24

Character, History, and Politics

In Richard Leacock’s 1964 documentary Campaign Manager, a heated, mealtime strategy session slides into an equally intense argument over who ordered the medium-rare steak. A similar scene is dramatized in Michael Ritchie’s 1972 feature film The Candidate. ¹ Because these two films have virtually identical content, they enable us to study how mainstream scripts have traditionally transformed historical and political material into fiction. In this chapter, we pay particular attention to three transforming techniques—the filling in of missing spaces, the use of rhythm to heighten articulation, and the personalization of decision making. We then look at how these techniques serve to diminish the historic overview that makes documentary reality so powerful. Finally, we examine some alternative transformations that, while dramatizing the tension within individual personality, still affirm documentary reality.

We now accept it as a critical commonplace that the traditional distinction between documentary and narrative—articulated as truth vs. fiction—is problematic. However true the events of a documentary may be when they are filmed, the act of filming transforms them into recorded, mediated, formally constructed representations. Such representations necessarily convey an interpretative meaning independent of the truth of their subject. All the filmmaking choices—selection, framing, focal length, photographic quality, editing sequence, shot length, and sound mix—inscribe such a point of view.

Rather than looking at the question of truth, we, instead, approach the distinction in terms of the representation of individual motive. The restorative three-act structure locates the source and the meaning of action within the psychology of character. All else is subordinated to this causality. Documentary, on the contrary, deals with the material world’s resistance to such a clear-cut sense of individual causality. This may or may not be acknowledged, but although both fiction and documentary construct their representation to reveal, a documentary is always constrained by the fact that it must recognize that its subject has an existence independent of the film. Of course, it is such limitation, such a sense that meaning is not fully accounted for and contained within the film, that brings documentary closer to history.

We must recognize this limitation if we are to make fictional films that speak to the interactions between the individual and the larger world.

Filling in, Rhythmic Articulation, and Personalization

To demonstrate why mainstream screenwriting does not speak to this tension, we will show what happens when you use three techniques— filling in missing spaces, heightening articulation through rhythm, and personalizing decisions—to transform historical material into fiction. The following transcript is from a section of documentary footage taken from the fifth episode of the PBS documentary on the Civil Rights movement, Eyes on the Prize – Mississippi: Is This America? (1962–1964).² The scene is from the training camp for the Mississippi Freedom Summer, run by veteran civil rights workers at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, during June 1964.

Does this scene illustrate a residual racism lingering in America, so that even America’s apparently most liberal white children are susceptible to it? Or is it a moment where one individual, for whatever personal reason, gets angry (we don’t see this, but we can imagine it) and starts pushing and provoking everyone else? Or is it just an accident of confusion, without any meaning beyond the event itself? There is, of course, no single answer, but the openendedness that characterizes this direct-cinema documentary technique allows, even forces, a number of interpretations. Even if we finally reject those interpretations that suggest a disturbing and ironic indictment of racism in American society, we must at least consider them as possibilities.

We are now going to rewrite the previous transcript into a mainstream fictional scene, by centering our attention almost exclusively on character, in order to show how such rewriting restricts our range of interpretation. Normally when rewriting, we would first ask ourselves: What effect we want to achieve? Once we answer this, we would know what to change. However, for purposes of illustration, we are going to work backwards here—making changes and then analyzing their effects.

When we look at the previous transcription, we see that two important stretches of time are not represented. The transition between Forman asking the students to role-play and their presumably subsequent gathering by the mock courthouse has been cut out (or more likely, not filmed), and, although we see the crowd beginning to collapse around the civil rights leaders, we do not actually observe the leaders being knocked to the ground. The fact that they stand up and brush themselves off in the next sequence allows us to assume that this happened.

Let’s now reconstruct this scene in screenplay form, filling in these missing moments with imagined transitions. This filling in of transitions is one of the ways we traditionally transform fragmented historical material into fiction. Six beats have been marked for subsequent discussion.

Without personalizing the group of white students anymore than is strictly necessary (we will do that in the next section), we have fleshed out— “milked,” if you will—the transitions merely implied by the documentary footage, shaping them by rhythmic articulation. Let’s look closely at how the first transition works.

In Beat 1, Leader 2 slaps the “Courthouse” sign on the tree without telling the students what they are supposed to do. Figuring it out, the students play (Beat 2) at being southern rednecks. A general trick is used here. A tight script avoids doubling; that is, it avoids an explanation followed by an action played out precisely to the specifications of that explanation. Rather than have Leader 2 tell the white students what to do and then show the students doing it, we achieve a tighter scene by having Leader 2 hint and then having the students show us, as they (and we) figure it out. If you do place the explanation first, you will want to show us something that does not go according to plan.

In the third beat, the Leader challenges the white students to cut loose, then in the fourth beat, he ups the ante by asking them to yell the word nigger. They go silent. Note the use of contrast here. The silence after the leader asks them to say the word nigger becomes much more powerful, because the intensity of the white students yelling has been jacked up by the previous beat. Only in the fifth beat can one person finally step forward and say it; and only in the sixth beat, do the rest of the students dare to join in.

The beats were written to create a logical momentum that leads the white students to break their taboo and say the one word that is most difficult for them to say. The logic builds like this: Beat 1—The civil rights leaders are asking the students to lean forward by hinting at what they want the students to do but not telling them outright. Beat 2—The students figure it out and play at being bad guys. Making the leap on their own to playing rednecks establishes the eagerness of the students to do what is expected of them. It suggests an energy and a willingness to throw themselves into childlike game-playing that will be intensified by Beat 3 and will ultimately lead to Beat 6. After the boisterous acceleration of Beats 2 and 3, Beat 4 closes in silence. The silence inscribes a space, a clear moment of expectation that not only fills in the transition but also directs us to its most important moment. When the white student finally says nigger, the importance of this action has already been carefully framed.

In the transcription of the actual film, we saw how the sense of historical inevitability developed, in large part, due to the omissions of the transition scenes. Lacking their particularity, we are led to generalize and fill in on our own. Rather than focus on character for motivation, we look to the historical situation.

By dramatizing the omitted transitions, we begin to reduce the sense of historical inevitability in favor of narrative causality. Something specific happens, events evolve from that, and this specificity makes us less confident about the kind of historical generalizations we can make.

We have added detail to the script, but we have not yet tied it to a specific personality. Although we have filled in the transition, the movement toward the fight remains completely impersonal. The white students act, but we do not know why. The motivation comes rhythmically from the previous beats; the buildup of excitement and anticipation in Beats 2 and 3 generates a momentum that is irresistible, if uncharacterized. We have no idea why one specific student volunteers and the rest do not.

Now we’ll go deeper into the screenplay and lay in a specific character motivation. As you no doubt can guess, this takes us even farther from historical representation.

By opening the scene on David’s attempt to get a reaction from an in different John, this new version immediately frames the issue in terms of character. Although our interpretative position in the first dramatized version remains ambiguous (we see the transitions, but we do not understand individual motivation), this version leaves us with little doubt about how we are meant to enter the scene. In the first version, we wonder what will happen between these groups of whites and blacks given the history of American race relations and the lack of anything turning us in other directions. In the second version, we wonder why David is so eager for affirmation and how this eagerness will condition his subsequent actions in the context of this moment in the history of American race relations.

This difference in focus actually serves to change the location of the meaning. In the first version, our initial interest is in the content of the Leader’s words. The opening shot holds our attention even though it runs much longer than we would expect in a narrative film. But in the second version, the words are less important than is the physical relationship, with David trailing after John, all the while seeking his recognition. In the documentary, we would be lost without dialogue, while the opening beats of the fictional screenplay would be quite intelligible without sound.

The first beat dramatizes John’s cool familiarity with the role-playing. He is the only white student to know what Leader 2 is suggesting. When David picks it up in Beat 2, he plays off of John, not off of the leader. This is a critically important transformation—the leader has been reduced to the “other,” the unknown character who remains in the background. The force that David responds to is no longer the African-American man, but John, a potential white friend. The unspoken implication is that, although intellectually David might be here for the racial equality of the civil rights movement, emotionally he is still more eager for approval from the older white man he understands, rather than from the African-American leaders he apparently has come to work with. This relationship is reinforced in Beat 6, during which David seeks permission to say the word nigger (“It’s only a game?”)—not from the African-American leader who has asked him to say it, but from John.

The cumulative effect of this is to give a public act a private meaning. We have personalized David’s decision to say the word nigger —we have given it subtext. The paradox is that, normally, subtext is a sign of the writer’s success; it implies there is more to the character’s private life than meets the eye. But if we want to maintain focus on more abstracted social issues, on an historical perspective, we cannot explain everything in terms of the character’s personal life. We must suggest that larger, more impersonal circumstances have something to do with the outcome.

We have taken a documentary scene that we are inclined to read as an expression of a moment of racial intolerance and have turned it into a personal story about an insecure character named David, who is seeking approval through his involvement in the Civil Rights movement. Of course, we have no way of knowing what really happened in Oxford, Ohio, that day in June 1964. The issue here, though, is not what actually happened, but what is suggested by different forms of representation, because it is these forms of representation that we can control. By using the mainstream model and placing the character story in the foreground, we bring to this event a greater individual specificity that may involve us more in the story, but the cost is considerable. History becomes secondary to personal will. The possibility that this scene might represent anything greater than David’s psychological needs is diminished. Far from being indifferent or cruel, the world becomes highly responsive to our individuality. It becomes expressive of an internal state. If we want to maintain historical causality, the sense that at times we are moved by forces larger than ourselves, we have to find some way to flatten the story, to diminish character motivation, and create some space for a broader range of motivation.

Before we go on, we need to add one more thing. A fictional film that maintained the distance of this documentary segment for its whole length would bore the most discriminating viewer. Storytelling assumes modulation of distance to achieve its effects. An indiscriminate use of such distance would be read as a lack of filmmaking control. However, used selectively, the flattening, the sense of inevitability suggested by the documentary, is a tool that the fictional filmmaker can use for considerable effect.

Using Narrative Distance to Suggest the Impersonality of History

To control narrative distance, we have to find a means to establish a tension between the personal and the more formal, distant voice characterized by the documentary. One way to bring about tension is to account for the narration by presenting the scene as though it were actually a documentary seen by a character within the story. This is very useful, because it can suggest two, apparently simultaneous, orders of reality—the documentary itself and the dramatic space in which the documentary is viewed. Framing the event as a documentary within a dramatic film also frees the camera to assume a more open, documentary form without having to otherwise account for the radical change in style.

Holes do not have to be filled in, rhythms do not have to be articulated, the documentary scene does not have to be personalized. While at the same time, the framing dramatic scene can serve all three techniques without disturbing the fragmentary quality of the documentary. The following example is a scene in which a middle-aged man, having used the memories aroused by looking at a tape of himself as a young man to revive his own sense of social commitment, begins to realize that the moment in Mississippi was not as clear-cut as he remembered. The content mixes in another documentary scene from the same episode of Eyes on the Prize.

There is another technique that can be used to distance the viewer from a scene without actually throwing the scene into the past. We can play it almost exactly as before, but, by exaggerating the pattern of the scene, we call attention to its formal qualities, to the fact that it is not quite natural. This conscious lack of naturalism suggests that there is more going on here than a specific character’s story.

In Beat 1, Leader 2 slaps the “Courthouse” sign to the tree, leaving the white students uncertain about what they are to do. Only after the Leader’s encouragement does one student tentatively take a stab at it (Beat 2). The Leader affirms the student’s action. Because it is okay, the other students join in (Beat 3), pretending to be southern rednecks. In Beat 4, the leader challenges the white students to cut loose; in Beat 5, he ups the ante by asking them to yell the word nigger. They go absolutely silent. Only after almost identical encouragement in Beat 6 can the same white student finally step forward and say it.

Notice the intentional repeating of motif in Beats 1–3 and Beats 5–7. These two sets of beats stop the action and focus on the same individual who hesitates, receives identical encouragement, and finally acts. The success of that individual’s action then frees the others to follow. The repetition of the motif can be placed in the foreground (especially if the motif is repeated a third time), so that the viewer’s attention is unconsciously taken from the question of individual motivation to the broader sense of a patterned or formal motivation. The scene will begin to seem artificial, intentionally stagy. Such artificiality displaces the motivation. The scene will seem to come, not from the story world (i.e., not from a character’s specific motivations), but from some imposed outside world. Because the scene is so distant, this outside world may supply the necessary perspective without consciously breaking the immediateness of the story. We will end with a few examples of films that use these techniques.

The film Swoon gets its historical perspective, not by updating the case of Leopold and Loeb or presenting it as though we were there, but by foregrounding the distance between then and now by introducing a number of historical anachronisms into the story, which emphasizes the difficulty in a historic recreation. It starts and ends with a scene of recreation in which actors circle around one another in front of a backdrop while we see modern film equipment at the edges of the frame—the whole thing is a performance.

Sometimes, the performance comes from the script, as in the choice of framing the story with these two scenes. Sometimes, it comes from the directing. As Leopold waits in the car, Loeb draws the boy they will kill into the car. The camera remains with Leopold in the car. But outside of anyone’s point of view, the camera twice slides over to a lake and goes out of focus. The feeling it conveys is not only a lyric expression of what the character is feeling but also an acknowledgment of the act of narration which distances the scene, reminding us that it is a historic recreation. Instead of seamlessly appearing to enter history, we are constantly aware of the tension between our perspective today and the not fully explainable quality of this moment in our past.

Daughters of the Dust achieves its historic perspective in a number of ways. By opening with a title that sets the historical situation and its outcome, the film functions much like the titles in Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage), which tell us exactly what will happen in each scene. In one critical scene in Daughters of the Dust, Nana Peazant, the island’s matriarch, confronts her great grandson, Eli. After Eli moves away, Nana begs him to return. At first, he does not, and a series of cross-cuts builds the tension between the two characters. However, as this scene reaches what seems like a climax, we cut away from it altogether to a group of women in white dancing on the beach. This imagery becomes processed and slowed down; hence, we read it not as emphasizing individual characters but rather the dance—the act and joy of ritual itself. We cut back to Nana Peazant as she holds her hands out to Eli. After a beat, he takes them.

A character changes in this sequence, but we do not see the moment of change. Instead, it happens while we watch the imagery of the dancing woman. Instead of the motivation coming at the individual level, the effect of this design is to displace the meaning to the interaction between the individual and his history. Eli’s decision is motivated by some combination of his own circumstances and the history of his people.

Conclusion

As we move beyond the simple truth/fiction distinction, we can see that documentary approaches open up subjects and forms that may be borrowed by fictional filmmakers. At the same time, documentary film-makers’ increasing awareness of the constructed nature of their work has led them to appropriate devices that had been traditionally limited to narrative films. But it is important for filmmakers to realize that while the old truth/ fiction distinction is no longer automatically applicable, there is a sense in which documentary suggests a very different worldview than do mainstream fictional films. To truly use documentary as a source for fiction, we not only have to appropriate its content, but we have to think about using its form to expand the possibilities and range of fictional filmmaking.

References

1.  We would like to thank Professor Warren Bass of Temple University for calling this to our attention at the 1990 Symposium on Screenwriting and the Academy, in New Orleans.

2.  Eyes on the Prize – Mississippi: Is This America? (1962–1964). Transcription of the fifth episode.