Watching the World

Screen documentary and audiences

Thomas Austin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719085581
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Screen documentary has experienced a marked rise in visibility and popularity in recent years. What are the reasons for the so-called 'boom' in documentaries at the cinema? How has television documentary met the challenge of new formats? And how do audiences engage with documentaries on screen? Watching the world extends the reach of documentary studies by investigating recent instances of screen documentary and the uses made of them by audiences. The book focuses on the interfaces between textual mechanisms, promotional tactics, and audiences' viewing strategies. Key topics of inquiry are: film and televisual form, truth claims and issues of trust, the pleasures, politics and the ethics of documentary. Case studies include Capturing the Friedmans, Être et Avoir, Paradise Lost, Touching the Void, and wildlife documentaries on television. This compelling and accessible book will be of interest to both students and fans of documentary.

1
Continuity and change: the documentary ‘boom’

In the period from late 2002 to early 2004, trade and popular film publications and websites in the United States and Britain began to identify a ‘boom’ in documentary cinema.1 Such commentaries were based initially on the commercial success of a handful of documentary features, most notably Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (US, released October 2002, grossed $21 million in the US); the sleeper hit Winged Migration (France, a dubbed version of Le Peuple Migrateur, released April 2003, grossed $11 million); spelling contest film Spellbound (US, released April 2003, grossed nearly $6 million); and Errol Morris’s Fog of War (US, released December 2003, grossed $4 million).2 While music-related documentaries have occasionally done well over the years,3 the subject matter of these films covered a much wider range.4 So what were the factors behind this phenomenon?

There is no doubt that in 2003 and 2004 cinema audiences for documentary were growing, in both the US and the UK. More money than previously was being spent on watching documentaries – and this was not just due to the ticket price inflation that allows Hollywood to perennially hype every year as better than the one before. For instance, at the start of 2005, of the 20 biggest-grossing documentary films in US history, 11 were released in 2003 and 2004, and seven of these were in the top ten (eight if Bowling for Columbine is also included).5 Unusually, some documentaries outperformed high profile arthouse and ‘independent’ fiction films. For example, as the Los Angeles Times noted, Bowling For Columbine ‘out-grossed a host of more costly star-studded adult-oriented films, including Far From Heaven, Antwone Fisher, Adaptation, Punch-Drunk Love and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind’.6 Equally, in the UK, mountaineering documentary Touching the Void grossed more than £2 million to become the second highest earning British film released in 2003. And in the same year subtitled French documentary Etre et avoir, already a hit in France, ranked ninth in the UK box office chart for foreign language films.7

In addition to these relatively big earners, less spectacular successes also gained more exposure than might have been expected. For example, Ceský Sen/Czech Dream (Czech Republic, 2004), a provocative hoax film involving the launch of a non-existent hypermarket, secured small but significant distribution deals in ten countries, a record for a documentary from Eastern Europe. Moreover, the total number of documentaries gaining theatrical release in the US climbed significantly, from an average of 15 in the late 1990s to around 40 in 2003 and 50 in 2004.8 As Paul Arthur notes, this figure accounted for ‘roughly ten percent of total film releases but more than one-fourth of the rosters for smaller, nonstudio distributors.’9

Four important points need to be borne in mind here. The first is that the commercial achievements of documentaries at the cinema have to be kept in proportion. While some have crossed over to the multiplex sector, the majority remain very much a niche taste, and deliver a fraction of the revenues earned by successful fiction films. As one professional observer of the US film industry put it: ‘In the world of blockbusters, the [box office] mark to hit is $100 million, but in the world of documentaries, it’s $1 million.’10

Another issue to consider is that most of the strong financial performers in the boom have been American. A handful of French films – Etre et avoir, Le Peuple Migrateur/Winged Migration, and La Marche de l’empereur/March of the Penguins (2005) – have done very well both at home and overseas, and Touching the Void became an unprecedented documentary hit in both the UK and the US, but these are very much the exceptions to the trend of American dominance. (The highly uneven but relatively healthy documentary sector in the US benefits from economies of scale in the home market, while UK filmmakers face the twin problems of sharing a language with American competitors, and the reluctance of ‘risk averse’11 distributors and exhibitors to handle home-grown products, two issues that have dogged UK fiction film producers for decades.)12

The third point is that some significant antecedents of the so-called boom appeared in the late 1980s and 1990s. Work in these decades by Nick Broomfield, Errol Morris and Michael Moore, among others, won both critical attention and audiences. Eric Faden identifies five influential films that paved the way for the documentary boom in the US: Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (US, 1988, grossed over $1 million in the US), Moore’s Roger and Me (US, 1989, grossed more than $6 million); basketball story Hoop Dreams (US, 1994, grossed nearly $8 million); low-budget fiction success The Blair Witch Project (US, 1999, grossed $140 million), and finally, Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.13

According to Faden, The Thin Blue Line was significant not just in terms of the stylised reconstructions and film noir aesthetics praised by many commentators, but also because of the successful exploitation of its thriller narrative in the marketing campaign run by distributor Miramax.14 Faden also notes the fit between Moore’s emerging persona in Roger and Me – later apparent in his television appearances, books and the film Bowling for Columbine – and the ‘journalist as star’ tendency in American television in the 1990s. Finally, he stresses the importance of form (digital video blown up to 35 mm) and content (suspenseful narrative) in Hoop Dreams, and the role of The Blair Witch Project in apeing documentary style and so acclimatising audiences to a particular aesthetic involving hand-held (video) camera, location shooting, and the use of available light.15

The fourth point to note is that the boom was in part a discursive phenomenon, constructed in the output of film magazines, websites and newspapers.16 It is therefore instructive to analyse some of them to get a measure of how they characterised this development and its significance for potential audiences.

For example, in May 2004 the British film monthly Empire, a forum not usually interested in documentary cinema, ran a five-page feature on ‘modern cinema’s most resurgent art form’.17 The article differentiated between recent, successful films and earlier, unsuccessful ones, by deploying a combination of negative and positive discourses about documentary as a distinct mode of filmmaking. It described films such as Fog of War, Touching the Void, Capturing the Friedmans and Onibus 174/Bus 174 (Brazil, 2002) as surprising additions to ‘one of cinema’s least popular genres, the dreaded documentary’.18 Filmmakers were at last moving away from didactic documentaries ‘that lectured their audiences – offering all the gripping drama of an introduction to differential calculus delivered in an airing cupboard’.19 Documentary’s status as what Bill Nichols has called a ‘discourse of sobriety’ emerges as a problem here, but, crucially, the evidential status of the mode, the claim to veracity, retains its pull.20 According to Empire, the new films told ‘quirky and often moving stories which have the ultimate gimmick: they’re true’. Thus authenticity and human-centred stories are cast as the touchstones of successful documentary, encapsulated in the headline ‘Reel life drama’.

The article quoted several documentary practitioners who positively compared recent films to a range of competing media forms. Andrew Jarecki, director of Capturing the Friedmans, located audience appetite for screen documentary in a disappointment with television news: ‘News is so pared down. There’s a hunger for more complete versions of stories’. Similarly, veteran filmmaker Nick Broomfield contrasted documentary cinema with the omnipresence of reality television: ‘I’ve been really upset to see [UK] Channel 4 which is really the home of documentaries, switching to things like Wife Swap or Big Brother to try and desperately keep their ratings up. A lot of people who used to turn to Channel 4 have been alienated, so this audience goes to the cinema more because those documentaries they used to watch simply aren’t on television anymore’. Kevin Macdonald, director of Touching the Void, pointed to documentary’s advantages over Hollywood blockbusters: ‘because mainstream movies have become so detached from reality – and in a fiction film these days anything is possible because of digital effects – I think that a real sense of surprise and wonder is easier to find in documentaries’.21 The feature concluded:

The paradox is obvious: the cinemas, the places where previous generations hunkered down, suspended their disbelief and engaged in a communal dream, are to some extent becoming refuges from the relentless artifice, places where we can go to wake up, to find out what’s really going on. Or at least to engage with stories and experiences in which we can believe.22

The stress placed on the significance of character and story in new documentaries was also evident in a commentary by writer and filmmaker Mark Cousins in Sight and Sound magazine. For Cousins, reality television was not necessarily pushing audiences towards cinema documentary through its own failings, but was encouraging viewers to seek further involvement in real people’s stories: ‘Reality TV convinced viewers that those attributes they craved – character, narrative, suspense, conflict and romance – were present in rawer, more engaging states when real people submitted themselves to the lens.’23 Building on this list of audience demands, Cousins argued that documentary was entering ‘a new phase of classicism’, centred unashamedly on character and story. He cited Touching the Void, directed by Kevin Macdonald, and Etre et avoir, directed by Nicholas Philibert, as key examples of this trend: ‘Macdonald and Philibert’s work is at least as penetrating as the [social problem] films inspired by Grierson, but is more linear and proportioned, less straining for effect.’24

So, were new documentaries succeeding because of their differences from, or similarities to, Hollywood films? There was no clear critical consensus at the time. Many films were seen to place particular emphasis on conventions of story-telling and character development familiar from fiction film. But documentaries still remained sufficiently different from much Hollywood output in this period to be reviewed – if not always marketed – as a distinct commodity and experience. (For more on the ambiguous labelling of documentaries in advertising campaigns, see Chapters 2, 3 and 4.)

There are important insights on offer in the commentaries discussed so far. But any investigation of the changing fortunes of documentary needs to look beyond individual films and filmmakers in order to situate them in the larger setting of commercial logics and industrial practices. For instance, it is clear that low-cost digital technology has brought down some barriers to entry by allowing documentaries to be shot and edited relatively cheaply.25 (The most celebrated example of this trend is Jonathan Caouette’s autobiographical Tarnation (US, 2003), famously made for $218.)26 However, without distribution and exhibition deals, any film will remain largely unnoticed. The documentary sector, much like that for fiction films, remains a buyer’s market: ‘Doug Hawes-Davis, a filmmaker who recently founded a documentary film festival [says] “Most of the distributors won’t look at any...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Continuity and change: the documentary ‘boom’
• 2 Seeing, feeling, knowing: Etre et avoir
• 3 ‘Suspense, fright, emotion, happy ending’: 60 documentary form and audience response to Touching the Void
• 4 ‘The most confusing tears’: home video, sex crime 84 and indeterminacy in Capturing the Friedmans
• 5 Approaching the invisible centre: middle-class 109 identity and documentary film
• 6 ‘Our planet reveals its secrets’: wildlife documentaries on television
• 7 Conclusion: documentary world views
• Methodological appendix
• Select bibliography
• Index