Documentaries usually assert their truthfulness in one of two ways. In “fly on the wall” observational filmmaking, we see truth in cinema that is supposedly free of the observer’s intrusion. The film tries to be honest to the spirit of its makers’ best perceptions and to earn the audience’s trust. However, it takes considerable artifice to maintain the illusion that truth is unfolding free of the recording process.
In participatory filmmaking the film team’s work and thoughts can become part of the film’s discourse, and in reflexive filmmaking the process reaches farther since the film can examine the act of perception as well as what is perceived.
To sum up, this spectrum of philosophies allows the camera to document aspects of the real world in the following ways:
● As though there is no mediating presence by crew and camera (transparent cinema).
● As events recorded by a camera and crew who visibly catalyze some of the events (participatory filmmaking).
● As events captured using a cinema process whose methods, personalities, and contradictions become part of the film’s purview (reflexive cinema).
● As events captured and serving as a mirror that reflects the author’s interface with the world in his or her cinema process (self-reflexive cinema).
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,1 Robert M. Pirsig writes about the metaphysics of quality, and about the importance of temperamental differences to attitudes about art and living. The book explores the implications of a 17-day journey by two motorcycles across America, driven by the narrator and a friend, and each carrying a pillion passenger. The narrator loves his motorcycle and teaches his son how to maintain it in good order, but his jazz drummer friend owns his motorcycle for the sheer exhilaration of motorcycling with his wife.
Pirsig calls himself a classicist and his friend a romantic, because the other man cares nothing for his machine’s intrinsic qualities and strikes it petulantly when his neglect causes it to break down. The classical approach to art aspires to objectivity and values order, harmony, rationality, and form. The classicist strives for what is essence, eternal and ideal, while the romantic is often concerned with the darker passions. Dissatisfied with the existing social order, the romantic focuses more subjectively on their own transient sensations, emotions, and feelings.
You can honorably occupy any part of this spectrum, so long as you recognize your make-up, purposes, and priorities from the outset. What is your temperament like? Do you know what you believe? How will your beliefs guide and inform the way you see the world through filming it? What parts of film history, what particular works, have drawn you to them?
The lens of temperament through which you see is something you determine while you explore your subject. Finding the right approach may be a question of emphasis and of how, temperamentally, you need to function as a storyteller. As you use your “history box,” you will need to justify the process of recording and interpreting to your participants, who must trust the picture you are building of them. Will the complexities of this relationship affect important truths, and will you have to acknowledge this implicitly or explicitly? The recording process may be too intrusive to document some intimate occasions, or will seem so to the audience. Can you draw a line, and if so, where?
These all seem like theoretical questions until you encounter them in life and see the consequences that may follow. Luckily, it is the real world that helps us decide—not only what to do, but in what to become as we do it.
Making a documentary is modeling a vision of the world as it is, so we bear a moral responsibility for all we put on the screen. The consequences can be material and even dangerous, since screenworks of all kinds, even video games, alter the threshold of what’s acceptable—for good or bad. Imagine that action movie heroes, instead of finding catharsis using assault weapons, instead began driving all-terrain vehicles over everyone who ignored them. There would soon be a rash of copy-cat massacres everywhere. Filmmaking is entertainment, and it leads by example. Filmmakers bear responsibility for the ethical and moral implications of their work.
Your main ethical concern will always be with the integrity of the arguments you use. A documentary is usually more powerful when its ideas and themes arise from a visibly unfolding train of events, rather than when you selectively illustrate a narrated thesis—which in principle is not unlike a TV commercial. The same can be said of fiction films; it is the difference between “signifying” a situation versus showing it in the act of being. Once again, drama and the documentary share fundamentals.
Quantitative evidence, where justified, is easier to accept than qualitative. If known actions hinge on the credibility of a particular person, as so often happens in CBS’ 48 Hours true crime investigations, then you will need to build that person’s character carefully from all the evidence you collect. From your research you may know all sorts of things about your contact, but your audience only knows what you put on the screen. In that sense, you are building a character no less deliberately than a playwright or screenwriter will do.
You may have to take special care to demonstrate that a point in your film is not contrived. In a documentary I made long ago about an English country estate, A Remnant of a Feudal Society (BBC “Yesterday’s Witness” series, GB, 1970, Figure 21-1), a head groom spontaneously held out his deformed hand to demonstrate what happened (as he thought) to horsemen forced to ride in all winds and weather. In the wide shot it was unclear what was wrong with the hand, so the cameraman made a slightly wobbly zoom in close. In editing I kept the zoom because removing it to make a cut between long shot and close shot, though more elegant onscreen, would have made the groom’s action look prearranged. One simple cut in the footage would have demoted its credibility!
Showing the origin and authenticity of evidence wherever you can helps maintain a good-faith relationship with your audience. Occasionally the filmmaker employs artistic license to serve a larger purpose—as Michael Moore did with chronology in Roger and Me (USA, 1989, Figure 21-2). By simplifying and transposing some causes and effects, Moore handed ammunition to his many enemies, and found his methods returning to haunt him. His later work Bowling for Columbine (USA, 2002), which targets the lethal inanities of gun culture in America, is more careful—and as a result hits harder.
Speaking on behalf of others is almost a disease among documentarians, and (as I learned through Henry Breitrose, a fine writer on the documentary) they have a special name: behalfers. These folks make it their business to speak for those without a voice, which ultimately is everyone unable to make their own films. For decades Europeans filmed indigenous peoples like small children or zoo creatures incapable of articulating anything for themselves. Missionaries ran roughshod over native populations because they could not imagine that Africans or Aztecs were equipped to hold spiritual philosophies. Colonial history alone should remind us how charity gets dispensed by the privileged, how it can feel to the recipients, and how self-serving it can be to imagine one is promoting someone else’s interests.
So whenever you get the impulse to do good, be awfully clear with yourself about its basis and its practical difficulties. Beneficiaries need accountability when you elect to speak for them, and agreement about who has the right to control their image. Offering your participants a share in authorship may be the only way to overcome the distrust that poisons relations between the religions or the races, say, or between feminists and well-meaning males.
FIGURE 21-2
Roger and Me—the first Michael Moore film, and maybe the first to go for the managerial jugular using satire. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Warner Bros.)
Look back a few decades to see how the fiction screen represents particular people, roles, and relationships. Criminals or gangsters are “ethnic” types; women are secretaries, nurses, teachers, and mothers. People of color are buffoon servants, vagrants, or objects of pity with little to say for themselves—and so on. All this is too familiar for comment. Well, three writers from the University of Southern California film school think differently. They call these regressive assumptions embedded values, that is, values so natural to the makers of a film that they pass below the radar of awareness. It follows that we are liable to overlook today’s equally unsupportable assumptions.
In their book Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out: Five Keys to the Art of Making Inspired Movies and Television (Simon & Schuster, 2003), Jed Dannenbaum, Carroll Hodge, and Doe Mayer of USC’s School of Cinema and Television demonstrate the traps in making art. Their examination of ethics in practice is especially pertinent to documentary, where unexamined assumptions silently guide a film’s outcome. The book, which is mostly aimed at fiction filmmakers, poses some fascinating questions that I have adapted below. The central question is, Will the world in your film reinforce received truths, or will it question them? Consider how your intended documentary represents these factors:
Participants:
● Class—What class or classes do they come from? How will you show differences? Will other classes be represented, and if so, how?
● Wealth—Do they have money? How is it regarded? How do they handle it? What does the film take for granted? Are things as they should be, and if not, how will the film express this?
● Appearances—Are appearances reliable or misleading? How important are appearances? Do the characters have difficulty reading each other’s appearances?
● Background—Is there any diversity of race or other background and how will you handle this? Will other races or ethnicities have minor or major parts?
● Belongings—Will we see them work or know how they sustain their lifestyle? What do their belongings say about their tastes and values? Is anyone in the film critical of this?
● Emblems—Do they own or use important objects, and what is their significance?
● Work—Is their work shown? What does it convey about them?
● Valuation—For what do characters value other characters? Will the film question this or cast uncertainty on the inter-character values?
● Speech—What do you learn from the vocabulary of each? What makes the way each thinks and talks different from the others? What does it signify?
● Roles—What roles do participants fall into, and will they emerge as complex enough to challenge any stereotypes?
● Sexuality—If sexuality is present, is there a range of expression, and will you portray it? Is it allied with affection, tenderness, love?
● Volition—Who is able to change their situation and who seems unable to take action? What are the patterns behind this?
● Competence—Who is competent and who not? What determines this?
Environment:
● Place—Will we know where characters come from, and what values are associated with their origins?
● Settings—Will they look credible, and add to what we know about the characters?
● Time—What values are associated with the period chosen for the setting?
● Home—Do the characters seem at home? What do they have around them to signify any journeys or accomplishments they have made?
● Work—Do they seem to belong there, and how will you portray the workplace? What will it say about the characters?
● Structure—What family structure emerges? Do characters treat it as normal or abnormal? Is anyone critical of the family structure?
● Relationships—How are relationships between members and between generations going to be portrayed?
● Roles—Are family roles fixed or do they develop? Are they healthy or unhealthy? Who in the family is critical? Who does the family brand “good” or “successful,” and who “bad” or “a failure”?
● Power—Could there be another structure? Do protagonists handle authority in a healthy or unhealthy way? What is the relationship of earning money to power in the family?
Authority:
● Gender—Which gender seems to have the most authority? Does one gender predominate, and if so, why?
● Initiation—Who will initiate the events in the film, and why? Who is likely to resolve them?
● Respect—How are figures with power depicted? How will you show institutions and institutional power? Are they simple or complex, and does what you can show reflect your experience of the real thing?
● Conflict—How do characters negotiate conflicts? What will the film say about conflict and its resolution? Who usually wins, and why?
● Aggression—Who is being aggressive and who is being assertive, and why? Who are you supporting in this, and whom do you tend to censure?
In total:
● Criticism—How critical is the film going to be towards what its characters do, or don’t do? How much will it tell us about what’s wrong? Can we hope to see one of the characters coming to grips with this?
● Approval/Disapproval—What will the film approve of, and is there anything risky and unusual in what it defends? Is the film challenging its audience’s assumptions and expectations, or just feeding into them?
● World View—If this is a microcosm, what will it say about the balance of forces in the larger world?
● Moral Stance—What stance will the intended film’s belief system take in relation to privilege, willpower, tradition, inheritance, power, initiative, God, luck, coincidence, etc.? Is this what you want?
Seldom will you make aesthetic and ethical decisions from a position of cool intellectual neutrality. Most questions arise from intruding into people’s lives and learning from the consequences. Many issues and aspects of personality—yours as well as those of your participants—remain latent and invisible until the “history box” is running, and this of course is part of documentary’s dangerous fascination. Once committed, you may have to defend your rights as chronicler and critic. Some will attack you for daring to make interpretive criticisms, while others will harangue you for failing to do so. So, what do you believe, and how will you justify your values?
Usually we only struggle with conflicting moral obligations when their material embodiment forces it upon us. We owe allegiance to people who trust us on the one hand, and to truths we hold dear on the other. When does obligation to a moral truth allow you to violate someone’s trust or legitimize turncoat behavior? Can you let go of a conviction and make a different film if new evidence shows that you were wrong? Sometimes you are in trouble no matter which way you turn. In such circumstances it helps to remind oneself that one’s movie is just one little person’s view at one little moment in time. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from friction.
Film’s strength and authority come not from supermen or superwomen, but from the essentially collaborative nature of the medium. We work together, debate issues together, help and support each other’s projects, and help each other live by values that may not be popular. Choose your team wisely, and seek their support whenever you need it. In an ethical issue, try to put all deci-sions on hold until you can confer with those you respect. Out of your conversations will come arguments and positions that can greatly help you uphold your own.
Luckily each of us probably carries only one or two strong convictions taught by life—an important message purposely explored at the very beginning of this book. Recognizing this, you can say, “This my life has shown me, so this is what I must explore, and this is what I stand for.” Of course, different or more profound truths may emerge along the road.
Films, especially transparent ones aiming to present life in a rather authorless way, often mask the roots they have in their maker’s psyche. I am convinced that most documentary—indeed most art—is displaced autobiography. If such a generalization seems outrageous, ask where you got the understanding that allows you to portray another person. Surely, from your own close engagement with life, from the energy generated by your own knocks and bruises. You need this energy because documentaries take months or years to complete.
By finding what you need to say being lived by other people, you put your convictions under test. It’s no longer yourself-as-subject, but whether you can spot the rules of the universe at work. This you do best by finding the counterparts to your own needs and experience floating in life’s stream. By catching and tethering them in a structured statement, you help them mirror the hard truths that life has taught you. Seeking your enduring preoccupations at work in others will lead toward filmmaking with overtones of universality. The discipline of such a process brings its own rewards: with growing maturity you can identify the surrogates to your own values and temperament, and watch them achieving a fully mysterious life of their own in your film. Your work quietly alters how you see the fundamentals of your own life—the very source from which your artistic process sprang. In this way, each project is midwife to the next.
This is the artistic process at work, the wellspring of life itself.
Luckily you don’t just take from others: you also give. Your film examination often helps transform the very lives you thought you were capturing intact. Since filming can compromise, subvert, improve, or even create the end result in your film, you face a conundrum. The solution may be to share the paradoxes with your audience rather than mask them. Today’s audiences are sophisticated and very interested in what filming does to the situation under study.
Try making a participatory documentary by using SP-13 Participatory Film. Your charge is to “gather a core sample of attitudes and feelings from a range of interviewees on a contemporary issue, interview the best two in depth, then shoot illustrative material to flesh out the narrative that emerges from your questioning. The resulting investigative documentary should use multiple participants and a range of techniques” in which the director’s path through the investigation is evident.
1. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (William Morrow, 1974). Before it became a bestseller, the book was first rejected by 121 publishers.
