Brief overview of manipulations

Typical practices for documentary filmmakers include several ways of manipulating, editing, and inserting footage into a film to enhance the narrative experience and expound upon the filmmaker’s version of truthful events. These include the use of stock footage, soundtracks, and narrative elements. Briefly exploring each of these elements shows that the way in which documentary films are received by the audience has less to do with conscious analysis of truthfulness and more to do with narrative storytelling and emotional impact. The assumption of telling the truth “lies beneath” documentaries, but as Eitzen (1995) writes, “…people may make sense of a documentary in altogether different terms…” (p. 88).

Stock footage is often used in documentaries to lend visual interest to the film. Stock footage refers to footage that has not been captured by the filmmaker but is instead archival film or photography from another source. Documentary filmmakers might use footage of Franklin Roosevelt speaking at one event but use that footage to represent Roosevelt at a different time or place, or to remind us of how Roosevelt appeared. The insertion of this footage might lend more visual interest to a documentary film; it might also lend the film an air of historical truthfulness by using stock footage from an historical era. Stock footage represents a filmmaker’s ability to show a type of a thing to the audience, rather than the thing itself. An interview with a coal miner, for instance, might be used as an audio soundtrack to footage of a typical coal mine or even a photograph of a typical coal miner. These images would not reveal actual representations of the specific things spoken about by the coal miner being interviewed, but would serve as types of things. Carroll (2000) observes that the use of this type of stock footage, “…does not stop us from calling these films documentaries.” (p. 304.)

Similarly, soundtracks can set the mood or tone of a documentary in specific ways. High School, a 1968 documentary on a Philadelphia High School, uses an Otis Redding song in its opening sequence. This use is explored by Eitzen, who concludes that the song was not actually played during the filming of the movie, but was added to evoke a feeling (1995, p. 100). He states the filmmaker’s explanation for the use as “…true to the experience of filming, even if not absolutely true to the facts.” (p. 100.) This use of sound, extremely common among documentary films, can influence how an audience reacts and responds. Cinema verite filmmakers, in fact, relied on new technology in handheld cameras and tape recorders to allow them to use sound recorded on-scene as a less editorial or interpreted way of showing their visions (Donato, 2007).

Although the use of soundtrack to set a mood in a documentary film is so pervasive as to pass unnoticed, the use of music in the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins illustrates the way in which images can be interpreted in different ways by the audience depending on the musical cues used by the filmmaker. The American version of March of the Penguins, with soundtrack by the composer Alex Wurman, is exemplified in this trailer for the movie:
(video: U.S. trailer for March of the Penguins)
This can be contrasted with a ‘trailer remix’ posted on the video-hosting site YouTube, in which the original music has been replaced by a soundtrack with a different tone – in this case, with music composed for the fiction film A Clockwork Orange. Trailer remixes for comic effect, common on YouTube and other video Internet sites, also highlight the way audience perception of a film (including a documentary film) can be changed by the use of different music.
(video: remixed trailer)
Finally, the use of narrative elements in documentary film can mean that audiences interpret the images captured by a documentary filmmaker in a way that is different from simply evaluating the truth of the images or considering the film as a factual argument. Currie writes that documentaries are “…a mixture of documentary and nondocumentary elements,” (p. 286) and this point is further elucidated by Eitzen, who makes the point that the assumption of truthfulness “lies beneath the interpretation of particular documentaries” (p. 88). What this may mean is that the documentary filmmaker is not only attempting to craft “a creative treatment of actuality” but is using techniques of traditional storytelling and the conventions of fictional cinema to do so. Adding narrative elements to edit a documentary into a story can increase the interest level of the audience and allow them to view the documentary as a narrative while not undermining the underlying assumption that the documentary film is a nonfiction account. To turn footage into a story, filmmakers must make decisions about what to include and what to leave out.Godmilow and Shapiro claim that documentary film “…has been perceived as a kind of poor step-sister to the fiction cinema of entertainment,” and that to remedy this perception, filmmakers “…borrow all kinds of structural and strategic devices from fiction in order to achieve… ‘satisfying form,’ that is, to send the audience out of the theater (and/or off to bed) feeling complete, whole, and untroubled.” (Godmilow and Shapiro, 1997, p. 84). The tendency to develop a piece of work into a linear narrative, that is, to make the work more structurally similar to the conventions of fictional film, must be considered as a way that documentary filmmakers manipulate and edit their films.

Crofts defines narrative as a linear pattern of a “chain of events organized in cause-effect series, often based on psychological motivation” (1987, p. 92). Many documentaries are organized by this structure, especially sports documentaries, competitive documentaries (such as Spellbound, the 2002 film about the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee) and personal documentaries (such as the work of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me). These films use editing to put together a compelling narrative and to draw viewers into their stories. Some critics argue that virtually all documentaries employ this tactic. Godmilow and Shapiro write on Lumiere’s Workers Leaving the Factory

“… You can see clearly that Lumiere had his workers collect just inside the factory gates and wait there until he got his camera rolling. It’s also pretty clear that he had instructed the workers not to acknowledge the camera, to just keep walking past it as if it wasn’t there. But when we see that ‘historical’ shot today… we read ‘actuality’.” (1997, p. 92)

What we read as actuality is, in this case, informed by a desire to manipulate reality in order to fulfill the vision of the filmmaker. If Lumiere was capable of making choices about what to shoot in 1895, thus presenting a more exciting or aesthetically pleasing experience to the viewers, then today the choices made by documentary filmmakers are vastly more sophisticated (due to the steady development of film technology) but still serve the same purpose.
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