disease that is killing the mother. The father cares for them while they probe Iran’s rich history with obsessive, desperate energy. Every image in the film carries rich metaphorical overtones, and every sequence and every image has an
analogical relationship to others. Skillfully the film implies, like the Persian poetry that plainly influences it, a wheel of life binding us to those who lived and suffered before us. We too must live and suffer as they did, and so we lead the way for those who will follow. Compressed into its austere half hour is a whole vista of time, repeated destiny, decay, and renewal.
Vincent Dieutre has structured his poetic first-person narrative Lessons of Darkness (2000, France) by his thoughts, memories, and feelings. He is a gay man falling out of love while journeying between three European cities and finding solace in the erotic solidity of the men in Caravaggio’s paintings. The narrative weakness in any poetic film is likely to be that it for-goes the dramatic tension and momentum of plot for the intensity and resonance of imagery and moment. When we are in masterful hands, as here, this is no sacrifice, but in those of lesser ability it can produce work that is wandering and arbitrary.
Any film led by mood, metaphor, and imagery risks forgoing dramatic tension and momentum for the intensity and resonance of the moment. This is no loss if the film holds our interest and leaves us with a larger vision.
A common rearrangement of time is to show an event and then backtrack to analyze the interplay of forces that led up to it, as in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996, United States). The film opens with the tragic sight of three murdered 8-year-old boys and then focuses on the trial of the three local teenagers accused of killing them in a satanic ritual. The film casts doubt on the validity of the evidence, rather as the filmmakers did in their earlier Brother’s Keeper (1992, United States), which told of some reclusive rural brothers accused of mercy killing a sibling. Both films examine the arguments for and against each allegation, deconstruct them and their key events, and then invite us to draw likely conclusions. Berlinger and Sinofsky’s films are interested in character as much as facts, and this takes their films further than the conventional investigation.
Four distinguished films probe family secrets and find surprises and heartache behind “successful” lives. Each film develops along the line of new information as it surfaces. In My Architect (2003, United States), Nathaniel Kahn recreates the father he hardly knew by building a picture of the distinguished and elusive architect Louis Kahn. Mostly he does this through the generous women whom Kahn made use of while leveraging his career. Here is a ruthless, driven man who used whomever was willing in his single-minded pursuit of architectural innovation. The consequences emerge through those who maintain or critique his architecture, the women who loved him, and the son who searches to define and hold him.
Andrew Jarecki’s controversial Capturing the Friedmans (2003, United States; Figure 18-17) follows up the arrest of a respectable Long Island teacher and one of his sons for alleged sexual crimes against children. The film gathers all available family perspectives, looks at the 8 mm home movies of the archetypal suburban family at happy play, and finds in the end that all is mystery and nothing adds up. So often, families are strangers to each other.
In Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street (2005, United States), as mentioned in the previous chapter, a son begins searching out the truths behind about his parents’ long but blighted marriage, hoping to reach his father after his mother suddenly dies. In the writing she left behind, he is astonished to discover that the mother he had felt so close to had maintained a secret love life. The father he always found remote suddenly marries his secretary of 40 years earlier, then emerges as warmer and far more understanding of his wife than Block had ever imagined. The miracle—which no documentarian can ever forget—is that truth does indeed set people free, as the film shows.
Where the previous three biographies analyze lives largely completed, the next film crackles with misplaced father/son hopes and resentments whose roots go back decades. Mark Wexler shot Tell Them Who You Are (2005, United States) hoping to get closer to his famous Hollywood cinematographer father, Haskell. Few films have explored the psychic wounds between generations more nakedly, painfully, and obstinately, and seldom do family relations seem more irreconcilable.
Each of these four biographies begins from some basic questions that, pursued through a labyrinth of ambiguous discovery, unfold like a detective story. Following clues and pursuing hypotheses, their protagonists lance at layers of protective myth and stereotype. Family members hold partisan views, each fixed in subjectivity, and nowhere is this truer than of children in relation to their parents. All four films reveal their main characters’ development over time, and these emerge through multiple perceptions, but it is the hierarchy of discovery that determines the films’ structures. Though all pursue a crooked course, high intelligence and sophistication make each seem to have taken the only path possible.
A well-structured film usually seems so inevitable that you cannot imagine it following any other path.
Societies, institutions, and tribal entities define their boundaries, close in upon themselves, and develop self-perpetuating codes. Films profiling them are often impressionistic, since boundaries usually contain many simultaneous activities. Juxtaposing these by theme, mood, or meaning can imply polemic using the light hand of montage. The 10-hour PBS special Carrier (2008, United States) aspires to be the mother of all such endeavors, although its subtitle (“One Ship, Five Thousand Stories”) may seem more like a warning. Conceived by Mitchell Block and its director Maro Chermayeff, it draws on 1600 hours of superb filming during 6 months’ residence aboard the nuclear-powered U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz. Each hour-long episode handles a theme (“controlled chaos,” “show of force,” “rites of passage”), and each is bookended with title sequences redolent of recruiting films. Most episodes are diffuse, high on testosterone (the average age aboard is 19), and punctuated with upbeat songs that seem suspiciously like narrative aids. Even so, the series is worth seeing from beginning to end as a thorough study of a military society riddled with contradictions and conflicts. Sailors of both sexes and all ranks are remarkably candid, and the series’ connective tissue becomes the evolving personal stories of 15 central characters. We come to see a rare camaraderie that for many compensates for the turmoil and pain wrought by dysfunctional family origins. Most suffer excessively because of long periods of separation from their loved ones, as do the families they leave on land.
The walled-city type of film explores a microcosm in order to imply criticism of the macrocosm—the larger world that spawned it.
The sheer enormity of the series in relation to its enlightenment leaves you feeling ambiguous. Unintentionally, I think, it glamorizes military life and celebrates the gunboat diplomacy for which the Nimitz was built. The unspoken issues—why America chooses military might over social justice, adequate health and education, and a modern infrastructure for its citizenry and why military might makes ideological enemies rather than beats them—remain outside the pale. As with many documentaries, you are left wondering what restrictions the filmmakers accepted—or imposed on themselves—as the price of entry.
Most of Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries—at long last available on DVD—are walled-city films, most notably two of his earliest—Titicut Follies (1967, United States) and High School (1968, United States). The Titicut Follies is a revue presented by the staff and inmates in a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane. Wiseman makes it function as a backbone for the film and also a grimly nihilistic metaphor. When there are no interviews or narration you cannot retreat from scenes that are grippingly horrific, as if retrieved from the eighteenth century. In stark, Daumier black-and-white imagery we see the inmates’ degrading spectrum of daily experience—from induction, psychiatric evaluation, nakedness, forced feeding, to burial. In one sequence, a seemingly sane Hungarian tries desperately to extricate himself from the institution’s nightmarish embrace. In another, a psychiatric doctor with an ash-laden cigarette on his lower lip rams a feeding pipe down a half-dead prisoner’s nose. Each digression from the ongoing revue is so engrossing that the revue itself becomes a mocking commentary. Wiseman and his cameraman Bill Brayne lead us into a living hell and at the same time define what observational documentary means.
Two films by Nick Broomfield—Soldier Girls (1981, United States/United Kingdom, with Joan Churchill) and Chicken Ranch (1982, United States/United Kingdom, with Sandi Sissel; Figure 18-18)—qualify as walled-city films but differ significantly in approach from narrated and observational approaches. The first looks at women soldiers in basic training, while the second is about the women, their relationships, and their customers in a brothel. Both explore social ghettoes and find their structure in a series of events that spontaneously occurred during a stay by the filmmakers. Each shows how those who rule institutional life set about conditioning and controlling their inmates. Each leaves us more knowledgeable and critical.
Neither, however, pretends to be neutral or unaffected by what it finds. By letting us see a discharged woman soldier embrace the camera operator, by including the brothel owner’s tirade at the crew for filming what he wants kept confidential, each scene admits where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie and hints at the liaisons and even manipulation that went into their shooting. Broomfield has since made Battle for Haditha (2007, United Kingdom; Figure 18-19), a documentary-style enactment of the 2005 event after a marine was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. His colleagues went to find the perpetrators, resulting in 24 Iraqi civilians dead in a frenzy of killing that the military tried to conceal. Over time, a director’s themes emerge, and Broomfield seems concerned with the way that inferiors are manipulated into serving the interests of their masters.
Documentarians sometimes graduate to docudrama or fiction in order to hypothesize what cannot be established in acceptable documentary terms.
This is any film that uses the essay form to educate, analyze, or elaborate on a thesis. Expos é s, agitprop, experimental, or activist films are often structured by the stages of an extended process, but more often they use montage to display ideas for the audience to consider. Let’s suppose you want to convince the audience that poor immigrants, far from draining the local economy, add economic value to a large American city. You must establish how and why the immigrants came, what work they do, what city services they do or don’t use, what their enemies say about them, and so on. You must build an argument and advance the stages of a polemic in order to convince the skeptics in your audience.
Thesis films must marshal facts and impressions and build a careful sequence of logic if they are to persuade. They are demanding films to plan and shoot and require sustained effort to edit.
Of the films mentioned in Chapter 5, Documentary Language, both Buñuel’s Land Without Bread and Resnais’ Night and Fog advance passionate arguments about the mechanisms of human cruelty. The Pare Lorentz ecology duo, The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River convey strong messages about the rape of the land. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, United States) argues that the Bush Administration, supported by the corporate media and its embedded journalists after 9/11, used the wave of public feeling to further its prior agenda for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare (2004, Austria/Belgium/France/Canada/Finland/Sweden; Figure 18-20) draws connections between the export of fish from Lake Victoria, the neglect and starvation of its native Tanzanian population, and the import of munitions used to fuel wars over Africa’s mineral resources. Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, United States; Figure 18-21), built on work by Fortune reporters, explains how the energy company built a house of cards and why it collapsed.
These are the independent voices of democratic reason that shine light in dark places. Their freedom to argue today rests squarely on the growth of accessible digital equipment but remains limited by the fact that most film archives are corporately controlled and very expensive. Meanwhile, the Internet is developing as an uncontrolled arena for the exchange of information and opinion. History will probably judge public discourse to have changed radically at this time.
The catalogue film is a type of documentary whose main and enthusiastic purpose is to examine something comprehensively rather than critically. A film about harpsichords, steam locomotives, or dinosaurs might organize their appearance by size, age, structure, or other classification. Unless the film takes the stages of a restoration or archeological dig as its backbone, time probably won’t play a centrally organizing role.
Joris Ivens’ Rain (1929, Netherlands; Figure 18-22) is a silent, highly atmospheric 12-minute film shot in Amsterdam over two years. It reveals the beauty of rain in a cityscape. A year earlier, Ivens had shot another equally lyrical 11-minute classic, The Bridge. These films will stand for all time as defining portraits of city life in 1920s Holland. Soon Ivens and Henri Storck turned to social justice with Borinage (1932, Belgium), in which concern for the misery of exploited miners replaced Ivens’ earlier interest in aesthetics. By showing how the men and their families lived from day to day, the film exposed a hidden and desperate part of European society to the rest of the world.
Les Blank’s films, usually described as celebrations of Americana, are really catalogue films. There is Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1977, United States), In Heaven There Is No Beer (1984, United States), and the delightful Gap-ToothedWomen (1987, United States). All are good-natured forays into special worlds, and were they not so innocent they would probably appear voyeuristic. The travelogue, diary film, and city symphony are frequently montage-based catalogue types.
There may initially be no obvious time structure. A film about stained glass windows may have no time structure inherent in the footage. You could posit a structure from the dating of particular windows, technical developments in glass, the region of the artifacts, or the origin and idiosyncrasies of the glassmakers. Which option you take depends on what you want to say and what your material best supports. Anthology films that chronicle a particular year take this approach.
Surreal documentary is a rare form well suited to a playful handling of the outlandish or appalling. Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb (1994, United States; Figure 18-23) profiles the 1960s underground comic artist Robert Crumb, best known for Fritz the Cat. So weird was his upbringing that he and his family seem dangerously dysfunctional (he was suicidal and an older brother killed himself). His comic strips explore sexual obsessions and revolve around personal, confessional observations about abnormality. It’s hard to tell whether it is Zwigoff’s film or the subject matter that is more surreal.
As Deborah Hoffmann’s mother descends into Alzheimer’s disease, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (1995, United States; Figure 18-24) uses dark humor to explore what would otherwise be a crushingly sad situation. The film’s progression is organized by the daughter’s journey—from early consciousness of her mother’s growing eccentricity, to fearing that her mother will turn into the pathetic shell of her former self, to realizing that her mother is actually becoming more her essentially humorous self.
A new generation is supplying films that provoke an active inner dialogue rather than feeding a diet of facts intended for passive consumption. The older form speaks monologically; the newer, dialogically.
Though old habits of disseminating improving tracts to the unwashed masses die hard, documentary is becoming less monological and more dialogical. Slowly documentary is acquiring the complexities of language, thought, and purpose once confined to older art forms such as literature and theater. The newer documentaries are willing to
investigate people’s innermost thoughts and feelings and do not lecture their audience.
Whether you are planning a film or confronting the dailies of one already shot, the structure you choose must accommodate a few central concerns. Your options may not be as limited as you think. To find alternatives, try answering these questions:
Answering these questions probably won’t produce ready solutions but will lead you to think hard about your story’s essentials, which is the spade work of creativity.
1 Roemer, Michael. Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.
2 Watt, Donald and Jerry Kuehl. “History on the public screen I & II,” in New Challenges for Documentary, Alan Rosenthal, Ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, pp. 4318–4453.
3 For the best, movie-oriented explanation, see Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (1992, Michael Wiese).
4 According to the British director Lindsay Anderson.