Keith Beattie

Men with Movie Cameras: Flaherty and Grierson

The list of foundational figures in the history of documentary — those documentary filmmakers whose work has been identified as integral to the development of documentary practices — is a varied one. Dziga Vertov, Walther Ruttmann, Joris Ivens, Pare Lorentz and Leni Riefenstahl are prominent in accounts of world documentary cinema, while two figures, Robert Flaherty (1884–1951) and John Grierson (1898–1972), are generally considered to be the founders of English language documentary. The pioneering status of both Flaherty and Grierson rests on the fact that both filmmakers developed practices, methods, techniques, and most notably in Grierson’s case, institutional arrangements and a body of theoretical writing that in varying ways, formed the bases of documentary as it continues to be practiced in numerous countries worldwide.

Reworking Direct Cinema: Performative Display in Rockumentary

The documentary form popularly referred to as rockumentary has become, since its inception in the early 1960s, a staple of nonfiction film production.

The evidentiary strategies of Two Laws

Abstract This article examines the ways in which the documentary film Two Laws deploys a variety of strategies to represent the historical claim to land made in the early 1980s by the Borroloola people of Australias Northern Territory. Cross-cultural collaboration between the indigenous people of Borroloola and two non-indigenous film-makers produced a film that combines a vigorous reflexivity with dramatic re-enactment and oral testimony. Importantly, the presentation of evidence in support of the land claim is achieved via a form communally devised by the Borroloola people based on their cultural needs and contingent on Borroloola social structure. In this way the so-called documentary truth claim and indigenous land claim intersect in Two Laws: for the Borroloola people, the filmic evidentiary truth claim functions in a direct way in support of their legal claim to their lands.

The Camera I: Autobiographical Documentary

‘I thought it was real’; ‘I try to keep track of the days’; ‘dear diary’. The styles and language of written autobiography are familiar to us. The expression of the self — through use of the first person ‘I’ — characterizes a written form which reflects and focuses various ‘personal’ or subjective issues and agendas. A move from written autobiography to filmed self-representation has extended the possibilities for the depiction of ‘first person’ topics and created new styles and forms available for such representation. In turn, new camera and sound technology has further contributed to the growth of the autobiographical mode. The camcorder diary, for example, is now a popular and expanding form of self-authored work which has impacted on the visual language of the autobiography, creating new visual styles that situate the viewer in an intimate relationship with the subject of the autobiography. Other issues beyond new camera technologies have impacted on the development of autobiographical film and video.

The Evening Report: Television Documentary Journalism

The journalistic reporting of newsworthy issues is an essential feature of television programming. Two of the primary televisual modes deployed to report current events and notable personalities are news bulletins and current affairs programmes. Television news reports typically feature one or more news presenters or readers in a studio whose scripted to-camera comments are complemented by video footage of selected news items. Current affairs programming resembles new bulletins in those examples that include multiple studio-based items of interview and discussion. Alternatively, current affairs programming moves away from the format of the news bulletin in those cases where a programme is composed of short, filmed reports on a single topic. In such cases, current affairs programming intersects with a related, though distinct, form of television news reporting, that of the long-form television news documentary, the subject of this chapter.

Finding and Keeping: Compilation Documentary

The compilation filmmaker is a collector and an editor who creates an object — a film or television programme — from a variety of so-called found footage. Footage that can serve as the basis of the compilation film includes, among other sources, newsreels, television programmes, government produced films, instructional films, home movies and fiction films. From among these diverse sources the compilation filmmaker constructs a work that in its ‘pure’ form is composed entirely of archival footage, devoid of interviews and voice-over narration. The pure form of compilation film has been encoded in definitions such as: ‘the compilation film is a documentary made solely from already existing footage. The filmmaker may never use the camera, functioning primarily as an editor, presenting and analysing new footage (made by others for other purposes) through juxtaposition and ordering of material in the editing process’ (Sobchack and Sobchack, 1987: 355). This definition, with its emphasis on a film constructed solely from existing sources, reflects the approach to compilation film taken by film historian Jay Leyda (1964) in one of the few book-length studies of the form in which he characterized the process of compilation as one in which ‘films beget films’.

The Fact/Fiction Divide: Drama-Documentary and Documentary Drama

Television schedules reflect the increasing prominence of productions which meld the conventions of drama and documentary. Historical dramas, ‘biopics’ (filmed accounts of the lives of famous and infamous people), dramas constructed around incidents from news headlines, dramatic plays which replicate the visual styles of documentary and journalistic inquiries which include dramatic re-enactments, are all a part of this popular global televisual practice. The film industry also continues to produce work in this field, most notably filmed biographies and historical dramas including JFK (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Braveheart (1995), Michael Collins (1996), Hurricane (1999), Pearl Harbor (2000), Iris (2001), Ali (2001) and Pollock (2002). Works of this type raise a number of questions regarding the documentary form, and the legitimacy of its relationship to dramatic treatment of historical events. Depending on which interpreters are read, the meeting of fact and fiction results in either the subversion of documentary claims to authenticity and veracity, or, innovative and productive approaches to documentary representation.

The Burning Question: The Future of Documentary

In 1996 the editors of a collection of essays devoted to aspects of documentary film and television invited a selection of international documentary producers, directors and editors to answer a number of questions, among them, ‘What is the future of the documentary?’ The inquiry, undertaken in a chapter titled ‘The Burning Question’, provided a range of responses, including observations on documentary cinema, the fate of documentaries commissioned for television, the funding regimes ruling both environments, and occasionally, reference to the part new digital technologies will play in the future of documentary (Macdonald and Cousins, 1996). Perhaps the most striking aspect of the investigation was the number of participants who chose not to answer this particular question. Attempting to predict the future is a demanding and risky task which some filmmakers and commentators simply chose to ignore. Unfortunately, one result of such a silence is the suggestion that documentary does not have a future. One thing that can be stated with certainty is that documentary representations of the real will continue to be produced in the twenty-first century.

The Truth of the Matter: Cinéma Vérité and Direct Cinema

Cinema verite — a form associated with developments in France — and direct cinema — work associated with the United States — have, since their inceptions in the early 1960s, constituted profound influences on documentary filmmaking.1 Cinema verite, ‘film truth’, drew on Vertov’s description of a kino pravda, a cinema or film dedicated to representing truth in ways not achieved in the fictional cinema. Direct cinema, a misnomer in terms of the fact that most work in the category comprised journalistic reports produced for television, aimed to reveal the truths of human existence residing behind the surface facts. Film historian Eric Barnouw (1983: 255) summarized the forms by describing what he saw as their essential differences: The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the…cinema verite artist was often an avowed participant. The direct cinema artist played the role of the involved bystander; the cinema verite artist espoused that of provocateur. Direct cinema found its truth in events available to the camera. Cinema verite was committed to a paradox: that artificial circumstances could bring hidden truth to the surface.

Constructing and Contesting Otherness: Ethnographic Film

At the close of the nineteenth century a French physician, Felix-Louis Regnault, made the following observation in the course of his research into the anatomy and physical movement of people he referred to as ‘savages’: ‘All savage peoples make recourse to gesture to express themselves; their language is so poor it does not suffice to make them understood … With primitive man, gesture precedes speech’ (quoted in Rony, 1996: 3). By the time he published this description (in 1898), Regnault had already produced a number of filmed studies of so-called primitive people that have since been considered to be the first ethnographic films.1 To Regnault, his films were documents which reveal, through close scientific observation, details of a ‘race’ of people who, plunged in darkness without adequate language, cannot represent themselves.2 Regnault’s project of representing ‘inarticulate savages’ in ways intended to provide ‘them’ with a history intersected with the original aim of anthropology, a field of study that was then developing its focus. In a broad sense, anthropology established itself at the turn of the twentieth century as a Western academic discourse which assigned itself the task of representing non-Westernized peoples.