Chapter 19
Form, Control, and Style
This chapter may be heavy going unless you’ve had experience in other narrative art forms. If it seems foreign, skip to the table of prompts at the end and use them for your next film. Once you’ve made one or two films, you’ll recognize the path you’ve been on, and ideas about form and style will begin to complement your own thinking.
Form
Flaherty was original enough to single-handedly invent the genre of documentary because he saw that documentary needs narrative compression and storytelling techniques to engage its audience. This is disturbing to the ethnographer, or any purist for whom manipulation is suspect. But our experiences and meanings pursued through documentary won’t get across unless you can make an audience feel them. This reconnects with the notion of a film’s contract with its audience. It must promise something, deliver what it promises, and remain consistent while doing so. Only the director can decide how to do this, but the nature of your subject is a powerfully deciding force.
A large and enthusiastic public now exists for the best documentaries, but you will have to devise strong narrative approaches if your films are to rise above the average.
The inbuilt limitations that come with your subject provide a useful spur to creativity. They insist you concentrate on the essentials of what you’re doing. The most pervasive are in time, personnel, equipment, travel, shooting days, and resources. They help concentrate the mind so you shoot no more than necessary. Film schedules have tightened ever since digital shooting and editing sped up production. These are the realities, and like the rules limiting any game, they make filming finite and challenging. Whether you can work fruitfully within them decides whether you survive—financially and professionally. Accordingly, you plan and schedule in detail, breaking tasks into bite-size pieces so you can tell where you have under- or overscheduled.
There are also limitations you set yourself, ones you choose that give you something meaningful to push against and that force you to find creative solutions. Let’s briefly examine how setting their own aesthetic rules galvanized a couple of visual movements.
Setting Limits and the Dogme Group
In America of the early 1930s some photographers banded together under the name Group f/64. They felt that photography could never realize its potential unless it stopped emulating high-art forms like painting, sketching, and etching. From that consciousness came a fantastic movement in photography that gave us the groundbreaking work of Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyke.
FIGURE 19-1 The Celebration—a Dogme fiction film that jettisons many fiction conventions in favor of more informal and immediate shooting techniques. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Nimbus Film Productions.)
In Denmark of the mid-1990s, the founding members of the Dogme 95 cinema group arrived at similar conclusions and went on to produce landmark fiction films. The Celebration (1998, Denmark, directed by Thomas Vinterberg; Figure 19-1), Breaking the Waves (1999, Denmark, directed by Lars von Trier; Figure 19-2), and The Idiots (1999, Denmark, directed by Lars von Trier) were all shot digitally and handheld. Their starting point is a playful manifesto explicitly rejecting the embrace of Hollywood and that moves their methods toward the norms of documentary. It appears in various versions and translations, so I have taken the liberty of putting it in vernacular English:
FIGURE 19-2 Improvisation, fine performances, and a documentary approach give Breaking the Waves an impassioned urgency. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Zentropa.)
A Vow of Chastity
- Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in, but shooting must go where that set or prop can be found.
- Sound must never be produced separately from the images or vice versa.
- Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is shot.
- The camera must be handheld. Any movement or immobility attainable by handholding is permitted. The action cannot be organized for the camera; instead, the camera must go to the action.
- The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable, and if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut, or a single lamp may be attached to the camera.
- Camera filters and other optical work are forbidden.
- The film must not contain any superficial action such as murders, weapons, explosions, and so on.
- No displacement is permitted in time or space; the film takes place here and now.
- Genre movies are not acceptable.
- Film format is Academy 35 mm.
- The director must not be credited.
Furthermore, I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste. I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work,” as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.
Signed ___________________________ [member’s name]
The last clause is really intriguing: By rejecting a leadership hierarchy and even personal taste, the manifesto strikes at the narcissism of ego. The effect of deemphasizing leadership and film techniques was to hand their actors a rich slice of creative control, to which they responded handsomely. About their manifesto, Thomas Vinterberg said:
We did the “Vow of Chastity” in half an hour and we had great fun. Yet, at the same time, we felt that in order to avoid the mediocrity of film-making not only in the whole community, but in our own filmmaking as well, we had to do something different. We wanted to undress film, turn it back to where it came from and remove the layers of make-up between the audience and the actors. We felt it was a good idea to concentrate on the moment, on the actors and, of course, on the story that they were acting, which are the only aspects left when everything else is stripped away. Also, artistically it has created a very good place for us to be as artists or filmmakers because having obstacles like these means you have something to play against.1
Contradictions always arise from trying to live according to beliefs, but the Dogme Group’s work and the superb involvement it called forth from actors demand respect for their spirit and achievements.
Their guiding values helped catapult Danish film to the forefront of international cinema. The moral? Filmmakers decide what matters by rejecting what intrudes. In documentary, some limitations come with the subject but others you must choose.
Creatively inspired limitations—no matter whether you encounter them or impose them on yourself—are valuable because they give you something meaningful to push against.
So, what creative limitations will you set yourself?
Content Influences Form
Most of those working in the arts—musicians, writers, and painters, for instance—control their own content and form. The documentarian, however, is more like a mosaic artist who works from the idiosyncratic, chance-influenced nature of found materials. Each documentary depends on acts, words, and images plucked from life—all elements largely outside your control. This means that, unless your film is of the highly malleable essay type, its source materials already restrict your options. Also limiting you are your ethics, interests, and ideas about what work the documentary should do. They will shape your work and give it a style that is yours and nobody else’s.
No documentary succeeds unless you can turn your footage into a compelling narrative. Memorable films are thus each one of a kind, so you can’t treat the best as prototypes.
Fiction films create characters and situations in the service of ideas, but documentary discovers meanings hiding inside lived reality. That’s why it’s so fascinating—you have to present the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be.
Style
The documentarian begins work very practically, by selectively shooting and editing in order to direct the audience’s attention at what is meaningful and would otherwise go unnoticed. Getting your meaning across will be easier if:
- The subject is gripping.
- The treatment (that is, form and style) is imaginative.
- Point of view comes from an emotional response rather than one that is intellectual.
- The film makes use of imagery, metaphor, and symbolism to suggest there is more going on than meets the eye.
Examine a documentary’s style in detail using Project 1-AP-7 Analyze Structure and Style.
All the conventions of the cinema are at your service as you transform actuality into a story with style, point of view, and the meanings that you and your associates come to know are present.
Jean-Luc Godard said, “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and inside of the human body—both go together; they can’t be separated.”2
However, every film treads a fine line between drowning in realism on the one hand and over-imposing order and meaning on the other. You navigate between extremes. Stamp your work too heavily and you will crush the personalities, events, and subtexts subtly present in the dailies. Withdraw all interpretive effort from the tale, and the point of telling it evaporates.
The word “style” is often and confusingly interchanged with “form.” There are in fact two aspects of style—what you can choose and what you can’t.
Style you Can’t Choose
Happily, you can’t choose aspects of your films’ style that arise from your tastes and identity. If this seems a little foggy for an art that is so collaborative, you can still recognize the authorship in a Michael Moore or a Werner Herzog documentary, even when you don’t particularly care for their films. Contributing to this are:
- Choices of subject
- Camera handling
- Forms that each director favors
- Marks of personality and taste
- Methods and messages.
A film’s genre, its voice, meanings, and its style overlap during production and are difficult to see separately afterwards. If you overreach during production, you can quite easily upset the balance so that stylizing actuality (that is, intensifying its essential nature) turns into stylized actuality. The ultra-fragmented, MTV camera-waving style of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’ fake documentary, The Blair Witch Project (1999), and the overcomposed look of Errol Morris’ biography of Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1991, United States; Figure 19-3), both suffer, in my view, from an overemphasis on a stylistic “statement.” The film on Hawking, although it argues his complex theories brilliantly, was shot not in authentic locations but on specially constructed sets.
Trying to strike a style or project an artistic identity leads rather easily to watch-me gimmickry. More important is to develop your deepest interests and be guided by the marks left on you by formative experiences.
So what to do? Working simply, sincerely, and intelligently is most likely to make an audience connect emotionally with your work. Simplicity is wise anyway, since you have a long developmental curve ahead as you acquire the technical and conceptual skills to serve what you have to say.
Expressiveness through cinema is no easier to learn than expressiveness through a musical instrument. You will never stop learning and growing.
Because you can’t choose your identity, some of your film’s style will take care of itself. Audiences and critics may even tell you what your style is. Beware! You’ll be tempted to play safe by imitating your reputation.
FIGURE 19-3 A Brief History of Time profiles the life and ideas of the paralyzed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. It conveys the agility of his mind with a dizzying and stylized treatment. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Triton Films.)
Serve the controllable aspects of your films well over a period, and people will come to recognize something in your films that they’ll call your style.
Style you Can Choose
Films about a children’s author, a tree disease, or early submarines all occupy different worlds, belong in different documentary genres, and call for different approaches. A film about a Talmudic scholar should look very different from one about a skateboarder simply because each occupies an utterly different physical and mental reality. One might call for low-key (large areas of shadow) lighting, rock-steady indoor compositions, and a Vermeer palette of dark colors. The other is more likely to have high-key (mainly bright) lighting and be shot outdoors with an adventurously handheld camera.
The nature and meaning of whatever you film always give clues on how you should film it. Good stylistic choices can help us more easily join your characters in their particular world.
Prompts to Help you Make Stylistic Choices
As you decide a shooting and editing style, try completing these prompts in writing:
- Meaningful limitations I will impose on myself for this film are …
- The contrasts or differences between my main characters and their worlds are …
- My POV character(s) is trying to get, do, or accomplish …
- His/her/its environments are composed of … and suggest …
- The different rhythms my film contains are …
- The main change and development during my film is of:
- Place
- Pace or rhythm
- Season or country
- Palette
- Other ______________________
- The film’s contents suggest a preponderance of:
- Warm, close, intimate photography
- Cool and distanced views
- Static frames with action choreographed within them
- Contained, measured movement
- Fast, unstable, or subjective movement
- Other ______________________
- Characteristic colors in each of my film’s sequences are …
- Each suggests …
- Their progression through the film suggests …
- The main conflict my film handles (between … and …) suggests that contrasting or complementing visual and aural elements might be …
- The editing style in my film should aim to be:
- Slow, deliberate, unhurrying
- Alternating between … and …
- Fast, glancing, and impressionistic
- Other ______________________
- Slow or fast motion, freeze frames, and other optical treatments would achieve … in my film.
- Narration in my film might come from … [character or type of narrator]
- The difference between the start of my film and its end suggests that editing and photography need to change from … to …
- Soundscapes in my film include …
- Aspects of sound design that my film will emphasize are …
Notes
1 Interview by Elif Cercel for Director’s World ; see http://stage.directorsworld.com
2 Roud, Richard. Jean-Luc Godard. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.