Introduction
1 It is not often noted that although Grierson uses the term ‘documentary’, here the context of the quote is as follows: ‘Of course, Moana being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value. But that, I believe, is secondary to its value as a soft breath from a sunlit island washed by a marvelous sea as warm as the balmy air. Moana is first of all beautiful as nature is beautiful…’ The ‘documentary value’ that the film has is seen as a subsidiary element, with the main worth of the film residing, for Grierson, in its ‘poetry’.
Chapter one
1 It should be added here that filming in one long take, and/or not using any sound are of course editing and sound ‘choices’ in the sense that any viewer would find them eminently noticeable and think about why the filmmaker had chosen to use such (non-)conventions.
2 The phrase originally appeared in his 1933 article ‘The Documentary Producer’, Cinema Quarterly, 2, 1, 8.
3 In this respect, one could argue that Chronique d’un ete is a reflexive documentary, and this is precisely what Jay Ruby does in his essay ‘The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film’ (in Rosenthal 1988).
4 Quoted in Emma Perry (2001) ‘In the frame: Little ups and downs’, Time Out, 20–27 June.
5 Of course, this ‘change of direction’ would surely have been planned from the outset – which is to say, Isaacs probably had a hunch that most people might respond in the ways they did, starting out shy of the camera, then gradually ‘opening up’ for it.
6 We can, of course, have nonfictional musicals.
7 As Plantinga points out, it is entirely possible to watch a fiction film nonfiction-ally – that is, to infer some ‘real world’ knowledge from viewing it. This is what happens if someone were to watch The Matrix with a view to charting Keanu Reeves’ acting career, or the use of certain special effects. In this respect, the (fiction) film is viewed as a real-world artefact, it is comprehended nonfiction-ally. But there is a difference between this specific kind of usage and actual properties of the nonfictional, as Plantinga makes clear. One might view a fiction film in this way for particular purposes, but the general (or conventional) use and understanding of the film is an entirely different thing. One-off (mis)understandings are different from socially agreed usage, and it is this latter category which is vital when we are defining something like ‘documentary’ or ‘nonfiction’.
8 Of course, there is a ‘preferred’ way of doing things in the sense of there being a recognised professional way of conducting an interview. This raises all sorts of issues about the relationship of discourses of ‘professionalism’ to modes of documentary (and other filmmaking) practices. It should also be noted at this point that some documentarists would not necessarily agree that interviews are an integral part of documentary. For example, someone like Godfrey Reggio makes films that completely dispense with interviews or voiceover.
Chapter two
1 By pointing to such ‘uncertainty’ on the part of the viewer, it is not suggested that viewers are duped or fooled into simply thinking they are watching a documentary or a drama when this is manifestly not the case. A lot of the time viewers are well aware that what they are watching is a documentary that is attempting to mobilise drama or performance in some ‘new’ way, and they will watch the material while negotiating precisely this point. There might be some initial ‘literal’ uncertainty, but most people watch things having some prior knowledge of the conventions and mode of address involved, and will respond accordingly. Much more research is needed into viewer responses to types of documentary output. See Austin 2005b.
2 Two of the actors were recognisable to me personally. This is not necessarily a problem, though it is interesting to think through some of the different ‘responses’ that spectators might have to such material, depending on whether they ‘spot’ that it is an actor playing the role. For, even if one knows that a film like Pissed on the Job is addressing viewers in the way that it does – that is, as a ‘documentary-style’, performed interpretation of detailed interview material – it is pretty likely that one still attaches more ‘authenticity’ to an ‘unknown’ face than someone one knows to be so-and-so, the actor. This is actually a strange paradox of sorts, where we can recognise the skill and ‘authenticity’ of someone’s performance, but if we ‘know’ them from a previous film or programme, then it disrupts this admiration. This only really happens when actors are performing in the documentary arena – or the new, hybridised, performed documentaries. Pissed on the Job used professional actors (albeit less well-known ones), Woolcock’s Tina films used non-professional actors (or ‘real people’) improvising variations on themselves. A similar paradox is at work with mock-doc texts such as The Office, where we know that the characters are being acted – there is admiration (and cringing recognition) of the authenticity, yet this has to co-exist with admiration of the quality of the performances. The more praise the series received for its authenticity, the more recognition there was of the virtuosity of the acted performances.
3 ‘Perceived as’ being the key phrase – although modern viewers might perceive A Job in a Million to be stilted, we should not assume that the audience of 1937 felt the same way.
Chapter three
2 The Nottinghamshire collieries saw a large number of miners returning to work while the strike was still on. Some Nottinghamshire miners maintain that because there had been no national ballot on strike action, they were legitimately going back to work. However, this fails to see their actions as part of a wider context of working-class solidarity – as the Yorkshire miners in The Battle of Orgreave clearly feel, the fact that some of the Nottinghamshire miners were back at work while the strike was still on sent a message to the Thatcher government, who were obviously on a well-planned collision-course with the National Union of Mineworkers.
3 Julian Petley has pointed out to me that he remembers that the ITN news on the same evening actually showed these events in the correct order. This is one of the reasons that the furore over the BBC’s doctoring of the sequence rose to such a pitch. If the miners had been the only ones pointing out that there was a clear distortion occurring, they would doubtless have simply been ignored. But it was difficult for the authorities to completely ignore the issue when Britain’s most respected news producers (the BBC and ITN) showed completely contradictory sequences of the same events.
4 Interviewed on Newsnight on 27 July 1984, Margaret Thatcher talked of the miners and picket line violence as follows: ‘[If] any government gave in to the violence and intimidation of the kind which has disfigured our screens, there would be no future for democracy … the violence and intimidation we have seen should never have happened. It is the work of extremists. It is the enemy within.’ Figgis ironically juxtaposes Thatcher’s words on the soundtrack with the ominous build-up of militarily-ranked police officers, with the result that the police (and by extension Thatcher herself) become the ‘extremists’, ‘the enemy within’. Later in the film, the ‘enemy within’ soundbite is repeated over tracking shots of now-derelict mining communities and boarded-up shops – more in sadness than irony.
5 The ‘Acid Brass’ project (1997) was a series of concerts and a recording by the Williams Fairey Band playing Brass Band interpretations of acid house music. Deller juxtaposed these two forms of music without irony, as he saw them both as popular, ‘folk’ forms of music. The links between the two forms – and how they can and should be seen in a broad context of recent working-class history and culture – are explored further in Deller’s The History of the World 1997–2004 (2004, UK). This is a large flow diagram showing the mass of interconnections between the two.
7 The inquest was initially called to investigate the death of John Lees, and the powers that be had every reason to believe that it would be an open and shut case. In this respect, those who spoke up against the actions of the Yeomanry were going against the grain of what was expected – that is, they were not called specifically as witnesses ‘against’ the Yeomanry, and would more than likely be expected not to speak out – and they took the inquest in an unexpected direction as a consequence.
Chapter four
1 Of course, The Office also comes to its audience ‘indexed’ (see chapter one) as a mock-docu-soap, and the presence of a recognisable performer such as Ricky Gervais anchors this further.
3 See, for example, Man Bites Dog (Remy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992, Bel.). This film is a mock-documentary, and is, in places, very funny. But it is a very dark, mordant satire on media journalists’ standards and ethics, which uses an accurate parody of a documentary team following a serial killer as the vehicle for its broader critical points.
4 The programme invented a drug (‘Cake is a made-up drug…’) and some moral panic-style stories about its effects and then asked various celebrities to condemn the drug.
Chapter five
1 The series, Blood Matters, was a four-part series examining aspects of blood and blood donation, made by various directors and animators under the aegis of the Documentary Filmmakers Group, in association with the National Blood Service. The other films were more ‘personal’ or specifically focused on an issue such as the relatively low donation rate amongst ethnic minorities. As such, they tended to use less straightforwardly ‘expository’ techniques and be more ‘subjective’ or ‘poetic’ in the way they engaged with blood donation as a real world issue. The films are: What’s Blood Got To Do With It? (directed by Andy Glynne; animation director – Jim Field); Leona. Alone (directed by Rani Khanna; animation director – Benji Davies); Blood Sutra (directed by Rajesh Thind; animation director – Ravi Swami); The Circle (directed by Caroline Gardiner; animation directors – Gemma Carrington and Alon Ziv).
2 This is not to say that there is no such thing as the ‘objective’ world ‘out there’, independent of us and about which we can have (at least partial) knowledge. But it is to claim that there are considerable problems with an ‘objective’ discourse in the sense that it is often (incorrectly) mobilised in relation to documentary: that is, as a standpoint that is ‘fair’, ‘balanced’ and so on. Such ‘objectivity’ is what Stuart Hall would refer to as ‘an operational fiction’ (1988: 361), and it is precisely such simplistic thoughts of objectivity that are shaken by the subjectivity of animated documentaries.