A Journey Through Documentary Film

Luke Dormehl

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781842435908
• eBook ISBN: 9781842435922
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From Nanook of the North to Exit Through the Gift Shop, an overview of nonfiction film history from the early pioneers to the directors dominating the field today

As one of the most fascinating areas of filmmaking, documentaries have broken down societal taboos, changed legislation, strengthened and rocked entire governments, freed wrongly convicted prisoners, and taught us more about the world in which we live. This overview of documentary history takes readers from the early "actualities" of pioneering nonfiction filmmakers such as Robert J. Flaherty and John Grierson, to the documentaries of Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, and the directors dominating the field—and box office—today. An essential resource for film students, documentary buffs, filmmakers, and anyone interested in nonfiction film, it looks in-depth at more than 60 documentaries from around the world, covering a century of cinema, to illustrate what "documentary" means, and the changes and transitions that have occurred in nonfiction filmmaking over the years. Covering films such as Night Mail, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity, F for Fake, The Thin Blue Line, Hoop Dreams, Fahrenheit 9/11, Grizzly Man, and  Man on Wire, each analysis includes an introductory synopsis, as well as detailed notes on the film's production history, filmmaker, unique innovations, construction, and key themes and issues.

ESSAYISTIC DOCUMENTARIES

These documentaries are expository in nature, a rhetorical discourse designed to provide information about a particular subject or historical event. As such, they are essayistic films: carefully constructed and narrativised in order to present a clear, flowing argument designed to convince the viewer. Although not always the case, this is often supported by the usage of an authoritative ‘voice of god’ narrator. Images – which can be provided by interviews, stills, archival materials, or even dramatised re-enactments – are tightly edited in a way that supports the argument put forward by the filmmaker.

Nanook of the North (1922)

Directed by: Robert J Flaherty

Produced by: Robert J Flaherty

Written by: Frances H Flaherty (idea) and Robert J Flaherty

Editing by: Robert J Flaherty and Charles Gelb

Cinematography: Robert J Flaherty

Running time: 79 minutes

Synopsis

Early travelogue chronicling life in Inukjuak, in northern Quebec, Canada; an area all but untouched by industrial technology. The film focuses on an Inuit named Nanook and his family.

Comments

Due to the non-fiction nature of many early film shorts, it is a matter of subjectivity what is considered the first documentary. If Nanook of the North is not the first documentary film, then it is certainly the first such commercially successful feature-length production. Its director, Robert J Flaherty, was also the first filmmaker to define himself in the terms we now associate with the documentarian: an independent filmmaker, who favoured real people and locations over the artificiality of actors and sets, and who dedicated himself to seeking out new images to present through his films. ‘First I was an explorer; then I was an artist,’ was Flaherty’s famous self-assessment.

Nanook of the North

Before making Nanook Flaherty had worked as an explorer and prospector in Arctic Canada, and was thus familiar with the Inuit people. Prior to Nanook he had shot a less ambitious film in the region, which was destroyed after he accidentally dropped a cigarette onto the highly flammable film negative. (This is detailed in intertitles at the start of the documentary, which remain traumatic reading for anyone who has ever set out to shoot a film.) Flaherty subsequently received $50,000 from a French fur company, Revillon Frères, which funded his 16-month expedition to make Nanook.

The main academic discourse surrounding Nanook concerns its apparent lack of authenticity. In contrast to the lightweight cameras which would later characterise documentaries in the cinéma vérité and direct cinema modes, Flaherty’s heavy filmmaking equipment barred him from achieving this kind of off-the-cuff footage and instead necessitated him plotting out scenes in advance. Below is a recollection from Flaherty about the manner in which sequences were agreed upon, appertaining to the film’s hunting scenes:

‘Suppose we go,’ said I, ‘do you know that you and your men may have to give up making a kill, if it interferes with my film? You remember that it is the picture of you hunting the iviuk (walrus) that I want and not their meat?’ ‘Yes, yes, the aggie (motion picture) will come first,’ earnestly he assured me. ‘Not a man will stir, not a harpoon will be thrown until you give the sign. It is my word.’ We shook hands and agreed to start the next day.

More controversial was Flaherty’s decision to cast the characters in his film – in particular handpicking a new screen wife for his leading man (whose real name was actually Allakariallak). ‘We select a group of the most attractive and appealing characters we can find, to represent a family, and through them tell our story,’ he said, in relation to his later documentary Man of Aran (1943). ‘It is always a long and difficult process, this type finding, for it is surprising how few faces stand the test of the camera.’ It is not a world away from the creation of reality television: choose a good-looking group of people, and then create a series of dramatic hurdles for them to leap, which, while provoking real reactions, is by its nature contrived. Most challenging of all is the fact that Nanook is set in the past (although this is not revealed onscreen), with Flaherty electing to present life as it was prior to the influence of Europeans (for example, encouraging Allakariallak to hunt with a spear rather than a gun, and detailing the building of an igloo). From an artistic perspective these flourishes not only made the film more exciting, but strengthened Flaherty’s own philosophical views as an artist that man is at his happiest and least corrupt when closest to nature and untouched by civilisation.

These issues have led to some critics retroactively classifying Flaherty’s films as fictional documentaries. This appears unfair (and, since the term documentary seems to have been first used in conjunction with Flaherty’s Moana (1926), perhaps later documentaries produced in a different manner ought to be referred to as factual documentaries?). Ironically, it is precisely because of Flaherty’s acknowledgement that actualities can be shaped into a compelling narrative that he is well remembered today, and that his influence can be seen so strongly in the modern documentary.

Did you know?

Nanook (Allakariallak) died shortly after the film was completed. While the commonly cited myth is that he died of starvation during a hunting trip, it is more likely that his death was the result of tuberculosis.

Other recommendations by the same director

Moana (1926); Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931, as writer, producer and cinematographer, with direction by FW Murnau); Man of Aran (1934); and The Land (1942)

Night Mail (1936)

Directed by: Harry Watt and Basil Wright

Produced by: Harry Watt and Basil Wright

Written by: WH Auden

Narrated by: John Grierson

Editing by: Basil Wright

Cinematography: HE Fowle and Jonah Jones

Music by: Benjamin Britten

Running time: 25 minutes

Synopsis

Documenting the journey of an overnight mail train travelling from London to Glasgow, on which the post is sorted, dropped and collected on the run.

Comments

In today’s world of dreadful corporate promo videos it is difficult to imagine an organisation such as the General Post Office commissioning and making a film as artful as Night Mail. In fact, the documentary (whose working title was The Travelling Post Office) was one of many ambitious projects undertaken by the GPO’s dedicated documentary film unit, which, between 1934 and 1940, produced 35 short information films, before its success saw it turned into the Ministry of Information’s Crown Film Unit, where it was put to work producing a succession of British wartime propaganda films (see Listen to Britain, page 146).

Night Mail was filmed in black and white on a budget of just £2,000. What makes it so remarkable is its ambitious vision, which raises the subject matter far above what one might expect from essentially a public-service film about a rather mundane activity. John Grierson, who founded the GPO film unit, was a believer in what he referred to as ‘drama on the doorstep’, and Night Mail succeeds admirably in this capacity: shaping documentary shooting locations (although several scenes were actually shot on a soundstage), non-actors and sponsor’s message into a dramatic narrative. See, for example, the famous ‘two bridges and 45 beats’ sequence, in which the collection of a trackside mailbag is assembled in such a way as to ratchet up almost Hitchcockian levels of tension.

The documentary’s best-known sequence is undoubtedly the culmination, in which WH Auden’s spoken verse (‘This is the Night Mail crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order./Letters for the rich, letters for the poor/The shop at the corner and the girl next door’), Benjamin Britten’s music, the sounds and rhythms of the train, and a montage of landscapes and racing train wheels combine to bravura effect.

Did you know?

The sound recordist was unable to adequately record the sound of the train clattering over the tracks for the mailbag collection sequence. The soundtrack was recorded later on, with a model train and track being used instead.

While we’re on the subject…

Documentary short subjects such as 1963’s Thirty Million Letters and 1986’s artlessly named Night Mail 2 have both paid homage and tried to replicate the enduring appeal of Night Mail.

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936)

Directed by: Pare Lorentz

Written by: Pare Lorentz

Narrated by: Thomas Chalmers

Editing by: Leo Zochling

Cinematography by: Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand and Paul Ivano

Music by: Virgil Thomson

Running time: 25 minutes (without epilogue)

Synopsis

Examines the natural bounty of the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada, and how land abuses and extended drought led to the ravages of the Dust Bowl period between 1930 and 1936.

Comments

Seventy years before An Inconvenient Truth (see page 79), Pare Lorentz’s environmentalist documentary...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• ‘THE HAMMER AND THE MIRROR’ An Essay on Documentary and Truth
• A NOTE ON FILM SELECTION
• ESSAYISTIC DOCUMENTARIES
• PARTICIPATORY DOCUMENTARIES
• POETIC-EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARIES
• FLY-ON-THE-WALL DOCUMENTARIES
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• Copyright