The documentary tradition

Since its inception, documentary has had a contested relationship with the truth, as well as predating fictional features. The first film made for public projection was a 46-second documentary short, the Lumiere Brothers’ La Sortie des usines Lumiere a Lyon/Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895). Their subsequent 50-second L’arrivee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat /The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) reputedly had audiences panicked at the sight of the oncoming train. This is probably an urban myth but it dramatizes film’s visceral effect. In post-revolutionary Russia, Lenin immediately saw its potential for giving the peasants’ struggle epic scale and purpose. Dziga Vertov’s seminal newsreel series Kino-Pravda/Cine-Truth(1922) may have intended, in his words, to “catch life unawares” (Vertov, quoted in Michelson and O’Brien, 1984: 69) but his inventive use of editing and montage was unashamedly subjective: “I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it” (ibid.). In 2009 the Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence realized that metaphorical concept. He had lost an eye in a shotgun accident and had it replaced with a wireless video camera (see eyeborg.com). His documentary truth remains subjective, dependent upon when Rob opens his eye and what he chooses to focus on. These remain the central challenges for documentary filmmakers: what to focuson, with what objective purpose. Whatever the cine veritistes say, the moment the camera finds a subject, focuses and films, it is making a judgment about verity and value. From the start, propagandists saw the benefit of documentary celebrating and promoting social movements. Mexico’s 1911 uprising produced the first Latin American revolutionary cinema. Soviet film charted the great engineering efforts that dragged Russia out of its feudal past, such as Victor Turin’s epic film about the building of the railway line between Siberia and Turkestan Turksib (1929). Leni Riefenstahl’s Goebbels-financed Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will (1934) and her subsequent films on the 1936 Berlin Olympics were the ultimate statement of the grand triumphalist aesthetic of the Third Reich, a documentary match for Hollywood epics such as D. W. Griffiths’ The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), with their equally disturbing endorsement of racial superiority. The political purposing of documentary remains as pertinent today. Emad Burnatis a Palestinian farmer and self-taught cameraman whose Sundance award-winning 5 Broken Cameras (2011) records resistance to Israeli bulldozing of his village’s land to build a wall and the repression which destroys both people and his five cameras. Jafar Panahi is an Iranian filmmaker, who was banned for 20 years from making films or leaving his country for producing “propaganda against the regime”. This is Not a Film (2011) is a documentary self-portrait of Jafar’s effective imprisonment in his own apartment, largely shot on an iPhone, with his imagining the film he might have made cleverly subverting the filmmaking ban. Such films are not just powerful testimonials but central to a documentary tradition that not only reveals human life but also its often painful context. The truths so revealed, welcome in the West, are clearly not approved of in Israel and Iran. In America, an essentially commercial and politically supine television culture hasaided the revival of the cinema documentary as an argumentative vehicle. Thirty years ago, a cinema opening for a documentary was a rarity. Today there are several a week. One of the filmmakers responsible is Errol Morris. His The Thin Blue Line (1988) told the story of Randall Dale Adams, a man wrongly convicted of murdering a police officer, using a then novel, now much copied, approach of reconstructing the story from several points of view. Morris called it “the first non-fiction film noir” on PBS TV in September 1988 but, more importantly, it was billed on release as “the first movie mystery to actually solve a murder” because its inescapable conclusion led to Adams’ release from death row. Few films are so politically effective as well as being so stylistically influential. Michael Moore first brought his more prosaic – what one could call his ‘sham-bling Everyman exposing corporate malfeasance’ – character to the screen with Rogerand Me (1989), his pursuit of the General Motors boss Roger Smith for the loss of 30,000 jobs in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Moore’s satirical investigative approach was initially more appreciated in the UK which enabled him to make the series TV Nation (1994-95) for the BBC, and Michael Moore Live (1999) and The Awful Truth (1999-2000) for Channel 4. Moore’s subsequent feature films articulated arguments largely avoided by the broadcast media: Bowling for Columbine (2002) pursued America’s lethal love of firearms; Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) attacked Bush for exploiting 9/11 to prosecute war and Sicko (2007) compared the corporate greed of American healthcare to Britain’s NHS at the time and the health systems in Canada and Cuba. They are among the ten top-grossing documentaries of all time. Winning the Oscar for Columbine, Moore used his acceptance speech to attack Bush’s warmongering, thereby becoming a hate figure for the American Right and exposing the political fault-line in American culture. The British documentary tradition was initially less political. John Grierson’s ownDrifters (1929), about the North Sea herring fishing industry, set a template for documentary that lasted throughout the twentieth century. Its framing and montage is more about capturing the rhythm of life than the politics of the people or the economics of their industry. Industry itself sponsored many of the observational films made during the 1920s and 1930s, with both Shell and the General Post Office having their own film units, the latter responsible for Harry Watt’s acclaimed Night Mail (1936), with its poetic narrative by W. H. Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. Only Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey’s Housing Problems (1935), with its then unusual use of working-class voices describing those problems, prefigures later ‘social message’ documentary and even that has been dismissed as Gas Board propaganda (Winston, 2008: 88). But, with the coming of the Second World War and the co-opting of filmmaking to the state imperatives of the Ministry of Information, documentary films did develop a political bent, as expressed in the title of London Can Take It! (1940), Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings’ riposte to the Blitz. Jennings, whom film director Lindsay Anderson called “the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced” (Anderson, 1954: 181), went on to make other stirring hymns to the Home Front, such as Listen to Britain (1941) and Fires Were Started (1943). Propagandist though Jennings’ films were, his humanity and his artistry elevate them above that mechanical mode and have secured him a permanent post in the pantheon of documentary greats.

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