FIGURE 19-1
The Celebration: a Dogme fiction film using informal and immediate shooting techniques. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Nimbus Film Productions.)
The word style often gets interchanged confusingly with form. Both express concern with the way you present a film’s content, but form is the configuration and logic of the narrative, while style describes the ways in which the work allies itself with artistic precedent. This involves the telltale references and conventions by which audiences recognize a type of film and its purposes. Form is the structuring by which the film’s content becomes a story.
Form and style seem symbiotic in the finished work, but during the film’s inception you should try to see them as separate concerns. If, for instance, you have a body of filmed material about homelessness, you could conceivably edit it either as a societal problem to be solved by local government, or perhaps from a seven-year-old’s viewpoint as a nightmarish loss of everything familiar. The overall content might be similar, but their forms—one a settled and logical discourse, the other a subjective journey of loss—are quite different.
The genre (category or type of documentary) of the two films would be different too: one would belong with social study essay films, and the other with subjective biography. Their differences would emerge from different styles achieved through selective editing, different rhythms and points of view, and perhaps a different use of effects and music.
Documentaries do not fall into categories as readily as fiction films, and the components you have to work with largely determine your range of possibility. Flaherty invented the genre of documentary because he recognized that nonfiction would fail to engage audiences unless it drew upon storytelling techniques from fiction like having central characters, narrative compression, and dramatic tension. He saw too that, like any mature narrative, documentary needed an overarching theme. All this was and is disturbing to the ethnographer, or to any purist suspicious of authorial manipulation. But films made for a wide audience cannot escape the expectations we carry from our viewing history, expectations aroused by a film’s style and the contract it sets with its audience. Sometimes called the hook, this is the promise the Storyteller implies in a film’s opening moments to take us on a particular type of journey. We enter the film with the pleasant expectation that the story will deliver on its promise.
Only you the director can decide how to do this, but the nature of your subject is a powerfully deciding force. Since a documentary is usually an improvised collaboration with its subjects, every project has useful inbuilt limitations. Pervasive are those that ration time, personnel, equipment, travel, shooting days, and resources. These restrictions help you define what you’re doing, and often what you are not doing. Digital shooting and editing bring truncated production schedules so the new realities make filming a practical and challenging business. Ultimately whether you can work fruitfully within professional boundaries decides whether you survive—professionally, financially, and artistically.
The limitations you choose to work within are fruitful because they give you something meaningful to push against, and force you to find creative solutions. Let’s briefly examine how setting their own aesthetic rules galvanized a couple of visual movements.
In the early 1930s some American photographers calling themselves Group f/64 banded together. They were frustrated that photographers were emulating the “high-art” form of painting and did not yet consider photography an art form. Group f/64 decided that photography could only realize its potential by concentrating on what was unique to photography. From this elemental clarification came the ground-breaking work of Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyke.
In Denmark of the mid-1990s the founding members of the Dogme 95 cinema group came to similar conclusions and went on to produce landmark fiction. Their starting point was a playful manifesto explicitly rejecting the industrial embrace of Hollywood. Like documentaries, The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 1998, Figure 19-1), Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, Denmark, 1999, Figure 19-2), and The Idiots (Lars von Trier, Denmark, 1999) were all fiction films shot handheld using digital handicams. Their object was to make use of the fluidity and other-centeredness of observational documentary. Dogme’s playfully critical manifesto appears in various versions and translations, so I have taken the liberty of putting it in vernacular English:
FIGURE 19-1
The Celebration: a Dogme fiction film using informal and immediate shooting techniques. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Nimbus Film Productions.)
A Vow of Chastity
● Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in, but shooting must go where that set or prop can be found.
● Sound must never be produced separately from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is shot.
● The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable by handholding is permitted. The action cannot be organized for the camera; instead the camera must go to the action.
● The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable and if there is too little light for exposure, the scene must be cut, or a single lamp may be attached to the camera.
● Camera filters and other optical work are forbidden.
● The film must not contain any superficial action such as murders, weapons, explosions and so on.
● No displacement is permitted in time or space: the film takes place here and now.
● Genre movies are not acceptable.
● Film format is Academy 35 mm.
● The director must not be credited.
Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste. I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a ‘work’, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.
Signed_________ (member’s name)
By rejecting a leadership hierarchy and even personal taste, the manifesto strikes at the narcissism of ego. About writing their manifesto, Thomas Vinterberg said,
We did the “Vow of Chastity” in half an hour and we had great fun. Yet, at the same time, we felt that in order to avoid the mediocrity of filmmaking not only in the whole community, but in our own filmmaking as well, we had to do something different. We wanted to undress film, turn it back to where it came from and remove the layers of make-up between the audience and the actors. We felt it was a good idea to concentrate on the moment, on the actors and of course, on the story that they were acting, which are the only aspects left when everything else is stripped away. Also, artistically it has created a very good place for us to be as artists or filmmakers because having obstacles like these means you have something to play against.
(Interview by Elif Cercel for Director’s World. See http://stage.directorsworld.com)
The Dogme group liberated their creative energies by rejecting what they found destructive in current cinema practices, much as the Russian cinema had rejected Hollywood after the Revolution, and as the Free Cinema Movement rejected the safe mediocrity of British cinema in the 1950s. Each group set out to generate bold guiding values, and these helped catapult their work into public notice. Dogme, de-emphasizing leadership and dethroning film techniques, helped hand their actors a rich slice of creative control, to which they responded handsomely.
In documentary, certain limitations come with the subject, but others you must choose in order to challenge your inventiveness. So, what creative limitations will you set yourself?
Most who work in the arts—musicians, writers, painters, novelists, say—can control the content and form of their work. The documentarian, however, is more like a mosaic artist who gets perverse pleasure from working with the idiosyncratic, chance-influenced nature of found materials. In the end, each documentary depends on acts, words, and images plucked from life—all of them elements that occur spontaneously in various kinds of actuality, and which were perhaps chosen because what they materialized, thanks to the gods of chance, were not under the author’s control.
Fiction films create characters and situations in the service of ideas, while documentary tries to discover ideas and meanings hiding out within real people and their lived reality. In documentary you are trying to discover the world as it is, rather than create a facsimile in order to say something about a theme or belief.
You can choose some aspects of style, but not all.
Unless your film is of the highly malleable essay type, its source materials already point the way and narrow your options. Your ethics, interests, and convictions about the work your documentary should do also disqualify some aspects of style. If this seems a little foggy for an art that is so collaborative, you can still recognize the authorship in a Michael Moore or a Werner Herzog documentary, even if you don’t particularly care for their films. Contributing to this are,
● Choices of subject.
● Camera handling.
● Forms that each director favors.
● Marks of personality and taste.
● Influences from cinema they admire.
● Methods and messages from their thematic range.
FIGURE 19-3
A Brief History of Time approaches the life and ideas of the paralyzed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking with a dizzyingly stylized treatment. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Triton Films.)
A film’s genre, voice, meanings, and style interact and overlap during production, and are difficult to separate afterwards. If you overreach during production you can upset the balance so that stylizing actuality (that is, intensifying its essential nature) turns into stylized actuality. The ultra-fragmented, MTV camera-waving style of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez in their fake documentary The Blair Witch Project (USA, 1999), and the over-composed look of Errol Morris’ biography of Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (USA, 1991, Figure 19-3), both suffer in my view from an over-emphasis on a stylistic “statement.” The film on Hawking, while arguing his complex theories brilliantly, uses specially constructed sets rather than authentic surroundings.
So what to do? Working simply, sincerely, and intelligently is most likely to connect an audience emotionally with your work. Simplicity is wise anyway, since you have a long developmental curve ahead as you acquire the necessary technical and conceptual skills to serve what you will eventually have to say. Since you can’t choose your identity, some of your film’s style will take care of itself. Audiences and critics may even tell you what your style is. Beware! You’ll then be tempted to imitate and enhance your reputation.
A film’s subject suggests appropriate styles. Films about a children’s author, a tree disease, or early submarines all take place in very different worlds, belong in different documentary genres, and call for different approaches. A film about a Talmudic scholar should look very different from one about a skateboarder simply because each lives in an utterly different physical and mental realm. One might call for low key lighting (large areas of shadow), rock-steady indoor compositions, and a Vermeer palette of dark colors. The other is more likely to be high key lighting (mainly bright), and shot outdoors with an adventurous handheld camera.
All the conventions of the cinema are at your service as you intensify actuality to make it a story with style, point of view, and meanings. Every film, however, treads a fine line between the lax, prosaic realism of unmediated life on the one hand, and on the other, too much order and imposed meaning as seen in MTV nonfiction. You navigate between extremes: stamp your work too heavily and you crush the personalities, events, and subtexts subtly present in the dailies. Withdraw all interpretive effort from the tale, and the point of telling it evaporates.
Apart from rejecting what is false or superfluous, it is wise to question all your assumptions at the outset, in order to flush out options that you may not otherwise recognize. Use the Form and Style worksheet below (Table 19-1) as a set of prompts, and don’t hesitate to rewrite it if you can make it better to serve your growing experience.
TABLE 19-1 Form and Style Worksheet (Project DP-11 on the book’s website, www.directingthedocumentary.com)
These prompts are by no means exhaustive, and not all will be relevant. For grammatical simplicity I have assumed you have a single main character.
Limitations I will impose on myself while making this film are …
The main character is trying to get, do, or accomplish …
The main conflict my film handles (between … and … ) suggests that contrasting or complementing visual and aural elements might be …
The environments in this film
Are composed of … and suggest …
The main character belongs in … but contrasts with … because of …
I will therefore try to show each environment as …
Different rhythms my film will contain are determined by …
The film’s theme calls for,
Warm, close, intimate photography for …
Cool and distanced views for …
Static frames with action choreographed within them for …
Contained, measured movement for …
Fast, unstable, or subjective movement during …
Other____________
Changes and developments I expect in my film are in,
Landscape or place characterization
Pace or rhythm
Season or country
Other____________
Palette characteristics …
Predominant colors and tonality for each sequence …
Their progression through the film should suggest …
Editing in my film should aim to be,
Slow, deliberate, unhurrying
Alternating between … and …
Fast, glancing, and impressionistic
Other____________
Stylized time treatment via slow or fast motion, freeze frames and other optical treatments would achieve … in my film
Narration in my film might come from … (character or type of narrator)
Sound design in my film should include … and emphasize …
To analyze a particular film, use Table 19-1 Form and Style Worksheet and perhaps DP-8 Dramatic Form too, to help you write about the relationship between dramatic form and style. Where does the film’s authorial voice arise? What gives it substance and meaning?
