Aitken, S.C. (1994). I’d rather watch the movie than read the book. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 18 (3), 291-307. Retrieved December 5, 2007 from Academic Search Complete database.
Barnouw, E. (1993). Documentary: A history of the non-fiction film. New York: Oxford University Press. Carroll, N. (2000). Photographic traces and documentary films: Comments for Gregory Currie. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58 (3), 303-306.
Crofts, S. (1987). Not a window on the past: How film and television construct history. Film & History, 17 (4), 90-95.
Currie, G. (1999). Visible traces: Documentary and the contents of photographs. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (3), 285-297.
Donato, R. (2007). Docufictions: An interview with Martin Scorsese on documentary film. Film History, 19 (2), 199-208.
Eitzen, D. When is a documentary?: Documentary as a mode of reception. Cinema Journal, 35 (1), 81-102. Retrieved October 13, 2007 from JSTOR database. Stable URL http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-7101%28199523%2935%3A1%3C81%3AWIADDA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O
Freedman, S. G. (2006). The predictable scandal. Columbia Journalism Review, 44 (6), 50.
Godmilow, J., & Shapiro, A-L. (1997). Producing the past: Making histories inside and outside the academy. History and Theory, 36 (4), 80-101. Retrieved December 4, 2007 from JSTOR database. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-2656%28199712%2936%3A4%3C80%3AHRITRI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P
Hall, J. (1991). Realism as a style in cinema verite: A critical analysis of ‘Primary.’ Cinema Journal, 30 (4), 24-50.
Juhasz, A., & Lerner, J. (2006). F is for phony: Fake documentary and truth’s undoing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
The debate about defining what a documentary film is and is not has never been satisfactorily resolved. By looking at different categories of films perceived as nonfiction, and by studying the development of the documentary form in the United States, it can be seen that a documentary film depends on how the audience perceives its truthfulness and credibility. Propaganda documentaries, educational documentaries, cinema verite, and the more recent works of filmmakers like Michael Moore are all perceived as falling into the category of nonfiction (although perhaps not without controversy.) While arguments can be made about the distortions and editing engaged in by documentary filmmakers, such concerns do not appear to trouble the average viewer’s definition of what films fall into the category of truth rather than fiction.
The difference between film and other mediums can be seen as a difference in the audience’s perception of the information that is imparted. Film is a more immediate, immersive experience than a book, a play, a speech, or a website. The trust that an audience gives to a documentary filmmaker needs to be examined in order for it to be seen how a documentary works as a nonfiction account. Plantinga’s definition of a documentary as nonfiction with “…aesthetic, social, rhetorical, and/or political ambition” serves to underline the importance of studying how documentary filmmakers achieve those aims. (p. 105) When Martin Scorsese refers to “documentary power,” meaning the unexpected, immediate quality of events and images capable of being captured on film, he is trying to highlight one of the ways in which documentaries can separate themselves from fictional film accounts. (Donato) However, the way in which a documentary film engages an audience – that is, the way that it works to achieve its aesthetic, social or political ambitions – depends on manipulation and editing to make the images captured compelling in a way that, for instance, unedited security camera footage could never be.
Imparting information to others is inevitably dependent on the form chosen. The form can influence the content of the information imparted and cause the audience for that content to interpret the information in certain ways. The mechanical reproduction of reality offered by the technology of film and photography has allowed documentary filmmakers to attempt to create a form that would reflect the world, events, and reality in an unmediated, more truthful way than has existed before. Studying the way in which documentaries work, however, shows that they are unable to simply reflect the truth and instead depend on their creators’ interpretations of reality and edited, crafted versions of what filmmakers believe are truthful accounts.
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. Previous: Audience Reception Next: Finally...
Audience reception of documentaries seems to be central to the claim that documentaries tell the truth. Audiences make distinctions between fiction and nonfiction films in the same way that readers make distinctions between fiction and nonfiction works. The assertions and intentions of the author or filmmaker certainly play a role in how the audience judges or perceives a film. When, for example, the book by James Frey entitled A Million Little Pieces was originally released as a memoir – meaning that it claimed to be a nonfiction account of true events – then later was investigated and revealed to be largely fabricated, the audience for the book might have felt they had been misled. In fact, the revelation that the book was not truthful led to enough reader complaints that it was dropped from Oprah Winfrey’s book club (Freedman, 2006,p. 51). Speaking on the claims that writers of autobiographies make towards telling a truthful account, critic Maureen Corrigan refers to the implicit contract between the author and the audience, saying that “…it’s the autobiographer’s pledge to try to tell the truth that makes a reader respond differently… and when this quaint contract turns out to be a con, we feel like rubes.” (Freedman p. 51). Corrigan’s statement speaks to the trust relationship present in the reception of nonfiction accounts by an audience.
This relationship is also present in the way that documentary films are received by audiences. As Crofts (1987) writes, "The immediacy and apparent truth of the image confers an historical veracity on the material presented." (p. 91) The nature of film means that documentaries appear to capture true events in a more direct, less mediated way then traditional arts. Aitken (1994) refers to this when he writes that “Other media … may also encourage us to suspend our disbelief, but film is peculiar because of the semblance of reality attributable to the image-event and the obscurity of its very production.” The nature of film and its appearance of being an immediate information-bearing object that hasn’t been translated or otherwise mediated means that audiences for films engage in a trust relationship with the filmmaker.
However, it is evident that documentary films can engage in distortion, lies, and mistakes. Journalists and memoirists who engage in fakery or practices that falsify their writings are castigated when the nature of their work is revealed. If documentary films were held to the same standard, would viewers be upset when typical practices were revealed? The claims of cinema verite filmmakers show that those filmmakers were upset with what they perceived as the artificial ways in which narrative was implied, soundtracks were inserted over footage, and scenes were recreated for greater effect in documentaries in the United States. Flaherty’s practice in Nanook of the North included recreating scenes to capture a better shot, thus showing what he wanted to be featured as the truth in his story to its best effect. This practice is seen as anathema to some documentary filmmakers, but still falls within the realm of the “creative treatment of actuality.” Cowie (2006) addresses this point in the statement that:
Verisimilitude is … central to the documentary film… The world presented must
be believable, it must be like what we expect the world to be, in order for the film
to sustain our belief in its claim to reality. (in Juhasz and Lerner, 2006, p. 229).
Cowie’s argument that documentaries are required to be believable and credible in order for the film to be accepted as truthful does not eliminate the possibilities for creative treatment and manipulation, but cautions that filmmakers must craft films that appear to fit into the audience’s experiences.
Film, like photography, differs from painting, writing, and other traditional arts. While painters can capture purely fictive, imaginary places or people in their chosen medium, and writers can write a purely inventive story or history, a photographer or filmmaker is limited in their ability to depict the imaginary. As Carroll (2000) writes, commonly film images are made by “…the use of photography to imprint the image of whatever stands before the camera.” (p. 303). This mechanical element eliminates the ability to document something that is purely imaginary. Thus, Carroll continues, photography has the potential to “…produce a document…whose causal provenance gives it a certain evidentiary authority.” Although filmmakers certainly make fictional films, the films they produce are still evidence of actual events that occurred – for example, the film Psycho captures images and events that actually existed, albeit images set up and shot deliberately, using actors, props, and a fictional story. Similarly, Currie (1999) makes the case that documentary films and photography are unable to be “intrinsically misleading” the way that a written history can be misleading (p. 288). The mechanical nature of filmmaking means that it captures reality in a way that is not required of a book, painting, or website.
The increasingly digital nature of film and photography has allowed for more manipulation of images in post-production and, in some cases, for the distortion of truth. However, photographs have been altered and manipulated for well over one hundred years – for example, a well-known photo of Lincoln was in reality a photo of Lincoln’s head affixed to the body of John Calhoun. More recently, a photo of John Kerry was doctored to suggest that he appeared onstage with Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally in 1971. Separate images were merged into a composite which appears to show both sharing the stage (Mikkelson, 2004):
In light of these historical distortions, and considering that, as Richard Morrison wrote in a 2004 article for the London Times, “…to mock up a photo of, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury groping Beyonce Knowles in a Bangkok brothel requires little more than a few twitches of a computer mouse, and of course a vivid imagination,” (Morrison, 2004, p. 12), it appears that while traditional documentary filmmaking can be considered to have the inability to be intrinsically misleading, this definition will need to be recast as more films are shot using digital technologies and include images that can easily be faked.
How do such manipulations fit into the ideals and standards of American documentary filmmakers? As early as the late 1920s, Grierson referred to documentaries as “the creative treatment of actuality.” (Currie, p. 285). This inevitably gives rise to the question of how much creativity can inform an account that is attempting, in some way, to document reality. Plantinga argues that a nonfiction, documentary film is one in which a “…filmmaker takes an assertive stance toward the world projected through the work,” and “…asserts that the state of affairs making up that projected world holds or occurs in the natural world.” (p. 107). Documentaries are not fiction but instead present ‘actuality’ in some form. Grierson’s definition implies that a documentary film can incorporate creative elements and thus better articulate a social position or stance that the filmmaker believes to be true or reflective of the truth. While proponents of cinema verite in the 1960s argued that such creative mediation was unnecessary and only served to distort, most documentaries engage in many practices that incorporate creativity, including the use of narration, editing, and the inclusion of stock footage to enhance the viewing experience. Writing in 1975, critic Thomas Waugh criticized cinema verite advocates as “naïve” in their declaration that cinema verite had what he referred to as a “new, privileged grasp of reality” (Waugh, quoted in Hall, p. 25). Polemics written by cinema verite filmmakers now appear dated in their arguments that their films finally captured reality in an objective way (Hall, p. 25.)
Perhaps a more salient definition of documentary comes from Plantinga when he writes that documentaries can be viewed as nonfiction films which have “…aesthetic, social, rhetorical, and/or political ambition” (p. 105). While this would seem to allow any number of creative distortions, including the sorts of manipulations such as the doctored photo of Kerry and Fonda, audience expectations of documentary films seem to mean that blatant misrepresentation and alteration of reality is less likely than subtle techniques that imitate the effective techniques of fiction films and allow for the story or stance of the filmmaker to be presented.
The documentary film began concurrently with the invention of the motion picture camera. Both Thomas Edison and Louis Lumiere were interested in capturing images of real life with their respective inventions. Lumiere, the French inventor of what came to be known as the cinematographe, had an advantage in capturing scenes because of the greater portability of his camera (Barnouw, 1993, p. 6). This can be seen in his 1895 short work Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. The short, silent film depicting an everyday scene suggests a precursor to the feature-length documentaries that would follow as cinema developed. In a 2006 interview, Martin Scorsese refers to the short Lumiere films as “impressionist” and highlights the precise way they were framed (Donato, 2007). Modern-day Lumiere films are still produced according to rules restricting filmmakers to the same limitations as Lumiere faces: no sound, a single shot, without editing or special effects.
(Videos: #1 Workers Leaving the Factory. #2: Modern-day Lumiere short.)
As the technology of motion pictures developed, in 1922 Robert Flaherty finished Nanook of the North, a feature that, while still silent, employed subtitles to guide viewers’ interpretation of the images captured. Telling the story of a remote group of Eskimos, Flaherty employed sophisticated techniques to capture the humanity of the people featured in the film. One of the central scenes in the film is the building of an igloo (Barnouw, p. 38.) To convey what Barnow refers to as “authenticity of result,” Flaherty was forced to cut away half of the igloo because the interior was too small and dark to photograph well. (p. 38) Staging scenes and having the Eskimos he worked with repeat their actions for the camera were additional techniques used to complete his film. The combined subtitled narration and reenactments by the featured persons in the film were techniques that would often be repeated by other documentary filmmakers.
(Video:Nanook of the North, 8-minute segment.)
The term documentary was first used by John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker. In 1929, Grierson completed the film Drifters, a 50-minute silent documentary on British fishermen. In contrast to Flaherty, Grierson advocated for a style of documentary film that would articulate a social position. (Barnouw, p. 99). Similarly, explicitly political documentary films by Leni Riefenstahl and others were used as propaganda by governments. 1935’s Triumph of the Will exemplifies the powerful propaganda documentary. Without narrative, the film depends on the coordination of images and sounds to impact the viewer. In the United States, Frank Capra would direct a series of documentaries entitled Why We Fight during World War II. These films would use images from Riefenstahl’s documentaries, but with a different intent. Narration would provide a structure and context for Capra’s images, which would function as a film directed toward a specific purpose – informing the viewer of the reasons for the United States’ participation in World War II and encouraging support for that participation.
(Videos: #1: Triumph of the Will. #2 Why We Fight.)
Cinema verite developed as a response to propaganda documentaries and other perspective-laden films. Hall writes that “Cinema verite filmmakers claimed to have created a cinema in which no side was taken and no cause defended” (Hall, 1991, p. 27.) Innovations in camera design and editing equipment allowed greater freedom of movement for filmmakers (Donato.) Robert Drew and Drew Associates made Primary, a feature about the 1960 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin between John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. Almost completely eliminating voiceover narration in favor of sound filmed on location, the film’s most famous scene involves a long tracking shot of Kennedy’s arrival at a campaign event, following him through the venue and onto the stage (Hall, p. 29.) These shots were coupled with the filmmakers’ desire to make a movie in which their presence is unnoticed and as Drew said, they become “part of the woodwork.” (Quoted in Hall, p. 28.)
(Video: Robert Drew discusses a shot in Primary)
Finally, Michael Moore’s 1989 film Roger and Me can be seen as a style of documentary in which the filmmaker plays an active role in the events captured by the film. Roger and Me, as well as Moore’s extremely successful later films, has the filmmaker himself featured on camera, interviewing people and attempting to interview others. This role of the filmmaker becomes, as Plantinga (2005) states, “..a kind of provocateur” (p. 109). As an agent in the world, Moore inspires events which he then documents. Heavy use of narration, archival footage, and the promotion of a political point of view also characterize Moore’s documentaries.
(Video: Trailer for Roger & Me.)
This is by no means a complete list of important U.S. documentary films or filmmakers. One could argue that any number of American documentaries have more significance, artistry, or popularity. Rather, by briefly presenting several significant developments in documentary filmmaking, we are now able to examine what these divergent styles have in common that they can be labeled as documentaries. Further, by considering what qualities these different films have that allows viewers to consider them as nonfiction, and filmmakers to present them as such, we can consider these styles of documentary film-making in relation to other ways of imparting information.
Information is often deliberately imparted in the form of written or spoken communication. It can be encoded in HTML and accessed via the Internet, can be spoken by someone and not stored in any physical way, or it can be written in a book and read by others. In each case, there is a recognizable difference between the information and the object which presents it; for instance, the text, font, and layout of a book function as a vehicle to get the information from the page to your head. In other words, we implicitly understand that the content of something exists within a specific form. Additionally, we recognize that these forms are to some extent something chosen and edited by their creators. A book tells someone's version of events, and a webpage includes only the information that is chosen by its creator. A speaker chooses to use particular words and tells a particular version of events. When approaching books, lectures, websites, and other information-bearing objects, it is necessary to expect that the information imparted by these sources to be chosen and edited, and not a completely objective or unbiased view of reality.
But what happens when, in a particular form, an information-bearing object is seen as an objective record of events? Film, and before that, photography, offered a new way to record information. By seeming to allow the possibility to objectively document events as they happened, film allowed filmmakers to claim that their information is objective and unmediated reality - a recording of events and facts as they actually happened. Even if filmmakers don't explicitly claim that their nonfiction films reflect what actually happened in the world, this can often be assumed by the audience.
What exactly a documentary film is has been debated by filmmakers, critics, and film scholars. The variety of types of films included under the umbrella label of 'documentary' show a large range of differences in the type and amounts of mediation they engage in, while the grouping of these films as nonfiction suggests that viewers find something in common among all of them that is reflective of reality rather than being a fictional treatment. However, the presentation and editing choices of a documentary film inevitably affect how and what we think of its contents. Choices about narration, sound, what shots to include, and other film-making decisions have to be made, and how these choices are made can affect our perceptions of the information contained within the immersive, visual communication of film. The way in which different types of documentary films come together under the heading of documentary shows that a wide range of techniques and artistry are engaged in by the creators of motion picture works purporting to be nonfiction. As with books, websites, and all other information-bearing objects, the creator or author of the object has a point of view and makes editorial decisions about inclusion and exclusion.
Tracing the history of documentary films in America, common threads emerge that allow us to see the ways in which documentaries work. While great variation exists in both the intent of a filmmaker and the reception of a film by an audience, it can be seen that most documentaries contain both fiction and nonfiction elements. Finally, the recent box-office success of documentaries in the United States can also allow us to see documentary film conventions as a mixture of elements combining to form a perspective on reality or truth.
