The Mind–Body Connection

To put people at ease means knowing something about how the human mind works under scrutiny. We live our everyday lives comfortably when we can depend on a foundation of assumptions—about our identity, worth, function, and how others regard us. Having an audience destabilizes this in particular ways, as Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian actor and dramatic theorist, realized. From studying successful actors, he found they had learned to perform naturally and believably by vesting their attention in the thoughts and actions of their characters. Being able to “focus” in this way stilled the anxious, judgmental self and allowed them to function as naturally as if they were alone.

Trained actors therefore maintain focus by keeping up a chain of physical and mental tasks that fit the character they are playing. This foundation is threatened by insecurity of all kinds, even fear of losing focus, since any opportunity for unstructured thought lets the ever-anxious mind take over. An actor losing focus immediately forfeits conviction in everything he says and does. And because no interior state is without its outward manifestation—another Stanislavski realization—the audience knows something is amiss.

Applying this to those participating in making a documentary, we can say that:

• You can tell from a person’s body language whether he is unified and focused or divided and troubled.
• You can help. Give participants authentic mental and physical work to do so they relax and feel normal.
• The most intense focus—and thus the greatest relaxation—comes from pursuing their most compelling interests or goals because these shut out all other consciousness.

Doing What Comes Naturally

Help your participants by establishing trustworthy reasons for making the film. Involve them in something holding meaning and affirmation for them, and they will take part naturally and spontaneously. A sheltered middle-aged couple, for example, will delightedly fall into a recurring discussion about which food the dog should have. Participants become used to working with you and come to enjoy being who they are in your presence. I once filmed elderly miners describing the bitter days of a strike during which they derailed a train manned by “scabs” or strike breakers. We filmed overlooking their old mine; while they relived the deepest and most divisive issues in their lives, the camera came within 2 feet of their faces. Their emotional involvement left them with no attention to spare for how they might appear to us or to the world beyond our camera.

Self-Image and Self-Consciousness

The easiest people to work with are those oblivious of their effect on others. Old people and small children are natural because there is no ego, no internal censor at work. Knowing this, you can predict who is at the other end of the scale and will present difficulties. Those compulsively careful of their appearance or with nervous mannerisms are least likely to settle in front of a camera. During a street interview with an elderly lady I saw her completely lose focus. I was puzzled until I saw how, in mid-sentence, she began removing the hair net she realized she was still wearing. The more “proper” someone feels they must look for the record, the less flexible, impulsive, and openly communicative they will be. But since care and circumspection were this lady’s stamp, her action was also wonderfully representative. Her friends, seeing the film, would smile in recognition. Notice that the pressure of the camera’s presence did not make her behave uncharacteristically.

“Doesn’t the Camera Change People?”

People often say, “But the presence of the camera must change people.” Yes, but only the aspect or degree of a person’s response. This can go either way—toward self-consciousness or toward self-revelation. Indeed, the camera may catalyze an honesty and depth of feeling not seen before by a participant’s closest friends. Fulfill the human craving for recognition, and sometimes the floodgates open. So:

• You don’t need to be unduly protective of people. Most know their boundaries and will go no further than they feel comfortable.
• Because you film something doesn’t mean you have to use it. Later, you and your advisers can thoroughly consider the consequences of using or not using the footage.

Indeed documentarians sometimes decide not to use material and have even destroyed footage because its very existence endangers someone. One exception:

• Never keep anything you’ve shot that is injurious if someone else has editorial control. Some people say that if you shoot it, you’ll use it. Don’t shoot it, if you don’t trust yourself to abstain.

Obstacles: Habits of Being

Particular jobs attract particular kinds of personality, and some employment seems to generate mannerisms and self-awarenesses that are a liability in filmmaking, unless, of course, that is precisely what you want to show. Officials, unused to making public statements and afraid of crossing superiors, will make excruciatingly boring and self-conscious contributions. Lecturers address invisible multitudes instead of talking one on one as they did during research. Before trying to alter a participant’s idea of how he should relate to the camera, estimate what is habit and what is only a misperception about filming. The latter you can alter. You can, for instance, say, “There is only one person, me, listening to you. Talk only to me.” Another mistaken notion is the idea that one must project the voice. If the participant cannot respond to direction, a little playback may do the trick. People are usually shocked to see and hear themselves for the first time. Expose an unsatisfactory “performance” only as a last resort, supportively and in private.

Sometimes you will get someone whose concept of a film appearance is taken from commercials and who valiantly projects personality. This is true to some aspect of the individual’s character and assumptions, and if you are making a film about stage mothers you could hardly ask for anything more revealing.

Reflexivity

When making a reflexive film, tell participants that:

• They can talk to you or to the camera as they wish.
• They can do anything and go wherever they need to go during filming.
• Nothing is off limits, and no thought or subject of conversation is disallowed.
• Filming is to catch things as they happen, and to make filming be part of that happening.

In Nick Broomfield’s The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991, United Kingdom), the director uses boyish disingenuousness to draw out the South African white supremacist Eug è ne Terre’Blanche (sic), with hilarious and very revealing results. In other films of this type, the director’s manipulation can make the audience uncomfortable, which is sometimes true in Ross McElwee’s otherwise sophisticated Sherman’s March (1989, United States).

Compromises for the Camera

When shooting action sequences, you may need to ask people to slow down or control their movements because movement in general, once it has a frame around it, looks perhaps 20 to 30% faster. The operator’s fanciest footwork cannot keep a hand framed and in focus if its owner moves too fast.

How willing are you to intrude to get a result that is visually and choreo graphically accomplished? The ethnographer shuns such intrusion, and most who make documentary have some of the ethnographer in them. But, as Jean-Luc Godard observed, making fiction sends you toward documentary, and making documentary involves you in fiction. Even the most mechanized Hollywood product contains elements of improvisation and inventiveness that leave the camera documenting a “happening.”

Camera as Passport

In everyday life, people make allowance for a camera. If you are shooting in crowds, don’t be afraid to go where you would normally not enter. The camera is your passport; use it to go to the front of a crowd, to squeeze between people looking in a shop window, or to cross police lines. In Western countries, this is part of the freedom of the press, but it may not work in all cultures. A colleague went to film in Nigeria and learned (through having stones flung at him) that taking a person’s image without asking is theft. In some political climates, merely holding a camera is holding a weapon. Every year, dozens of brave journalists are injured or even killed while doing their jobs. Knowing the rules and staying lucky can mean life or death.

Motivation for Camera Positioning and Camera Movement

There are few rules for camera positioning, since every scene has its nature to be revealed, and each has its inherent limitations. These are usually physical: windows that restrict an interior to shooting in one direction or an incongruity you must avoid in an exterior. A genuine settler’s log cabin must be framed low in order to avoid seeing, above the ancient trees, an ominous revolving sausage over the neighborhood hot-dog stand. Making documentaries is serendipitous; you are always having to jettison plans to accommodate the unforeseen. Such limitations shape film art to a degree undreamed of by film critics.

Serendipity

Serendipity can work in eerie ways. The British miners I mentioned earlier had sabotaged a scab coal train but without hurting anyone. The day before we visited to film them, an express train derailed close to the original site. The next morning I interviewed a doctor who had participated as a strike-breaker in the original incident. Knowing we were coming the next day, he thought he must be dreaming when summoned to a train crash in the small hours. After some queasy soul searching about voyeurism, I altered our plans to film the wreckage (Figure 29-1). It brought home like nothing else the destruction the saboteurs had risked by their demonstration. Adapting to the unexpected is frustrating for some, while for others it is a challenge to their inventiveness and insight. In the name of spontaneity you will be tempted to make no plans, but plan we must, because plans often work out. Luck favors the prepared mind.

FIGURE 29-1 Be ready for the unexpected—a train wreck that occurred nearby while filming The Cramlington Train-Wreckers.

Multiple Angles on the Same Action

Each aspect of film language, as we’ve seen, corresponds to some aspect of everyday human perception, but how to justify covering an action from multiple angles? Think of it this way: Cutting together long and close shots taken from the same camera position suggests an observer’s intensified, shifting concentration. Imagine a tense family meal covered from five different angles taken from five different camera positions. It’s a familiar film convention and has a corollary in literature where multiple viewpoints imply not physical changes of location but shifts in psychological point of view. The same holds true when you cut multiple views together for the screen. Though film seems to give us “real” events, it really gives us a “seeming” that is not, despite appearances, the events themselves but a human way of perceiving them. Test this out by recalling the experience of being a bystander at a major disagreement. You got so absorbed that you forgot all about yourself. Instead, you went through a series of empathic internal agreements and disagreements, seeing first one person’s point and then the other’s. You were so subjectively involved that “self” disappeared and you had an out-of-body experience of the protagonists’ heated realities.

Screen language evokes this heightened state of subjectivity by using a series of privileged views. Each shot suggests an observer’s identification migrating as the situation unfolds—sympathy and fascination, distaste and anxiety, say, taking his attention from person to person. Cutting from angle to angle reproduces this familiar psychic experience, but it doesn’t work unless scene, shooting, and editing are “right.”

It is “right” and “works” when the empathic shifts are rooted in a single sensibility—that of a character or of the invisible Storyteller. Without this grounding, the different angles don’t feel integrated. By the way, that state of heightened and embracing concentration is not one we normally maintain for long.

Abstraction

The opposite of probing emotional inquiry is withdrawal into mental stocktaking or a state of temporary detachment. In this mode, we alter our examination from a part to the whole, or we zero in on something distracting. By watching your own shifts of attention you will see yourself escaping to a private realm where you can speculate, contemplate, remember, or imagine. Detail that catches your attention turns out to have symbolic meaning or is a part that stands for the whole. A car’s rearview mirror just above a swirling water surface can stand for a whole flood. This much-used principle in film is called synecdoche (pronounced sin-ek-duh-kee). As you direct or shoot, keep an eye open for anything expressive or symbolic, such as the scale that represents justice or the flower growing on an empty lot to suggest renewal.

Abstraction may not signify withdrawal or refuge, but instead a moment of looking inward to find the significance of a recent event. Selective focus is a device used to suggest this state. When an object is isolated on the screen, and its foreground and background are thrown out of focus, it strongly suggests abstracted vision, as does abnormal motion (either slow or fast).

These are some of the ways to represent how we routinely dismantle reality and objectively distance ourselves from the moment. We may be searching for meaning or simply refreshing ourselves through imaginative play.

Subjectivity Versus Objectivity

The world we know is full of dualities, oppositions, and ironic contrasts. For instance, you drive your car very fast at night, and then, stopping to look at the stars, become aware of your own insignificance under those little points of light that took millions of years to reach earth. Human attention shifts from subjectivity to objectivity, from past to present and back again, from looking at a crowd as a phenomenon to looking at the tense profile of a woman as she turns away. Screen language exists to replicate every aspect of what an Observer notices and what a Storyteller uses to retell it.

Framing Implications

Framing can change implications. Isolating people in separate close shots, for instance, and intercutting them will have a very different feel than cutting between two over-the-shoulder shots (OS) or showing the whole scene in medium long shot (MLS). In the single shots, the spectator is always alone with one of the contenders, and editing creates the relationship. In the OS and MLS shots, however, we always see one in relation to the other, and our relation is with the two of them, not each separately. This feels different.

There is nothing arcane here; your guide to how an audience responds always lies in making astute use of common experience.

Using Context

How do different backgrounds work with a particular foreground action? If a participant is in a wheelchair and you angle the shot to contain a window with a vista of people in the street, the composition unobtrusively juxtaposes her with the freedom of movement she so poignantly lacks.

Looking down on the subject, looking up at the subject, or looking at it between the bars of a railing can all suggest ways of seeing—and, therefore, of experiencing—the action that makes the scene. True, you can manufacture this through editing, but it’s labored. You accomplish far more by building observation and juxtaposition into the shooting. Make yourself respond to each location’s particularities; make your camera respond to how participants’ movements and actions convey the scene’s subtext. The difference is between sharing the consciousness of someone intelligent and intuitive who picks up the event’s underlying tensions and sharing the consciousness of a dull eye that swivels dutifully toward whatever moves.

Handheld or Tripod-Mounted Camera?

Scene Breakdown and Crib Notes

When filming a scene you must have ideas about what it establishes and what it might contribute to your intended film. List your goals so you overlook nothing in the heat of battle. If, for instance, you are shooting in a laboratory, you might make a reminder, or crib note, on an index card as shown in Figure 29-2.

FIGURE 29-2 Crib note—goals for a laboratory sequence.

Say your bottom line is showing that the lab workers are dedicated and even heroic, and you must get shots to establish these things. Then, treating the camera as an observing consciousness, you imagine in detail how you want the scene to be experienced. If you were shooting a boozy wedding, you’d perhaps want the camera to adopt a guest’s point of view. Going handheld, peering into circles of chattering people, it could legitimately bump into raucous revelers, quiz the principals, and even join in the dancing. To shoot in a dance studio, with its elaborate ritualized performances, takes a placing and handling of the camera that is formal and grounded. So how to show lab workers as heroic? The answer might lie in studied shots emphasizing the danger and painstaking rigor of the work they do and thus the human vulnerability of each worker. Perhaps you show a face near a retort of boiling acid. You make us see that each person has his own world and risks destruction in order to investigate significant problems. You see the calm, concentrated eyes above their masks, the elaborate equipment, the dedication.

Whatever the shooting situation, always ask yourself:

• What factual or physical details must I shoot to imply the whole?
• What will be each essential stage of development that I must cover?
• Is elapsed time important, and if so how do I imply it?
• What signals the start and end of each developmental stage?
• Where does the majority of the telling action lie? (In the courtroom, for example, does it lie with judge, plaintiff, prosecutor, or the jury?)
• Who is the central character and how does he or she act on the situation?
• When is this likely to change, and what makes the next person become central?
• Who changes during this scene?

Inserts and Cutaways

Before allowing the crew to wrap, cast your mind back over the events you have just filmed and itemize possible cutaway shots or inserts (sometimes called cut-ins) that you need to shoot for possible ellipsis or cross-cutting. What is the difference?

• A cutaway is a shot of something outside the frame, such as the wall clock that somebody looks at. Shoot it from that person’s eyeline as safety coverage.
• An insert shot is an enlargement of something in the main frame, such as a page in the book that someone is reading.

During a scene I once directed of a carpenter in his workshop, he folded and unfolded something below frame with a clicking noise all the time he was speaking to the camera. The cutaway we took of his hands holding his ruler enabled me to bridge together two separate sections of the interview and also to visually explain the off-screen noises.

Eyeline Shifts and Motivating Cutaways

Frequently, a person you are shooting will hold out a picture, refer to an object in the room, or look off-screen at someone or something. In each case, his action directs our attention to something we need to see. This becomes an insert shot or cutaway. The corollary is that to legitimately use an insert, cutaway, or any cut at all, an editor must find a motivation—whether it emanates from a character or the needs of the story that is being told. Sometimes a cutaway or insert conveys a Storyteller attitude. For example, in the kitchen of a neglected elderly man, the tap drips incessantly. You film a close shot of it and of the dusty, yellowing photographs on his shelf in the background because it speaks volumes about long-standing disregard. Such shots, drawing the viewer’s eye to significant detail, arise from (and are motivated by) the Storyteller’s narrative intentions. They express an authorial point of view about this man and his life.

Shoot Reaction Shots

Make your editor happy after you’ve covered two or more people in conversation by getting them to prolong the conversation while you shoot reaction shots. These can be listening, watching, or waiting close-ups of each individual when he is not talking. Catch (or even ask for) eyeline shifts; they are worth their weight in gold to the editor.

Cover Alternative Versions of Issues

Try to cover each important issue in more than one way so you have alternative narrative vehicles later. You could, for example, cover a political demonstration with footage showing how the demonstration begins, close shots of faces and banners, the police lines, the arrests, and so on. But you might also acquire coverage through photographs, a television news show, participant interviews, or street interviews. This would produce a multiplicity of attitudes about the purpose of the march and a number of faces to intercut (and thus abbreviate) the stages of the demonstration footage. You now have multiple and conflicting viewpoints and narrative materials that you can greatly compress through parallel storytelling.