Documentary Film

Bazin contemplating phenomenological realism

Look out it’s Dylan ‘performing’ in Don’t Look Back 1965

This blog is having an identity crisis… I have been trying to write about different issues and attempting to find a “voice” but  now due to  immense pressure from ahem…., one student, I am going to talk about Documentary film.. Apologies for the confusion. Perhaps I should have two blogs…?One for each facet of my very busy life... Ok here goes for Barry et al

Defining Documentary

Difficult to define documentary in a nutshell, but I would start off by placing it in direct contrast to fiction film.

Some times Documentaries are called “non-fiction” films

Literally, documentaries are filmic evidence,  ’documents’ of something, someone that has existed in reality.

Dcumentary can function as a genre- with its own codes and conventions, audiences and expectations. These differ in different moments of film history.

What do you expect when you watch a  documentary? How does this differ from watching fiction? (Think about the spectator)

Realism-

Realism   has spawned many film movements in European film history, Italian Neo Realism/ British Social realism where filmmakers have tried to make their films as realistic as possible using contemporary society as their backdrop to expose the often current conditions of the poor.  Andre Bazin, French writer and critic (see picture above) had many ideas about realism and he saw cinema as closely allied to the real as it produced i mages that were recorded mechanically.

For   Bazin, realism was a style whose chief elements were the long take, deep focus, limited editing and, when possible, the use of non-professional, or at least relatively unknown actors.  In La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz 1995) he uses these conventions as well as the use of black and white, which can be said to code reality.

One of the major issues is about the  relationship of film to ‘reality’ .  Different periods have seen different approaches to this.

British Documentary movement- Key works Night Mail- (Watt/Wright 1936) Watch it again…This movement was also called   called poetic realism.. and the Expositry Mode (voice of God)

What is real about this film, what is unreal now..?

The Public Gaze- Films that tried to democratise the viewing of films, “Housing Problems”  Look up the dates your self !  These early documentaries are remarkable for their use of ‘direct address’ to the camera,their objectification of the ‘poor, working class’ their outlining of facts and the film treating the subject  as a problem that had to be solved..  Compare the use of editing here with continuity editing in Hollywood fiction which draws you in.

Poetic or authoured mode- filmmaker gathers recorded sights and sounds to evoke atmosphere and mood- “Listen to Britain” Humphrey Jennings – (the last scene always makes me feel patriotic)

Observational Mode- Etre et Avoir (2003) Product of new lightweight technologies enable the filmmaker to enter into a tiny school in rural France and record seeminly unseen. How much control doe the director actually have over the ‘reality’ of the situation? Here there is no voice but there is tons and tons of editing

Direct Cinema was America’s big docu movement from the late 1950′s which was about the revolutionary new technology introduced into filmmaking, lightweight camera’s, synchronisation of sound enabled the filmmakers to enter into previously undocumented worlds, e.g politicians, sportsmen celebrities ‘normal’ people whose ordinary lives became interesting just by virtue of having the camera’s turned on them. Think about where you would place this movement in terms of the categories listed above.

Key films Primary (1960) Salesmen (1969) Don’t Look Back (1965)

Issue number two: documentary changes with the advancement of technology.

Self Reflexive documentaries- inexpensive video equipment-funding provided by TV, more control over filmmaker. The Thin blue Line a documentary about a man convicted and sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit, exposes the documentary filmmaking process. (Errol Morris 1988)

Self Reflexive can also be Docu comedy - or Performative Documentary- Michael Moore- filmmaker as part of the documentary.

Basic points are that documentary can never be just a faithful representation of the real, as it always already involves some form of choice. How to shoot what to shoot how to edit the footage…

Stella Bruzzi’s book on New Documentary elaborates  upon the long-running question that has concerned all of non-fiction production, “How do we know what we know regarding something, be it an event, person, or institution?”

The obsession with uncovering how film can best be used to “know” underlies her discussions of a variety of topics such as the authenticity of the  Kennedy assassination film, the rise of the docusoap genre in Great Britain, the journey film, presidential image making, and a survey of the performative documentaries of Nicholas Barker, Molly Dineen, and Nick Broomfield. Sounds a good one I am off to buy it…

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