The Documentary Handbook

Peter Lee-Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135270148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

'The Documentary Handbook is mandatory reading for those who want a critical understanding of the place of factual formats in today's exploding television and media industry, as well as expert guidance in complex craft skills in order to fully participate. The practical advice and wisdom here is second to none.' – Tony Steyger, Principal Lecturer, Southampton Solent University, UK

The Documentary Handbook is a critical introduction to the documentary film, its theory and changing practices. The book charts the evolution of documentary from screen art to core television genre, its metamorphosis into many different types of factual TV programme and its current emergence in forms of new media. It analyses those pathways and the transformation of means of production through economic, technical and editorial changes.

The Documentary Handbook explains the documentary process, skills and job specifications for everyone from industry entrants to senior personnel, and shows how the industrial evolution of television has relocated the powers and principles of decision-making. Through the use of professional Expert Briefings it gives practical pointers about programme-making, from research, developing and pitching programme ideas to their production and delivery through a fast-evolving multi-platform universe.

Part I
Talk to the camera

Whereas most film drama plays out in front of the camera, much televisual non-fiction adopts the full frontal approach of addressing the camera directly. The epithet ‘nonfiction’ is a hostage to fortune wherever its broad brush stroke is applied, from written biographies that speculate about the subject’s feelings and motivations to films that pretend to deliver unmediated truth. Television’s reliance on the real world – real people, real places, real tragedies – does not reduce its many fictions; programmes and the people that appear in them are directed and produced much as they are in drama. The screen presenter merely puts a friendly face to the controlling hand.

The original meaning of the word fiction, from the Latin fictio, is a forming or shaping of things, be they events or elemental truths. That is what television does – organises features of the messy world for popular and mostly easy consumption. Every aspect of the technical process is a construction based upon a series of selective judgements, i.e. a fiction. ‘The camera doesn’t lie’ is itself a fiction, or half-truth, not least because what it tells you by definition excludes everything it doesn’t tell you. What subject matter you choose to film, where and whom you film, which bits you eventually use and how you put them together are all subjective choices, made for reasons variously good, bad and indifferent. Coming to terms with this authorial process, and exercising its powers effectively and responsibly, is the central core of factual television – and of this book.

In the past, people turned to storytellers and priests to construct a narrative for their lives, explaining the wider context in which their trials and tribulations had meaning and, in some cases, may be rewarded in a future life. Television has largely taken over that role, shaping the vast array of facts and figures, images and experiences it has access to into a set of recognisable and digestible narratives. At the birth of the mass medium some 60 years ago, the world was still organised along traditionally hierarchical lines with supporting moral verities. So the worldview widely presented was largely non-contentious, and often supported by an avuncular intermediary: the white, middle-class, middle-aged male that is still the commonest image of broadcast authority on Western television. As he stepped in front of the camera to speak directly to us, catching our eye and easing our understanding of the world, he defined the standard, reassuring presentational form of this latter-day priesthood. This is defined as ‘the expository mode’ in Bill Nichols’s influential Introduction to Documentary:

The expository mode addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that propose a perspective, advance an argument, or recount history. Expository films adopt either a voice-of-God commentary (the speaker is heard but never seen) . . . or utilize a voice-of-authority commentary (the speaker is heard and also seen), such as we find in television newscasts . . . The commentary . . . is presumed to be of a higher order than the accompanying images. It comes from some place that remains unspecified but associated with objectivity or omniscience. The commentary, in fact, represents the perspective or argument of the film.¹

That perspective is rarely of divine inspiration, the god’s voice being that of Mammon, or the economic interests of the channel. These may be overtly commercial or regulated by the government and legislation of the day. The expository, avuncular mode remains the staple of television worldwide, from news bulletins to most forms of factual programming, although women and ethnic minorities are now better represented, and often in virtual partnerships on-screen as couples banter their way through the business of the day. Secure in the television studio, programme ‘anchors’ interact with the reporters at large on the high seas of the real world, who also address the camera as if it were their ‘friend’ in the studio, who in turns asks them questions on our behalf, before turning back to address us directly him- or herself. Though friendliness has replaced the more severe gravitas of old, omniscience and indisputable authority remain the presumption of most television ‘hosts’ addressing the camera. The international uniform of suits and ties for men, professional clothes for women, underpins that authority. Even successful satirical subversions of the form, such as US Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, rigidly adhere to those conventions – and the great and the good fight to get on the show, from White House insiders to the President of Pakistan. When Jon Stewart delivers to the camera another story about the asininity of public life and ends with a raised eyebrow, he may be mocking the mendacity and incompetence of our so-called masters, but not the system that produces them. As the next political hasbeen strides on to the set to publicise his memoirs, his hand is shaken, not the status quo.

Everybody trained to address the camera, whether it be rooky reporters or captains of industry, are told to address it as a friend, to talk conversationally without jargon, to engage with personality, not point-scoring. Politicians’ careers depend upon their camera performance above all other talents. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s photogenic qualities and easy glibness before the microphones kept him in power, and his less camera-friendly successor Gordon Brown waiting in the wings, for ten years, despite personal qualities, policies and problems that called for a much earlier handover. US presidential elections are largely dependent on television ads and election coverage, where the average sound bite contracted from 44 seconds in 1968 to just 7.8 seconds in 2000 and 2004, favouring the pithy vacuities of George W. Bush over the more complex thoughts of Al Gore and John Kerry.² Barack Obama’s inspiring rhetoric further endorses that filmic tradition, with his speeches frequently framed in front of iconic images of Abraham Lincoln or the Founding Fathers, invoking American history to inform his grand narrative of aspiration.

Not all who address the camera seek to reassure the audience or sell themselves. As a potent instrument of persuasion, it is above all the favourite means for those with a tub to thump or story to tell. At the cutting edge of reportage, reporters investigate the underbelly of society, from consumer scams to state corruption, urgently advising us that we need to take notice and help purge the reported cancer from our body politic. Even those, for whom deep cover is the essence of their investigation, command the camera and reveal themselves, the emotions and dangers they put themselves through on our behalf. This apparent professional suicide is deemed a necessary sacrifice in the validation of such work.

As issues of representation came increasingly to the fore during the late twentieth century, it was not just in the traditional on-camera roles that minorities wanted to be seen. They wanted to front their own programmes in their own terms, broadening the vision as well as the voice. Forms of partial and polemical television that would have been anathema to its founding fathers became more common; meanwhile, new technology enabled newer intimacies such as the self-shot video diary and the proliferation of niche channels where every specialism could find a camera to address. While some saw liberation in these developments, many were only watched by their own kind, a kind of speaking to oneself. This progressive, fragmenting democratisation of the airwaves continues with new openings and byways on the burgeoning pathways of the internet, where anyone can go and anything does. While much of this material is like so much dust free-falling in space, some achieve a clarion voice that punches through the ether. Many still address the camera in the way they remember from children’s television, and most rely on the uniqueness of their own voice or vision, the individual addressing their audience through the technological peephole of our time.

The following chapters in this part explore the evolution and practice of these different factual forms that have at their heart this essential feature: they talk to the camera.

1 Reportage

reportage n. – 1 the act or process of reporting news or other events of general interest.
2 a journalist’s style of reporting¹

The word ‘reportage’ tends to represent two parallel tracks – the visual and the editorial. It has been used to describe the work of photojournalists and documentary cameramen who bring a particular vision to their images of the world, from the historic Soviet newsreels compiled by Dziga Vertov to the acclaimed war photographs of Don McCullen. And it is used to credit the longer forms of narrative journalism that bring some authorial insight to bear, whether it is published works, such as those of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, or investigative films, such as those of the campaigning Australian journalist John Pilger. Veteran current affairs producer Ed Braman describes it like this:

I’ve always defined reportage as narrating and filming the moments of engagement. What I mean by that is – ‘We arrived in this place and this is what happened, and this is what we discovered next’. It is the process of reporting as well as what is reported, and the spirit in which it is reported . . . Kapuśziński, absolutely, a great model of reportage. Ed Murrow was a fantastic model of reportage. Fred Friendly, Tom Wolfe – for whom the process was paramount – Joan Didion, whose work on Florida, Miami is fantastic reportage. ‘I engaged with this person, this is what they told me. This is what I learnt about it’. It’s not people or events as fodder in some larger argument promulgated by John Lloyd or Will Hutton. It’s: ‘I actually care about what this person said to me and I care about what I saw, what happened to people’. That’s reportage.²

Reportage is therefore seen as the opposite of the scorched earth journalism of the news pack, which stakes out a place or person, sucks a story dry and moves on like a swarm of locusts. The good reporter invests time, energy and some of their soul in digging deep to reveal the buried truths of a story. Some will be making long form films, others filing dispatches for news bulletins. It is not about quantity, but the quality of the work. Pilger himself quotes approvingly the American journalist T.D. Allman’s tribute to The Daily Express’s Wilfred Burchett, who slipped the leash of Allied occupation forces in Japan to ‘warn the world’ of the radiation fallout from the H-bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945:

Genuinely objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by ‘reliable sources’, but by the unfolding of history. It is journalism that ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.³

Pilger has made a career of stepping on toes to get those facts, and then stepping in front of camera to put his uncompromising construction on events as important as the Indonesian military suppression of East Timor and American connivance in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. His is a deceptively languid style of reporting, with a lacerating lance for the corruptions and collusions of power. It has, inevitably, made him few friends in powerful places. While regularly commissioned by Independent Television (ITV) in the UK, Pilger has never been able to get American networks to show any of his 55 films, but he remains unrepentant:

There is a hunger among the public for documentaries because only documentaries, at their best, are fearless and show the unpalatable and make sense of the news. The extraordinary films of Alan Francovich achieved this. Francovich, who died in 1997, made The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie. This destroyed the official truth that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Instead, an unwitting ‘mule’, with links to the CIA, was alleged to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft. (Paul Foot’s parallel investigation for Private Eye came to a similar conclusion.) The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in the United States. In this country [the UK], the threat of legal action from a US Government official prevented showings at the 1994 London Film Festival and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1995, defying threats, Tam Dalyell showed it in the House of Commons, and Channel 4 broadcast it in May 1995.⁴

Do not be confused by this Russian dolls’ nest of references. Reporters of distinction recognise the value of each others’ work and celebrate it as standing head and shoulders above the sea of mediocrity, the ‘churnalism’ that Nick Davies (2008) writes about. The political reportage of current affairs documentary at its best challenges the orthodoxies pedalled by the establishment of the day, and routinely reported by the hacks of the day. But the stakes are high, as its history shows.

Reportage then

This important strand of television documentary originated in the post-War period as an extension of current affairs coverage, owing as much to radio as to the well-established film tradition. Early television, like radio, had lacked the ability to pre-record and edit, so news bulletins were broadcast live with just the odd still picture. Radio paved the way in recording and editing techniques and early videotape editing evolved the same process of linking actuality sequences with narration. News operations seized the opportunity of extending their reportage in this way, but inevitably enshrined the reporter in the dominant role, standing in front of the camera. Consistent with the early broadcasters’ belief in their role as revealers of truth to their audience, this set one standard of television documentary in a classic narrative form: storytelling for the modern age, illustrated with moving pictures.

This reporter tradition persists today, even more strongly in the United States than in Britain, not least because of the dominant figure of Ed Murrow, dramatically revived in the George Clooney feature film Good Night and Good Luck (2005). Ed Murrow, with his wartime radio reporting from London, introduced Americans to the authentic sounds and experiences of war by creating the CBS radio documentary unit in 1946. This produced the original radio documentary series Hear It Now, which, with the arrival of producer Fred Friendly, led in 1951 to the seminal television documentary series See It Now. Although this initially featured several different stories in each half-hour, it had become a single issue strand by 1953.

The year 1953 was also the year that the BBC launched its long-running flagship programme Panorama, initially as a rather unsuccessful fortnightly magazine programme. It was not until the following year that it did its first single-issue documentary, on the hydrogen bomb, and this, along with the arrival of Richard Dimbleby as presenter and Grace Wyndham-Goldie as producer in 1955, established it as the premier current affairs programme, featuring extended documentary reportage. As former reporter and Panorama historian Richard Lindley writes, current affairs reporting, or ‘long-form journalism’ as it is sometimes called, was a radical departure for Britain:

When Panorama began in 1953 there was a void, darkness on the factual face of television. ITV did ...