11
News and documentary
Fact and fiction
A television drama about a military engagement was criticized by an army spokesman as being ‘too realistic’. The camerawork style was indistinguishable from news coverage and the army spokesman complained that the audience could easily be confused into thinking they were watching ‘a real event’. ‘The Blair Witch Project’, another piece of fiction, was complimented on its realistic camerawork treatment. The low tech image quality, the nervous unrehearsed hand-held camerawork combined to persuade the audience that they were watching an authentic event.
‘Realistic’ in this usage was achieved by imitating the characteristics of news coverage. ‘The camera surprised by events’ has a number of visual mannerisms such as rapid reframing, an unsteady frame, ‘hose-piping’ the camera in rapid panning movements in search of the significant event, etc. This ‘breaking news’ appearance can be reinforced by low tech image quality and poor colour rendition (see ‘Composition styles’ in Chapter 12).
Apart from this type of visual mannerisms, what separates fact and fiction camerawork? From the early days of film making, camerawork conventions have been used to convince and persuade the intended audience of the ‘reality’ of the story depicted. The criticism of ‘realistic’ camerawork appears to rest on the false assumption that there is one set of ‘fiction’ visual conventions and another set of ‘news’ visual conventions. Although there are differences in work practices when shooting news such as, for example, less or no control of staging subject matter, in general both types of camerawork use a variant of invisible technique. What usually confuses some people in identifying what is ‘real’ is that fiction film making has often borrowed certain visual ‘tics’ of news gathering. Orson Welles, in his spoof version of a ‘March of Time’ newsreel at the start of ‘Citizen Kane’ employed scratched film, jump cuts and ungraded film to ‘authenticate’ a newsreel appearance.
The fashionable view of what is considered realistic camerawork has undergone many changes. It was ironic that just as Steadicam was evolved to give smooth 360° movement anywhere, the fashion developed for unsteady camerawork as a signature of realism. Invisible technique that is fluid, smooth, unobtrusive camerawork is equated with fiction and the highly manufactured commercial commodity produced within the traditional conventions of Hollywood. Degrading the image and a hand-tooled ‘wobbly’ shot was seen as returning to the basics of realism and objectivity.
Realism and fantasy
As was discussed in Chapter 2, ‘Alternative technique’, the argument about objective and subjective camera effects were present at the birth of film The Lumière brothers and Mèliès provided a template for the two opposing views. The choice was between film making as an attempt at realism – providing the audience with believable people caught up in believable events – or, like Mèliès, a fantasy setting of a fabulous activity. Film narration has to use a number of basic visual conventions in order to ensure that the audience can follow the story.
The first moving images presented to an audience were Lumière factory workers leaving their place of work, a train arriving at a station, etc. These prosaic factual events were soon overtaken by the audience's appetite for mystery, action, pace and excitement and the expanding film industry in the first quarter of the twentieth century soon learnt how to construct shot sequences that engaged the audience's attention. These visual conventions of unobtrusive editing and camera movement are still present in most types of programming, including news.
But news also has an obligation to separate fact from opinion, to be objective in its reporting and, by selection, to emphasize that which is significant to its potential audience. These considerations therefore needed to be borne in mind when composing shots for news as well as the standard camera technique associated with visual storytelling. There is a trade-off between the need to visually hold the attention of the audience and the need to be objective when covering news. Pace, action and visual excitement have always been used in film to tell a story but, in a news story, these standard techniques cannot be employed to capture the audience's attention if they are reconstructions. Subjectivity is increased by restaging the event to serve the needs of television (e.g., re-enacting significant action that occurred before the camera arrived), selecting only ‘action’ events to record unless qualified by a reporter, and the use of standard ‘invisible’ technique editing to produce a partial account of an event. Although there is an attempt to avoid these ‘entertainment’ aspects of storytelling in news reportage, they are often unavoidable because of the nature of the news item or the demands of attracting viewers.
Film as illusion
Whether fact or fiction, all film making is in some way creating an illusion. Part of the role of the director or cameraman is find the appropriate technique to create a convincing illusion. There are a number of ways of achieving this, such as by immersing the audience in a story with convincing detail and choosing techniques that do not disturb their concentration on content or by convincing the audience they are watching an accurate account of reality – news coverage in the raw. They may be aware of unsteady camerawork or disjointed continuity, etc., but that visual style simply reinforces their belief in the authenticity of the event.
An objective representation of ‘reality’ in a news, documentary or current affairs production uses the same perennial camerawork techniques as the subjective personal impression or the creation of atmosphere in fictional films. A football match appears to be a factual event whereas music coverage may appear more impressionistic. In both types of coverage there is selection and the use of visual conventions. Football uses a mixture of close-ups and wide shots, variation of lens height, camera position, cutaways to managers, fans, slow motion replays, etc., to inject pace, tension and drama to hold the attention of the audience. Music coverage will use similar techniques in interpreting the music, but with different rates of pans and zooms motivated by the mood and rhythm of the music. If it is a pop video, there are no limits to the visual effects the Director may feel are relevant. All camerawork is in one way or another an interpretation of an event. The degree of subjective personal impression fashioning the account will depend on which type of programme it is created for.
Objectivity
Although news aims to be objective and free from the entertainment values of standard television storytelling (e.g., suspense, excitement, etc.) it must also aim to engage the audience's attention and keep them watching. The trade-off between the need to visually hold the attention of the audience and the need to be objective when covering news centres on structure and shot composition.
There are a number of standard shots used in feature work such as a canted camera, rapid camera movement, racking focus between speakers, etc., which appear mannered and subjective when used in new coverage. Any composition that appears subjective and impressionistic is usually avoided.
As the popularity of cinema films has shown, an audience enjoys a strong story that involves them in suspense and moves them through the action by wanting to know ‘what happens next?’. This is often incompatible with the need for news to be objective and factual. The production techniques used for shooting and cutting fiction and factual material are almost the same. These visual storytelling techniques have been learned by the audiences from a lifetime of watching fictional accounts of life. The twin aims of communication and engaging the attention of the audience apply to news as they do to entertainment programmes.
Figure 11.1 (a) Riot police advancing towards the camera; the viewer in position of the protesters; (b) from the police viewpoint facing a cage of demonstrators
Record versus comment
Whilst news camerawork aims to be simply a record of an event, inevitably it becomes a comment on an event. It is comment or opinion because choices always have to be made whenever a shot is recorded. Apart from the obvious decision on the content of the shot, whether it be politician, building or crowd, there are also the subtle influences on the viewers’ perception of the event produced by camera position, lighting, lens angle, lens height and camera movement. The camera is not an objective optical instrument such as a microscope. In setting up a shot, there is considerable scope for influencing the appearance and therefore the impact of the image. There is always the temptation to find the ‘best’ composition, even when shooting, for example, the effects of poverty and deprivation in city slums.
A news cameraman arriving to cover a street riot will be unable, at first, to understand fully the complexity of the situation. For personal safety, he/she can choose to film from behind the police lines or they can, if they are sufficiently courageous, get in amongst the protesters who are facing the police. The camera position they choose will, to some extent, colour the response of the viewer. From behind police lines the image is of missiles and petrol bombs aimed in the direction of the camera. Subjectively the viewer is under attack. The viewpoint in amongst the protesters is of a phalanx of police shields, guns and batons bearing down on the camera. The viewer is subjectively under violent attack from the forces of law and order. Usually there is no third choice, such as access to the roof of a building providing a high camera position looking down on the street avoiding any partisan identification. Even if available, this is an inflexible position that is quickly unusable once the point of conflict moves on. The criticism sometimes heard about the bias of this type of camera coverage simply fails to take into account the impossibility, in a fast-moving, confused situation, of finding a neutral, detached camera viewpoint. Almost every shot will suggest culpability.
With the development of digital manipulation in video post-production, no shot can be taken as an incontrovertible record of an event. The audience's trust in news coverage is based more on standard news conventions – the appearance of an item – than an absolute faith in the information provided.
Operational awareness
It is easy to believe that all one requires to be a good news cameraman is an understanding of technology, technique and an appreciation of news programmes’ customary styles. But news camerawork requires a fourth essential ingredient, the ability to professionally respond to sudden violent, unforeseen, spontaneous events and provide shots that can be edited to provide an informative news item. Keeping a cool head and providing competent coverage is the opposite to the often seen amateur video accounts of dramatic events where the camera is hose-piped all over the scene in a panic response to action that surprised the operator. News stories are often shot in real time with no opportunity (or requirement) to influence what is happening. The news cameraman must immediately respond to the occurrence in front of the lens and make split-second decisions about composition, what to frame and where to capture the significant shots. Essentially, news camerawork is looking for things moving or in the process of change. A shot of a closed door and curtained windows of a house where a siege is taking place can only be held on screen for a very short time and requires the supporting coverage of the flurry of activity that is taking place in the surrounding area.
Realistic camerawork
Realism in film is that attitude that is opposed to ‘expressionism’. Realism emphasizes the subject as opposed to the director's view of the subject. Expressionism or any form of fiction narrative can make any juxtaposition of images achieve either an expression of the film maker or to move, affect and provoke an effect in the audience. There is no limit to how fantastic a film narrative can be. There are no agreed restraints on technique or form, although there are social concerns about the effects of pornographic and violent subject matter.
‘Realism’, on the other hand, is attempting to be objective – to remove the conditioning influence of its creator. There are competing definitions of what it means to be ‘objective’ and factual film makers are expected not to fabricate an event. Does this mean avoiding any influence on the subject of the film? Is the presence of the camera an influence? Would the material be different if the camera was not present?
There are always two influences at work on any sequence of shots. Firstly, there are the requirements of the film and television form – the mechanics of the media. In some way, the audience has to see and hear what is being presented. Secondly, the personal subjectivity of the film maker – his or her creative ambitions and viewpoint are difficult to eradicate. The fingerprint of their aims and intentions will somehow be present.
It is not possible to remove all traces of the creative decision making in film For example, the ‘found’ form of a piece of driftwood on the beach is selected when it is picked up and taken to be displayed. Aesthetic values have been exercised. A choice has been made. Some productions avoid making these decisions and leave the camera running and the framing to chance. The images cannot be free of all subjective decision making because simply recording and placing the camera in a position conditions the appearance of the shot. A surveillance camera has a number of prearranged factors affecting the way the shot looks. How ‘realistic’ is the security camera system in a superstore?
There is in fact a new lust for authenticity – no interpretation, just a flat statement of reality. Standard programme production, particularly on crime, has been able to achieve increasing standards of glossiness that is in contrast to actuality footage.
Surveillance cameras provide the jolt of raw footage that is unmediated – a direct access to the real without modification. There are compilation programmes featuring cameras in police car chases, city centre fixed cameras of street crime, etc. This ‘reality’ TV also includes secret filming and the self-documentation of video diaries. The very roughness of surveillance images guarantees total authenticity. The appeal of this video reality TV is that it is perceived as real – it is not re-creation. New technology can go where TV cameras have never been before.
Secret filming allows evidence to be collected that is obtainable by no other method – it is an unglamorous version of crime. Its raw appearance feels closer to reality. How something was shot becomes more important than the reason it was shot. The stylized conventions of secret filming and the imitation of raw footage such as ‘grained up’ images, converting colour images to black and white, shaky camerawork and the appearance of voyeurism is a developed programme ‘style’.
Technology as an aid to ‘realism’
The invention of film and the projection of life-sized figures was proclaimed by the Lumière brothers as ‘life on the run’ – a greater realism than could be achieved with still photography. Movement and screen size enhanced the illusion. Later sound, and then colour and stereo sound, expanded the experience. Cinerama claimed ‘it creates all the illusion of reality ... you see things the way you do in real life not only in front of you as in conventional motion pictures, but also out of the corners of your eyes ... you hear with the same startling realism’.
As we mentioned in Chapter 7, ‘The shape of the screen’, the giant screen size and stereo were used mainly as novelty attractions. They were seen as an experience in themselves rather than at the service of realistic storytelling. The development of stereo sound, colour and widescreen were identified with spectacle.
Documentary programmes
The definition of what is a documentary depends on where people position themselves in this debate. The word ‘documentary’ was coined by a group of British film makers in the 1930s who were aiming to change the audience's perception about other people's lives. Over time, the word has changed in meaning and, to most audiences, ‘documentary’ implies visual factual evidence that is a truthful record of an event or activity.
The early British documentary makers often followed John Grierson's famous definition of documentary as being ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. But the concept that truth can be creatively interpreted allows considerable latitude in how visual factual evidence is produced. In the 1930s and 1940s, bulky 35-mm film equipment made substantial reconstruction and restaging almost inevitable. In his documentary ‘Drifters’, Grierson built a trawler deckhouse on land and then got genuine fishermen to recreate their normal seagoing activities. It is claimed that Robert Flaherty, following the activities of Nanook, an Eskimo, wanted a very much larger igloo built to accommodate interior shots. The traditional igloo had obviously an optimum functional design size because the roof of a larger constructed igloo collapsed.
Another British documentary film maker, Paul Rotha, identified a distinction between news and documentary by suggesting that news cameramen ‘make no effort to approach their subjects from a creative or dramatic point of view other than those of plain description’, whereas documentary cameramen must be ‘poets of the camera’. This early auteur theory (film as the exclusive creation of one person), suggests that documentary is the artistic vision of one man.
In the 1950s, French anthropologists’ use of the film camera as a ‘scientific’ recording instrument led to the development of the portable 16-mm camera with synch sound. There was a growing awareness of the influence the observer has on the subject. A famous example, before the documentary movement began, was of the study of working conditions at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant in Illinois in 1927, which discovered that output increased on the production line not only when, for example, lighting conditions were improved but also when they were made worse. The fact of being studied, rather than the experimental factors being manipulated, had caused the workers to react.
Observation, with or without a camera, affects the subject being observed. Once people become aware of being watched, their behaviour is altered. There can be no disinterested bystander with a camera who does not in some way affect the behaviour of their attention. In the 1960s, the American documentary film makers loosely grouped under the title of Direct Cinema were confident that they could remain detached from their subject. Liberated by the go-anywhere film equipment they suggested they were simply an uninvolved bystander at the ‘filmed event’. Their claim of non-intervention with their subject was hard to substantiate. Any documentary maker has to select a subject, a camera viewpoint and then edit the material. These are all areas where personal preconceptions, knowledge and attitude can influence choice in addition to the effect of the filming process on the participants.
At the same time, across the Atlantic, the French Cinema-Verne documentary movement were doubtful if the subjective attitudes of a film maker could remain detached from his/her work. Jean Luc-Goddard suggested that the quest for uncontaminated reportage throws away the two most important assets of a film maker – intelligence and sensitivity.
Some French film makers deliberately put themselves in their documentaries because they believed their influence was always present. It is like a cameraman filming in a fairground Hall of Mirrors. At some stage, whichever way you point the camera, you are bound to get yourself into shot. Sometimes you will be sharply recognized and sometimes you film a distorted image of yourself. It is impossible to film/video a sequence without the originator's fingerprints appearing somewhere on a shot. The man/woman behind the camera can never keep him/herself out of shot.
Many people attempt to show things ‘as they really are’, but film/video as straightforward documentary truthful evidence is always suspect because:
the film or tape is a representation and is not equivalent to the actual event filmed Converting three-dimensions into a flat imageconverts an event into a replication of that event. The two are not interchangeable;
the camera is not an impartial scientific instrument that provides a truthful record of the subject. Lens, film tape stock and camera position all colour the truthfulness of the record;
the camera operator and then editor exert conscious and subconscious influences. They put themselves between the subject and the viewer and cannot be eliminated from the frame.
Professionalism
The packaging of ‘facts’ in an attempt to attract and keep a mass audience occurs in news, current affairs and documentaries, but the ‘package’ of technique is usually so well disguised or so familiar that it is not intrusive. The disquiet felt by some people is when a highly dramatic and sometimes life-threatening event is recorded by a news crew with no one from the television organization attempting to intervene or assist those in distress. It exposes the implications of adopting the role of professional ‘looker-on’, indifferent or detached from subject matter, and also the extent to which the illusion-making technique that has sustained countless fictional entertainments can be employed in the presentation of ‘real’ events.
There is the example of an ENG crew who videotaped a woman struggling for her life in an icy river after surviving a plane crash. This ENG crew even captured the moment when a bystander leapt into the water and rescued her. Or, in the most extreme example, the cameraman who stood his ground and zoomed out to contain the ‘action’ of a Vietnamese child running towards the camera, screaming and immersed in flame.
The convention in television is that the broadcast organization delegates responsibility for content to a few individuals, removing the majority of employees from any public accountability for the effect of their work. It is considered that market forces will take care of any lapse in taste. Give the public what it wants, it is suggested, and they will either watch and endorse the choice or switch to another channel. There is also, in many countries, the safety net of government-appointed regulatory bodies that require the companies to comply with certain codes of political balance, avoidance of offensive material, etc. The broadcast system would therefore appear to have sufficient safeguards to eliminate any moral dilemma that a crew may have in not assisting those in distress.
Professional looking-on’ would appear to be a mandate for noninvolvement with people ‘out there’ in front of the camera – a suspension of personal responsibility to act and the surrendering to the employing organization the task of evaluating the morality of any particular situation. A dispensation is claimed for the professional ‘news collector’ so that he/she may stand outside the event and objectively report. Whatever is happening, the news cameraman has, in one sense, a professional vested interest to see that it continues until he/she has got the essential material. Crews will struggle through blizzards and will be the first to arrive at snowed-in villages but they will bring no food or other essential supplies. They will search for possible suffering, hardship, death or even cheerful ‘community spirit’ stories and then leave with a ‘factual’ report. If the inhabitants are fortunate enough to have their electricity reconnected they can watch a replay of the triumphant arrival of the crew on the evening news.
The broadcast employee is cushioned and actively encouraged to make no moral judgements about his professional activity. Machinelike, he is programmed to be a neutral transmitter of messages and he either takes the money or resigns. The accolade ‘professional’ is in fact often used in television to describe, amongst other qualities, the ability to meet a deadline within budget, to satisfy standards and the values of fellow practitioners but, above all, to preserve some degree of objectivity and detachment. This is also interpreted as the ability to give the best possible presentation of subject matter that engages the interest of the audience whilst avoiding commitment or bias. But this professional detachment cannot be compared with that of, say, a doctor, who although he may avoid identifying with the suffering of his patient is nevertheless required to avoid administering poison or harming his patient.
It is unlikely that the crew who clambered over the wreckage of a train to get the close-up of the driver's face just before his leg was amputated to free him would have gone there to stare unless they had a camera between themselves and the event. This special dispensation for the professional looker-on’ allows such material as the expression on the train driver's face before he loses his leg and is endorsed by the news editor as of ‘human interest’, or of news value. Exploitation of grief and suffering is certainly not unique to television. Public executions were very popular (and still are in some countries) until abolished. Possibly the same frisson is still available in the comfort of our own homes when we look into the eyes of a drowning woman as she desperately scrabbles for safety in icy water and legitimize it by calling it news. It is this extra quality of vivid immediacy of news film that is particularly sought for and endorsed as having great ‘human interest’. Watching a person die or suffer extreme emotion is sanctioned by appealing to ‘news values’. But if the audience makes a trip to the scene of the disaster instead of watching it on television in order to catch a glimpse (in the distance) of the same victim, it brings down the full self-righteous wrath of journalism and denouncements of ‘ghoulish rubber necking’ and ‘sick voyeurism’.
There is in broadcasting a belief that a mass audience is attracted and held by production techniques that relay an experience of an event rather than analysis. Instant access to the ‘real’ is in demand, it is suggested, as long as it is highly packaged within the conventions derived from fiction films. This results in the search for impact to grab the audience and hyping the ‘real’ has not only borrowed all the standard entertainment conventions but has invented a few of its own.
A round-up programme of the day's sport becomes not the selected ‘highlights’ of a football match but an entertainment package of slow motion replays, personalities, comment and the collapse of real time to produce an interpretation of an event that is entirely different from the experience of a spectator at that event. The search for good ‘factual’ television, equalling popular television, equalling large audience, often runs the risk, in using the narrative conventions of fiction films, of obliterating the truthful representation of the event.
Engaging the attention of the audience
The ‘fly on the wall’ technique claims to have the least effect on the participants, but one policeman, commenting on a police documentary series, complained that TV fictional crime series have 50 minutes to solve their crimes in order to fit a TV schedule. Real police work is boring, repetitive, with hours, days and weeks of routine before a result (or sometimes no result), and yet the edited version of the police documentary runs 50 minutes of ‘highlights’ – it has more action than the non-fictional equivalent. The producer of the documentary justified the trimming out and heightening up of action on the basis that it would bore the viewer if repetitive, extended police routine was presented in its entirety. He elected to give a flavour of police procedures. This interpreting an event, giving a ‘flavour’, is not a mirror held up to actuality, as is sometimes claimed for this approach, but a creation in television terms of an event. It involves considerable decision and selection of material and, when those decisions are biased in favour of mass entertainment techniques such as pace, action, tension and impact, then reality becomes packaged in formula film conventions. This soon deteriorates into the recycling of Clichés and stereotypes; the fictionalizing of reality to fit the conventions of a thousand movies. In fact the highest endorsement some people can give to the vividness of an event they have experienced is that ‘it was just like a movie’.
It is suggested that television has turned its audience into ‘image junkies’ where endless newsreels of horror and spectacle are consumed at an alarming rate. Each new shock horror image de-sensitizing feeling and raising the ante for audience response. Possibly the danger of hyping the ‘real’ is not in the confusion experienced by the viewer who begins to expect the same production and entertainment values in the storming of a terrorist-held embassy as they experience with a Bond film, but in the ambition of programme makers, seeking large audiences, who appear to have deliberately blurred the programme distinction between fact and fiction.
American writer John Knightly in his book The First Casualty describes how GIs in Vietnam acted out the ‘John Wayne’ walk of Hollywood war movies when they saw CBS newsreel cameras arrive. They were filmed doing this and no doubt viewers, when they saw this footage, were convinced that this was a ‘real’ event. With life imitating ‘art’ there may be a new category for an Oscar – best dramatic performance in a news bulletin.
Summary
Although there are differences in work practices when shooting news such as, for example, less or no control of staging subject matter, in general both news and fiction camerawork use a variant of invisible technique.
All camerawork is in one way or another an interpretation of an event. The degree of subjective personal impression fashioning the account will depend on which type of programme it is created for.
In news camerawork, compositions that appear mannered or subjective (e.g., a canted camera) are avoided but composition still influences impartiality.
It is often impossible in a fast-moving, confused news story to find a neutral detached camera viewpoint.
News camerawork requires the ability to professionally respond to sudden violent, unforeseen, spontaneous events and provide shots that can be edited to provide an informative news item.
Observation, with or without a camera, affects the subject being observed. Once people become aware of being watched, their behaviour is altered. There can be no disinterested bystander with a camera who does not in some way affect the behaviour of the subject/s of their attention.