Who Makes Documentary and Why

Go to any documentary festival and you will see that filmmakers are a varied lot—old, young, shy, outgoing, haunted, introverted, extroverted, large, and small. Most are friendly, unassuming, and very approachable. You quickly feel at home with them, because they say profound things through their films, yet remain unassuming and natural. Their films—long and short—take you on magic journeys into hidden or unexpected worlds. A 12-minute piece like Pawel Lozinski’s The Sisters (1999, Poland; Figure 1-1) shows nothing more than two elderly ladies arguing on a courtyard bench. The elder wants the younger to walk and exercise her hip implant; the younger smilingly evades her every entreaty. Each complains conspiratorially to the camera about the other. The elder says their parents spoiled her sister and made her lazy. The younger says the elder has always been bossy. The film hits you with a poignant truth: Nothing changes between siblings. They need this daily ritual of argument, but time is running out. Soon one will be alone and a lifetime of comforting disputation will go silent.

A feature-length film such as Michael Moore’s Sicko (2007, United States; Figure 1-2) brings the biting truth of caricature. It starts with horror stories from people who fell through the cracks in the American health care system. Then, through his specialty—hilarious, surreal confrontations—Moore builds a devastating case for the profit motive turning America’s health care system into a travesty. He shows how Americans are brainwashed into believing that other countries have inferior socialized health services—meaning communistic. Then he shows what Canadians, French, British, and Cubans actually get and what millions of Americans—conditioned to believe their own society is superior—don’t get.

FIGURE 1-1 Pawel Lozinski chronicling roles unchanged since childhood for The Sisters. (Photo courtesy of filmmaker Pawel Lozinski, [email protected].)

Each film is funny and entertaining and leaves you pondering. Each works quite differently because there are so many ways a documentary can propose ideas about the real world to its audience. Today’s documentary makers use every imaginable storytelling method to engage us with ideas about the actual: They can magnify a tiny backwater, explore intimate and unlikely relationships, chronicle large historical events, or rattle the teeth of a nation by speaking truth to power.

What do you get from making documentary? The process takes you below the surface of life into more mysterious regions where you start living life more profoundly. Documentary makers learn to value the joy, pain, compromise, and learning that come from being completely alive. No wonder they make such good company. They love to use the screen to explore what they find fascinating or scandalously unjust. Today you can do this without money, power, position, or even much in the way of special training. What you mostly need is courage, a passionate drive to solve mysteries, and the persistence to make what you’ve gathered into a story that will detonate in the minds of an audience.

FIGURE 1-2 Michael Moore in Sicko preparing to probe the American health care system. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Dog Eat Dog Films/Weinstein Company.)

Making a Living

Now that nonfiction filmmaking is inexpensive to produce, there are many kinds of film that can bring its makers a little money, though usually not enough for a middle-class lifestyle. Directors often have to teach or make instructional or other workaday videos to earn their daily bread. At the glamorous and profitable end is the independent feature documentary that is shown in cinemas and is able to make big money. Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins (2005, France; Figure 1-3) made $77 million in its first 20 weeks, while Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, United States) grossed over $119 million. Disney is launching Disneynature, a new production unit that will produce and distribute documentaries for an initial cycle of four years. The young filmmaker just starting out can obtain local commissions, such as medical, training, wedding, birthday, Internet, local activist, and other films. There are news coverage, reality shows, and fundraising films for charities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), any of which could take you to the ends of the earth. You might work in travelogue or educational films, films about music, or films about a thousand other special interests. You could make industrial films or films for social scientists or anthropologists. There is no limit to the kind of films that people want. The trick is to make them ingeniously, inexpensively, and for money. There is, as you will see, a highly entrepreneurial aspect to surviving in this way of life.

FIGURE 1-3 March of the Penguins: Sometimes documentaries hit the jackpot. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Buena Vista/APC/Jerome Maison.)

Many people put off deciding how they should specialize as a future professional. If you mean to take up documentary as a way of life, it is a serious business; it means learning to walk the walk and talk the talk. Professional journals can draw you into the world of documentary by showing what the various jobs and interests lead to. The Independent (formerly The Independent Film and Video Monthly; see www.aivf.org), International Documentary (Figure 1-4), American Cinematographer, and DV are a mine of professional, critical, and technical information. You can get up-to-the-minute news on ideas and trends, new approaches in independent filmmaking, cinematography, postproduction, distribution, and festivals. Variety will tell you everything about the commercial film industry. Astute reading will soon enable you to think, act, and handle yourself like an insider.

FIGURE 1-4 International Documentary, a leading documentary journal. (Photo courtesy of International Documentary Association.)

The European Documentary Network (http://tv.oneworld.net) is representative of many special-interest Web sites. By Googling a combination of words that interest you (such as documentary, festival, production, proposal, pitch, funding, center, etc.), you can locate an enormous body of information on the Internet. Not everything is accurate or valuable, of course, but the whole scene is open for you to sightsee.

Documentary is …

Documentary’s founding father John Grierson—to whom we shall return—defined documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality.” He meant that if you use your creativity to organize pieces of recorded reality into a narrative, then you have produced a documentary, but this embraces all nonfiction forms such as nature, science, travelogue, industrial, educational, social, and even factually based promotional films. Today, particular values and issues seem to distinguish the documentary from its nonfictional siblings.

An Organized Story with a Meaning

A brief documentary might have as its sole character a large beetle trying to climb a stalk in order to take wing. As a kid I once sat with my father watching this happen, and we were both entranced. Its efforts, and the obstacles making its takeoff so uncertain, gave its progress great dramatic tension. When the bug finally went buzzing on its way, we’d seen a marathon in the insect world, a whole documentary film in a single shot.

To be successful, your documentary must have engaging characters, narrative tension, and something to say about the human condition.

FIGURE 1-5 In Winged Migration, the “characters” are birds struggling to survive. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Sony Pictures/Mathieu Simonet.)

Every compelling story, fictional or documentary, has characters striving to accomplish something and overcoming obstacles from their circumstances. How they do this and whether they succeed provides the dramatic tension that keeps us enthralled. In Winged Migration (2001, France; Figure 1-5) by JacquesCluzaud, Michel Debats, and Jacques Perrin, the “characters” are different species of birds, each living under the compulsion of migratory survival. Each faces death as they expend every ounce of energy to overcome the challenges of distance, weather changes, and cold that sap their reserves. The sad truth is that the weaker or unfortunate ones do not complete the journey.

Documentary Intentions and Ingredients

Unfolding Evidence

The modern documentary differs from its earlier, more scripted and premeditated forms. Mobile technology allows us to easily record events in motion and to show an authorial consciousness at work even as events unfold. This captures the sensation of spontaneous living familiar from heightened moments in our own lives. Take, for example, Nicholas Broomfield and Joan Churchill’s Soldier Girls (1981, United Kingdom; Figure 1-6). Ostensibly, it shows how the U.S. Army trains its women soldiers, but it also reveals many other formal and informal moments, including sadistic training and humiliations, that are all the more disquieting when imposed by authoritarian white male sergeants on black or Hispanic women recruits. The film delays confronting its central paradox until late: Warfare is brutal and unfair, so a caring instructor cannot kindly train soldiers of either gender to survive. But, this argument wears thin after what we have seen and leaves us disturbed by larger questions about military

Mobile camcorders capture events in motion, show life spontaneously unfolding, and help convey the filmmakers’ responses even as the events take shape.

traditions and mentality—just as the film’s makers intended. We share what moved or disturbed Broomfield and Churchill, but they never tell us what to feel or think. Instead, by exposing us to evidence that is contradictory and provocative they jolt us into realization and inner debate. A film that exposes us to compelling though contradictory evidence makes us jury members arbitrating not right versus wrong—which is easy to decide—but right versus right, which is not.

FIGURE 1-6 In Soldier Girls, minority women undergo sadistic training and humiliation in the U.S. Army. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/First Run Pictures.)

Modern documentary avoids telling us what to feel or think. Instead, it exposes us to contradictory, provocative evidence that moves us to inner debate and realization.

Right versus wrong is easy to decide—more interesting and challenging is right versus right.

The Objectivity Myth and Fairness

The director’s Journey

The documentary director is essentially someone who:

• Investigates significant people, topics, or aspects of life.
• Does what is necessary to ethically record whatever is essential and meaningful.
• Lives to expose underlying truths and conflicts in contemporary life.
• Has empathy for humankind and develops a humane understanding of each new world.
• Orchestrates footage to make a story that is cinematically and dramatically satisfying.
• Deeply engages an audience in mind and feelings.

Many experienced directors operate from a gut recognition that is really a process of internalized logic. Working more by reflex than deduction, they recognize what works and will be effective. This is maddening to anyone trying to learn from watching them. Even professional crew members routinely harbor quite distorted ideas of what’s going on. To them, directors make decisions in a remote and arty compartment of their brain. But directing really isn’t a mystical process. Directors only appear inscrutable because it’s a strenuous inner process that monopolizes their energies.

No film—indeed, no artwork of any kind—emerges except by conscious, responsible choices and decisions. Each new film will require you to enter a new world, decide what is significant in it, and crystallize what matters on film. This means:

• Being critically aware of each unfolding aspect of your film’s world and characters.
• Retaining not only what you learned on your learning journey but also how you learned it.
• Using film freshly and inventively so your audience gets an equal or better learning journey than your own.
• Expressing ideas about the meaning and nature of actuality, not just showing it in a value-neutral way.

The multilayered consciousness it takes to keep all these balls in the air is not a “talent”; it comes from the kind of practice a juggler employs. Expect to learn from many mistakes or miscalculations. This is all good learning. The American Cinematographer’s standard interview asks famous people, “Have you made any memorable blunders?” The answers make reassuring reading. At times everyone feels inept and defeated, but you pick yourself up and go on.

Making documentary is very, very rewarding. You enter people’s lives, involve yourself in their issues and mysteries, and travel into new worlds with the best of traveling companions. Raising your own and other people’s awareness, you never have to ask yourself whether you are using your one and only life wisely.

The “Contract,” Film Openings, and Talking to your Audience

Intentionally or otherwise, every film signals its nature and premise within its first minute or two. Like a restaurant handing out an inviting menu, the wise storyteller sets terms in the opening moments so the audience can anticipate something compelling. This is the contract you strike with your audience and is a large part of your opening. By going to this book’s Web site (http://directingthedocumentary.com) you can run 12 minutes each of two documentaries by Academy Award nominee Tod Lending—Legacy (2000, United States) and Omar and Pete (2005, United States)—to see how they are set up. You can also see four 5-minute student documentaries in their entirety. Each implies a promise to its audience and sets up the world of its central characters as economically and appealingly as possible. This task is called a story’s exposition and often presents difficulties. How much should you lay out? How much factual material can the audience absorb before meeting the characters? Can you start the action (a lesson, an arrest, or, in the case of Legacy, a death) to give momentum during the initial exposition of the film? How much should you hold back to create dramatic tension?

Opening any dramatic work takes art and verve, or you lose your audience. The exposition and the discourse that follows depend on how you present evidence to the audience and how you acknowledge other points of view. I see three main types of communicator:

1. Propagandist: Wants to condition the audience and produces only the evidence to support a predetermined conclusion; wants the audience to buy the premise.
2. Binary communicator: Likes to give equal coverage to both sides while remaining neutral and shadowy as a narrative voice; sees the audience as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge and entertainment.
3. Mature communicator: Sees the audience member as an equal, willing to sift through contradictions and make thoughtful judgments; aims neither to condition nor divert the viewer but to share something from life with all of its contradictions and human mystery.

In the last category is Ira Wohl’s deeply touching Best Boy (1979, United States; Figure 1-7). An elderly couple is uneasy about yielding their 50-year-old mentally handicapped son to an institution. Soon they won’t be around to care for him, so the need is urgent. The film touches on all the humor, regret, and pain connected with the son’s position as a handicapped member of a family, and it leaves the audience entranced. The film does not set out to celebrate, sell, or convert but rather to expand the viewer’s mind and emotions. It succeeds by drawing us through a series of events that are fraught with emotion, meaning, and uncertainty. It lets us draw difficult conclusions about motives and responsibilities and takes us along as accomplices in a painful quest for answers. Like a good friend, a good film engages us actively; it never patronizes or manipulates its participants or its audience.

The Filmmaker and the Media

Film students sometimes think that cinema is an alchemy that aggrandizes and ennobles whatever you put before the camera, but it’s primarily a framer and magnifier: It makes truth look more true, and artifice more artificial. Small is big, and big is enormous. Along with any insights, every step exposes the makers’ fallibilities. Content chosen and mediated by a string of human judgments is biased by the lenses, lighting, film stock, or video medium used and even by the context in which you see the movie (crowded cinema, motel TV, with your family, etc.). Rendering the spirit of the real takes knowledge of cinema and judgment.

FIGURE 1-7 Best Boy touches on all the humor, regret, and pain of a family with a handicapped son. (Photo by Ira Wohl.)

Today documentary makers mostly rely on television, satellite, or cable to show their work, although the Internet may soon change this. For those who currently control broadcasting, the notion that truth may reside more powerfully in the vision of two or three individuals than in the consensus of the boardroom is a prickly issue. Corporations are committed to audience figures and profits; they are top-down power structures that shape programming by subtracting what might offend a sector of the audience or hurt profitability. They are hypersensitive to sponsors, politicians, and self-appointed guardians of public morals. Getting anything unusual on television takes unending struggle. Paradoxically, though, it has been philanthropic endowments, enlightened corporations, or embattled individuals within them whose commitment to free speech has kept the documentary alive and (by extension) kept its contribution alive to democratic pluralism.

The diversification of messages via DVD, airwaves, cable, satellite, the Internet, and video facilities—with production and replay equipment becoming better and cheaper—is making ever more video presentations available on every imaginable topic. With more channels of distribution, more films get made, competition rises, and making a living becomes more difficult. If you are to live by filmmaking, it must be with outstanding screen work. This book hands you the keys.

FIGURE 1-8 A Sony HDR-SR12—all you need to begin making documentaries. (Photo courtesy of Sony Corporation.)

With the proliferation of digital camcorders (Figure 1-8) and desktop nonlinear editing, you can learn the basics of filmmaking rapidly and at low cost. You can shoot and edit basic material with a consumer camcorder and computer costing under $1200. Quite sophisticated work is possible with a package costing under $2500, and you can work to high-definition (HD) broadcast quality with a $10,000 package. This includes an HD camcorder, fast audio-visual computer with high-capacity hard drives, and video and sound editing software that outputs to a digital recording medium such as tape or DVD.

Digital editing, now ubiquitous, restores the flexibility of editing film while dispensing with all the drudgery of film splicing and manual filing (my first film industry job). A lab transfers film “dailies” via a film-to-digital transfer machine to a high-capacity hard disk. Origination is now in the digital domain using flash memory instead of tape cassettes, making the digital process ever more efficient. Using a computer, you can now assemble and manipulate any number of cut versions with the speed and efficiency of word processing.

The phone camera is even changing history by putting material on the Internet for worldwide consumption, as governments and police departments discover to their cost after they beat and kill their critics.

Bearing Witness

Ordinary people know virtually nothing about the lives and minds of their fore-bears. Search for your forebears in censuses and other records, and you’ll find names, occupations, births, marriages, and deaths but little else about your genetic heritage. I would like to know more about the orphanage my father went to at 11 and about which he never said one word. I would like to know about the branch of his family who were village chimney sweeps near London. They left two pieces of oral information, evocative in their contradiction: that the boys had saltpeter rubbed into their torn knees and elbows to toughen their skin for the brutal job of climbing inside chimneys and that their family was illegitimately descended from the tutor of Queen Elizabeth I. The wound repair sounds grimly authentic, and the rest is surely delusions of grandeur. One universal fact stands out, though. The great mass of humanity has left nothing but what we glimpse in folk music, cautionary sayings, and marks on the landscape. Unless they tangled with the law or did something remarkable, they sank without trace. If anyone recorded their story, their masters did it for them—so the record isn’t exactly unprejudiced.

You and I need not pass so silently from life or rely on others to tell the tale of our lives. The screen is now ours to chronicle what we see and feel. We can reinterpret history, bear witness to our times, and prophesy the future. Documentaries record the grassroots voices and visions of today, and the DVD and Internet transmit them. Those holding power can no longer ignore them (Figure 1-9). The consequences—for democracy, and for a more equitable tapestry of cultures—are incalculable.

Documentary as Art

Art, Individuality, and Point of View

Émile Zola defined a work of art as “a corner of Nature seen through a temperament.”² Let’s borrow this and amend it: “A documentary is a corner of actuality seen through a temperament.” This advances on Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality” because the characters and events in a memorable film do seem to arrive through a human mind and feelings. Even when a film’s authorship includes a hundred people, you still see this unity because each person in the team works for the good of the project. Each finds such satisfaction in their craft that they have no need to control the whole. Not even the director does this, for he or she coordinates the collaborative effort, never controls it. It is the passion to entertain and persuade that unites film artists; they aim to make visible what is only at the edge of consciousness for the rest of us. The human condition is what fascinates documentarians, and they revel in using their medium to explore it.

FIGURE 1-9 Television and local activists cover an antiwar speaker during a Chicago antiwar demonstration. (Author photo.)

A documentary is a corner of actuality seen through a temperament, and this temperament can be individual or the collective identity of a group.

Most documentaries have a progenitor, someone who gets the whole process going and who, by common consent, directs the team. This means that your documentaries can only come through you. The chapters that follow concentrate on self-knowledge as a director’s starting point.

The best documentaries arise from their makers’ lifelong quest for knowl edge and self-knowledge.

Going Further

Christopher Vogler and Michele Montez’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (2007, Michael Wiese) uses the foundation laid by the folklorist Joseph Campbell to show how much contemporary films share with more ancient forms of storytelling.