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, ‘doc- umentary’ 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 accom- modate interior shots. The traditional igloo had obviously an opti-
mum 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 beha- viour 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 equip- ment 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-Ve´rite´ 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 – intelli- gence and sensitivity.
Some French film makers deliberately put themselves in their doc- umentaries 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 image
converts 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 subcon- scious 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 inter- vene or assist those in distress. It exposes the implications of adopting the role of professional ‘looker-on’, indifferent or detached from sub- ject 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 camera- man 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 dele- gates 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 non- involvement with people ‘out there’ in front of the camera – a suspen- sion 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 objec- tively 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 suf-
fering, 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. Machine- like, 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 objec- tivity 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 profes- sional 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 execu- tions were very popular (and still are in some countries) until abol- ished. 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 ‘ghoul- ish 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.