Documentary Film

Documentary film is a form of reporting about the world. Like a newspaper, a documentary provides information about events, people, places, and virtually any subject of interest to the public. In words and pictures, documentaries show us what has happened, or is still happening, in our world. Whether we watch a documentary about a war or a biography of a famous figure, we presume that we are absorbing a presentation of fact. Of course, documentaries are no such thing: to assemble a film—or a newspaper for that matter—is an act of interpretation. What should the headline be? Which photographs appear on the front page? Whose story will be featured? These are all editorial decisions. Like newspapers, films are edited. Stories get left out or shortened. In a film, scenes are shot from certain angles. Interviews with subjects are reshaped to fit the framework of film. There is an opening sequence of a documentary about Lillian Hellman in which the phrases from several interviews are merged into shots of several speakers who seem to be contributing to one succinct statement about the film’s subject. The film has thus created a dialogue between the speakers that in fact never occurred. Is such a film dishonest? No, because documentaries are inevitably interpretations; the documentarian, like a newspaper editor, is picking and choosing the items that suit the film’s style and point of view. Hellman, a controversial figure, demands the solicitation of many perspectives, and yet, the filmmaker implies, those perspectives can be melded into a unified statement. The very earliest films lacked this kind of coherent vision. They simply put a stationary camera in front of what was to be recorded. In part, the stationary camera simply reflected the state of technology. As cameras became lighter in weight or were mounted on rails or wheels, so that they could move with the action, filmmakers became more selective—or rather, camera movement by definition meant that interpretation, as well as reportage, became possible. As soon as the camera could move, filmmakers had their choice of close-ups and medium and long shots. Better lenses meant the human face could be brought closer to the audience’s eye than faces that appeared outside of film. Film stimulated an involvement with the human figure that was unprecedented. A face—just the face—could occupy an entire screen; a close-up could fasten on a hand making an expressive gesture. And what could be shown of figures could also be shown of objects—of anything that was susceptible to the camera’s scrutiny. The expanded technological resources of film had an aesthetic and moral result: film became, in a sense, its own reality. Rather than just reporting on the world; it created a world. Film was still a document but of a very peculiar kind. Montage, the juxtapositions of different images on pieces or frames of film, can in itself create meaning. Thus a man with tears in his eyes might appear either sad or happy depending on the images that preceded and succeeded the shot of him crying. One can, after all, cry with joy or sorrow. Reverse the succeeding and preceding images and the interpretation of the man’s emotions changes. Cameras and the editing of what cameras record can also speed up or slow down the action of a scene. For example, in Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s camera lovingly tracks in slow motion the athlete’s ascent over the bar in the pole-vaulting event. We have an intimate and prolonged attachment to the athlete unavailable to the spectators in the Olympic stadium. This kind of shot excites the viewer, who is enjoying a privileged point of view. Riefenstahl’s style is seductive. She wants her audience to revel in the beauty and suppleness of the human form. Although she is recording an event, she is also creating a kind of poem. This development of film as a way of not only knowing the world but of creating and enjoying it is reminiscent of William Wordsworth’s famous statement that we half-perceive and half-create our universe. We do not merely see the world; we project our sense of how it impinges on us. Projection, of course, is the perfect word for film. It projects a world and in the process changes it. This is what filmmaker Robert Flaherty discovered when he decided to film the Inuit people in Canada’s Hudson Bay region. He began by simply doing a travelogue, recording the manners and customs of a culture that he hoped would not only appeal to the curiosity of filmgoers but also cause them to reflect on the temper of modern life. The Inuits lived in the raw, so to speak, without labor saving devices and the array of inventions that included, of course, the movie camera. But Flaherty found he could not simply record Inuit life. For one thing, their way of life had changed by the time Flaherty showed up. They had abandoned many traditional customs and no longer hunted, for example, with bow and arrow. Inuits had guns. What to do? Flaherty actually helped the Inuits to recover their old ways of doing things. So we see Nanook in Nanook of the North hunting without the aid of firearms. Flaherty also includes a scene in which Nanook teaches his child how to use a bow and arrow. The scene is charming but in a sense false. The child will not grow up to hunt in this way. The traditional life the film purports to record was in fact fast disappearing. Is Flaherty, then, a fraud? Well, the people he films are real. The actions they perform were once a part of Inuit life. How else to show what that life had been without re-enacting scenes that evoked a past way of life? It could be argued that Flaherty was engaging in an act of restoration or restitution, showing not only his audience but also the Inuits themselves a way of life that would otherwise be left unrecorded. Documentary film, after all, stems from an urge to commemorate, to honor the lives of others. But the filmgoer should never forget that film is a medium, a means of conveyance, and even of transformation, not the thing itself. This is Dziga Vertov’s point in Man with the Movie Camera. We see scenes of the Soviet Union in 1929, but the film repeatedly reminds us that they are all “shot,” captured in the camera eye, edited in a studio, and scored with a sound track that seems to build and build in tempo and yet never quite comes to a resolution. The film itself is unresolved—as if the filmmaker is resisting the very seductiveness of the medium, making us realize, again and again, that we are watching a movie. Woody Allen aims at a similar self-conscious examination of the documentary in Zelig. Critic Susan Sontag, together with Nobel prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, critic Irving Howe, and Professor John Morton Blum, were chosen, Allen said, to endow his film with the "patina of intellectual weight and seriousness." This group of notables provide commentary on the bizarre career of Leonard Zelig, who could change color, body shape, even ethnic and national identity, blending into whatever company he sought. In mock-documentary mode, with voice-over narration, expert testimony, and faked photographs, Allen superbly constructed an amalgam of Citizen Kane and Reds--with Zelig also acting a kind of Jay Gatsby figure.