In What Ways Does The New Documentary’ Diverge From Earlier Documentary Traditions?

“You take the principles of Verité; I wanted to do the opposite!” (Errol Morris)

The evolution of ‘Documentary’ has shifted curiously through the twentieth century and into the twenty first.  First coined as a term in the 1920s the genre of filmmaking has gone through many transitions and changes and has taken many turns and changes creating what Bill Nichols theorises as the “family tree”, Paul Rotha as “the evolution of documentary” and Erik Barnouw’s “genealogy of sorts”.[1]  Rules and traditions have been attempted to be ascribed to documentary throughout its course.  In the twenties as ‘Kino-Pravda’ and the fifties as ‘Cinema Verité’, both roughly translating as the same thing, as ‘Cinema Truth’ however what seems key to the whole lineage of the form is what Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards claim quite cynically perhaps that while claiming to “represent ‘reality’” they “can really tell us only about the aims and attitudes of their producers and sponsors.”[2]  This being something I am inclined to agree with I will attempt to investigate how earlier traditions have been challenged in the last twenty years of documentary filmmaking and how the filmmaker has become ever present and more overt, and at times subversive, in contemporary documentary.

The word first applied by John Grierson writing in the New York Sun about Robert J. Flaherty’s film ‘Moana’ and compounded in the thirties with his view that the film contained “documentary value.”  Although noting the romanticised elements of Flaherty’s films he defined ‘documenary’ as the “creative treatment of actuality.”[3]  As a key exporter of the Kino Pravda ideology and contributor to the ‘We’ manifesto Dziga Vertov claimed documentary film was filming “life as it is” or “life caught unawares.”[4]  Therefore it seems ‘documentary’ was initially a form of filmmaking that at its birth instantly linked the three key concepts of life, reality and truth.  The link between which would be something that would be debated and challenged over the next eighty or so years.  In the fifties Cinema Verité and Direct Cinema set out documentary as an observational form of filmmaking.  The filmmaker would capture events as they unfolded without interference or involvement aside from pointing a shaky camera towards said events.  This was claimed by its practitioners as the best way to represent “truth” in film form, although this was challenged by the producers of more contemporary documentaries and their didactic approach described as Bill Nichols as “See it this way”.[5]

1988 seems to be a watershed year and one that is often cited as the year New Documentary came to the fore with the Errol Morris film The Thin Blue Line.  With its use of re-enactment and quite overt dramatization of actual events it was a moment that distinctly set newer films apart, specifically from the Verité films of the fifties, sixties and seventies.  As Morris says for himself “You take the principles of Verité; I wanted to do the opposite” and that “we tried to be as obtrusive as possible.”  These were principles Morris would retain for the following twenty years in films such as ‘A Brief History of Time’ where “Morris plays with imagery, as he always said he would and there are recurring ideas, used metaphorically, to emphasise a point” and with the Fog of War he stated that “you’re not supposed to make a movie with just one person, I always wanted to make a movie with just one person.”[6]

Linda Williams has written extensively on this landmark period of documentary and of The Thin Blue Line in particular.  She aligns the film alongside even Oliver Stone’s JFK where actual events are represented as reality through re-enactment and there is a “loss of historical truth amid the post-modern hall of mirrors.”[7]  Referencing French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard who states that the “deployment of the many facets of these mirrors is to reveal the seduction of lies.”[8]  Williams points out that “the contradictions are rich” in this new form of documentary “on the one hand the postmodern deluge of images seems to suggest that there can be no a priori truth of the referent to which the image refers; on the other hand, in this same deluge, it is still the moving image that has the power to move audiences to a new appreciation of a previously unknown truth.”  It seems to me therefore that the greatest change is stylistic.  Modern documentary films have a vast archive of footage to utilise and greater power to create image on the screen, that it does, however, the goal remains to move audiences towards “the truth.”  However, as with, Morris in The Thin Blue Line and Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 archive footage is used in juxtaposition to character testimony or live footage to comic, and usually derogatory effect, the witness testimony and film noir detective scene, and the cowboy scenes and George W. Bush speeches.

The main change, aside from the popularity of ‘New Documentary’ to Williams seems to be “the abandonment of the pursuit of truth to what seems to be the remarkable engagement with a newer, more contingent, postmodern truth – a truth, which far from being abandoned, still operates powerfully as the receding horizon of the documentary tradition;” thus, a further indication that the overall goal of the documentary seems the same, while its style has definitely changed as “stylistically, The Thin Blue Line has been most remarked upon for its film nourish beauty.”  Another stylistic changed noted by Williams is the role of the “documentarians role in constructing and staging these competing narratives becomes paramount” the juxtaposition of fictional and documentary filmmaking and “constructing competing narrative, slowly revealing the truth and creating a dramatic form of suspense.”[9]  This style of filmmaking is particularly utilised in the work of Michael Moore first seen in Roger & Me where Moore injects himself as a character into the story and builds a narrative around his attempts to get an interview with the CEO of General Motors.

Bill Nichols has also highlighted this style as something common in New Documentary.  The shift he notes is from the traditional documentary style of a “voice of God, and a corresponding voice of authority” to “the filmmaker becoming a persona or a character within their own film as well as the maker of the film.”[10]  He further comments on the “no voice of God” analogy when he notes that the filmmakers injects a “voice of perspective” that “makes us make specific decisions about the selected sounds and images being conveyed to us” therefore we become an active participant in the film.  He continues “the voice advances an argument by implication and we have to infer what the film maker’s point of view is in front of us.” And then concludes that “the effect is less ‘See it this way’ than ‘See it for yourself’.”  Nichols also notes that, and it is plain to see, that “The Thin Blue Line is a clear argument for one man’s innocence.”[11]

Taking The Thin Blue Line into consideration for the moment Paul Ward writes upon its use of re-enactment and testimony.  Referring also to The Battle of Orgreave and Touching the Void, Ward states that with the new use of talking heads “testimony anchors the re-enactments” as they can only be produced from the description of eyewitnesses view of what they perceive as the truth, he continues specifically upon The Thin Blue Line that “testimony is juxtaposed with re-enactment, as well as other material – but to contrary effect: here the purpose is to emphasise the problems of seeking one version of the truth; the overlapping and conflicting versions and the re-enactments drawing out of the complexity and contradiction of ‘what happened’.”  He concludes and I agree that “in many respects then The Thin Blue Line is about the pressure of the past on the present moment of recounting.”[12]  Waltz With Bashir made in 2008, twenty years on from The Thin Blue Line, goes to another extreme as the majority of the film (almost all bar the closing moments) is animation, including the talking head testimony.  The film shows the recounting of a massacre that the filmmaker whilst being involved in has since suffered from memory loss and attempts to regain the knowledge of what happened, the result being the animation re-enactments through the witness testimony results in some form of truth.

Another subgenre perhaps of the New Documentary that has flourished since the eighties and seems almost commonplace now is the mock documentary; or mockumentary.   The earliest of which can perhaps be found in the parodies created by Disney in the fifties mocking the ‘How To…’ informative public service films of the thirties and forties, then onto the music mock-rockumentaries of the late seventies and early eighties in The Rutles and This Is Spinal Tap.  More recently with the advent of reality TV and more pervasive scope in the news media we have been gifted with shows such as The Office and The Thick of It, resulting in the film In The Loop, where the documentary format is utilised to create humour and satirise modern culture and politics.  Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight have written that since the eighties there have been “central tensions within the documentary form” and there have been new forms of documentary borne as a result “the most significant the reflexive documentaries and the mock documentary which at the margins of documentary are also a growing body of fictional lists which, to varying degrees, represent a commentary on, or confusion or subversion of, factual discourse.”  The result in these new mockumentaries is a rise in cynicism or lack of belief in the things we are shown on screen.  Something that Alan Rosenthal has seemingly witnessed in his study of the form in the last twenty or so years.

In Alan Rosenthal’s first edition of his book New Challenges for Documentary first printed in 1988, the “landmark year” of new documentary he stated that “the idea that intrinsically there can be no truth in documentary allies itself very quickly with attacks on the concept of objectivity.   There can be no objectivity, it is said, only highly personalised subjective statements made by the film maker.” [13]  Therefore it seemed there was something of the zeitgeist about the fact that The Thin Blue Line coincided with the release of this book observing the viewers new lack of trust in the documentary format.  Perhaps, as it was, drawing close to the end of the Cold War many western cinema goers and viewers of television were more aware of the propaganda element of film making that had been prevalent throughout the twentieth century.  It was seemingly clear that a new more subjective and actively engaging formatting or twist on the genre was needed, and through the films of Errol Morris, Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield to an extent this change was set upon.  Also, in the first edition he set up a succinct breakdown of what he thought the documentary format was.  He stated that Grierson had claimed that “documentary is an actuality representative of truth” and Paul Rotha had surmised that “the need for structure [within a documentary] implicitly contradicts the notion of unstructured actuality” and that “the idea of documentary is sustained by simply ignoring this contradiction” and that “Documentary’s essence lies in the dramatization of actual material” he continued that “for over half a century we had been happy to accept this. But of late a growing sophistication has begun to question the very basis on which the idea of documentary rests.  Factors make it so that one can legitimately begin to query: what is ‘actual’ about Rotha’s ‘actual material’?”[14]

In Rothman’s second edition of 2005 he was able to document the change within documentary.  In the introduction he argues that there have been five main areas and aspects of change.  “Funding, markets and distribution, from public service to free market and general audience”, “technology and applications, from 16mm to digital, the web and recording”, “aims, subjects and addresses”, “ethics of staging, faking, anxiety and disputes” and finally a change in “documentary language through experimentation in audio and the visual.”  Rosenthal states that “Bill Nichol’s much cited typification of documentary as a discourse of sobriety would now need revision as a general statement.”[15]

In conclusion I would be inclined to believe that Rosenthal has succinctly summed up the notable changes in the documentary format.  There have been new subgenres within the genre akin to Bill Nichols’ ‘family tree’ idea and Linda Williams’s theories on the essence of truth within documentary have taken new direction.  My own summary of the divergence in tradition would be that with New Documentary there is a post-modernist search for what we perceive to be the ‘truth’ that allows us to be aware that we are watching a film made by an ever present film maker who is trying to put across his view, however, we are presented will seemingly all the information to make an information decision for ourselves.  Simply we have moved away from the didactic ‘Harry Enfield parodied Cholmondley-Warner’ and ‘How to…’ documentary, and away from the objective Kino Pravda and Cinema Verité movies to the postmodern self-reflexive documentary that makes the viewer an active participant in the documentary experience.

Bibliography

Bordwell, David and Thomson, Kristin, Film Art: An Introduction 8th Edition (New York, McGraw-Hill, 2008)

Nichols, Bill, “Foreward”, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sliowski (eds.), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1997)

Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, p. 1.

Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the present, New York: IB Tauris, 1999 p. 5.

 John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary.” in Grierson on Documentary, Forsyth Hardy (Ed. and Comp.), London: Faber and Faber 1966, pp. 199-211.

Linda Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History and The Thin Blue Line”, in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary, Film and Video, Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sloniowski (Eds.), Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 379-396.

Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simiulations” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Mark Poster (Ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988

Paul Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality, London: Wallflower, 2005.

Alan Rosenthal, New Challenges for Documentary 1st Edition, California: University of California Press, 1988

Alan Rosenthal, New Challenges for Documentary 2nd Edition, California: University of California Press, 2005.

Filmography

Actualit Films (France, dir.The Lumiere brothers, 1895- 1896)

Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic (USA, dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)

Moana (USA, dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1926)

The Man With The Movie Camera (USSR, dir.Dziga Vertov, 1929)

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (UK, dir. Eric Idle and Gary Weis, 1978)

This Is Spinal Tap (USA, dir. Rob Reiner, 1984)

The Thin Blue Line (USA, dir. Errol Morris, 1988)

Roger & Me (USA, dir. Michael Moore, 1989)

JFK (USA, dir. Oliver Stone, 1991)

A Brief History of Time (USA, dir. Errol Morris, 1991)

Bowling For Columbine (USA, dir. Michael Moore, 2002)

The Fog of War (USA, dir. Errol Morris, 2003)

Tarnation (USA, dir. Jonathan Caouette, 2003)

Fahrenheit 9/11 (USA, dir. Michael Moore, 2004)

Sicko (USA, dir. Michael Moore, 2007)

Slacker Uprising (USA, dir. Michael Moore, 2008)

Religulous  (USA, dir. Larry Charles, 2008)

Waltz With Bashir  (Israel, dir. Ari Folman, 2008)

Capitalism: A love Story (USA, dir. Michael Moore, 2009)

The Office (UK, created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, 2001)

The Thick of It (UK, created by Armando Ianucci, 2005)

In The Loop (UK, dir. Armando Ianucci, 2009)

The Virtual Revolution (UK, The BBC, 2010)

Requiem For Detroit (UK, dir. Julien Temple, 2010)

[1] Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, p. 1.

[2] Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the present, New York: IB Tauris, 1999 p. 5.

[3] John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary.” in Grierson on Documentary, Forsyth Hardy (Ed. and Comp.), London: Faber and Faber 1966, pp. 199-211.

[4] Bill Nichols, “Foreward”, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sliowski (eds.), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

[5] Bill Nichols, Inrtroduction to Documentary, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 48.

[6] Maxine Baker, ‘Errol Morris: An American Iconoclast’, in Documentary in the Digital Age, Oxford: Focal Press, 2005, pp. 1-26.

[7] Linda Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History and The Thin Blue Line”, in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary, Film and Video, Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sloniowski (Eds.), Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 379-396.

[8] Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simiulations” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Mark Poster (Ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 166-184.

[9] Linda Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History and The Thin Blue Line”, in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary, Film and Video, Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sloniowski (Eds.), Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 379-396.

[10] Bill Nichols, Inrtroduction to Documentary, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001, p.14.

[11] Ibid, p.48

[12] Paul Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality, London: Wallflower, 2005.

[13] Alan Rosenthal, New Challenges for Documentary 1st Edition, California: University of California Press, 1988, pp.12-13.

[14] Ibid, p.21.

[15] Alan Rosenthal, New Challenges for Documentary 2nd Edition, California: University of California Press, 2005.