Documentary is a form of story-telling. It can be nothing else. The reason is time.
Unlike other forms of visual art, paintings, photographs, sculptures, comic strips, installations, a television film is inevitably a traveller in time. It unrolls at a steady speed from start to finish. Like the writing of Omar Khayyam’s moving finger: ‘nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line.’ Time is built into the film as its basic premise. Event follows event in a pauseless flow.
Any description or presentation of events over time is a narrative of sorts. Whatever a film-maker puts on the television screen can only be presented as a story. Decisions about the order in which to put the materials are unavoidable and inescapable, no matter if each sequence in the film is intended by its maker to stand separate and equal. Even if it be the presentation of evidence about an arcane scientific hypothesis, the viewer cannot but receive each piece of information successively, spread out over time. What is seen first will inevitably inform and influence the viewer’s response to what is seen later. Thus to the viewer too, a film will always be received as a story. The film-maker will wish it to be a good story, and will try to ensure that the story the viewer follows is the one that the film-maker wishes to tell. What cannot be done is to avoid telling a story at all.
Story is not plot. Plot is that chain of causal links—this action had these consequences—which connects the starting point of a drama through to its ending. All except the most avant garde and experimental fictions have plots. Audiences expect fictions to be invented. A cause-and-effect plot draws the audience in and, by harnessing the universal human instinct for detecting causality, helps to make the events of the imaginary fictional world believable and convincing. But documentaries get their authority not so much from their internal conviction but from the implicit claim that the events and actions they present are real and true. Thus though a documentary may well have a plot too, equally well it may not. But it will always have a story.
Documentary stories can be about anything: personal tales, accounts of history, predictions of the future, explanations, conflicts, cries of pain or shouts of joy; all share the quality of being stories, arrangements of events in time. And implicit in that quality is the natural response of the audience. Audiences follow stories. For them, the driving force of the story is the question: what happens next? What keeps them watching is desire to know how things turn out. The documentary maker must find in his or her subject those story elements which keep that question uppermost in the viewers’ minds..
When the purpose of the film is simply to tell a tale which is already in story form, a history, a biography, an anecdote, this task is made relatively easy. The issue is one of compression—what do I show in order to tell the story as simply and effectively as possible in the time allowed? But many documentaries deal with materials that do not initially present themselves as stories at all. They may include accounts of concepts or ideas, descriptions of places or situations, summaries of knowledge or beliefs. Since there is no way to avoid the presentation of the material’s elements successively through time, the documentarist has no choice but to make the succession a meaningful one—that is, to find a way through the material that tells a story. Such subjects thus demand that the documentarist’s first and most important task to discover a narrative way of communicating the non-narrative material.
There are no universal means of performing this translation in a way guaranteed to succeed. Every case is unique. Though television has over the years developed a number of standard ways of presenting factual information, some more effective than others, many if not most of these devices have been devalued by familiarity and over-use. The documentarist will wish to study the subject until he or she finds within it that which lends itself best to a fresh and original treatment in story form.
How can that be done? Though we recognize that all arrangements of events over time are in some sense stories, we also know that not all are good ones. The video recordings of a surveillance camera also contain arrangements of events over time—a story of sorts—but they are not stories that anyone would be likely to find particularly appealing, nor wish to watch for their own sake. The fact that each event is neither related to the previous one nor connected to the next, that the characters shown change every few moments, that there is no underlying unity other than the location, all these factors quickly make watching such a recording a very boring experience. For a story to work, the events will usually relate to a single subject and follow a single theme, thread or line which runs right through, from a beginning to an ending. The theme will be revealed by means of these events.
In this context, the word subject is used more restrictively than usual. The subject of the documentary story means its principal figure. It is the answer to the question ‘what is the story about?’ It can be a person, an animal, an object, a concept, an idea, anything. Everyone can bring to mind countless documentary films on a limitless range of subjects: the life of the meerkat, the crisis in the London Zoo, the development of nanotechnology, the last days of an AIDS sufferer, the story of the ship Golden Hind, the world of the Khoi San people of South Africa, the true fate of Glenn Miller.
Subjects for documentary films share an important feature: they are not diffuse or indistinct ideas. Profound though its social impact may be, television is really not a very intense medium. Unlike the cinema screen, which immerses its audience in a total sensory environment to the exclusion of nearly every other stimulus, the television screen is small, fuzzy, limited in contrast, viewed in ordinary light among ordinary surroundings—a glowing postage stamp in the corner of the room. Television sound is of very much less than high fidelity. The set is often not even intended to be the sole focus of attention in the environment. A well-remembered survey of people’s viewing habits, which placed cameras inside the sets of a sample of viewers, showed that for much of the time, much of the audience was engaged in doing something else while watching—a surprising range of activities, from wallpapering to sex.
To win the battle against the viewer’s inattention using a medium with such limited presence, a documentary film’s most important weapon is simplicity and clarity of concept. If the subject of a television film is too complex to be expressed in a phrase of a few words, it may well have to be re-thought and its focus narrowed before it can be expected to make a successful leap through the screen. The television set is an effective filter for woolly ideas, confused aims and pretentious complications. The television documentary maker must find a way of approaching the subject so as to see it with a simple, perhaps even innocent—though not, one hopes, na ve—eye.
That is not to suggest that difficult ideas must always be reduced to banalities. It does mean that thought and imagination must be applied to working out ways of presenting them in a suitable form for the medium. To this end, television documentaries very often use the classic rhetorical device technically known as synecdoche—letting a part of something stand in for the whole thing: a person for society at large, a tree for nature, a storm for weather, an individual crime for the notion of crime itself. The television image is after all not the thing itself, but a representation, a sign, which only stands for, rather than is, its counterpart in the real world. The symbolic use of reality is fundamental to television, which is good on down-to-earth detail and less good on the grand vision. As the art historian Warburg said of painting, God is in the details. On television too, truth is often better found in the details than in the generalization.
The presentation of a story by means of a limited selection of significant details is, as some film-makers have noted, not far from the technique of the nineteenth century naturalist novel. In his book The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe suggested that journalists should learn the lesson taught by such writers as Balzac, Dickens and Gogol. This lesson he characterized as the power of just four devices: 1—scene by scene construction, 2—the use of dialogue, 3—point-of-view, and 4—’the recording of everyday gestures, manners, habits, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of travelling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaviour towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene.’
Wolfe suggested that point-of-view and status life, his term for the content of device no. 4, are not achievable on film. Yet many film-makers would recognize in the above quotation exactly what they seek to represent in their work. Documentarists know well that the documentary technique provides a point-of-view and the singling out of such details as express a person’s view of themselves and their place in the world. The camera must be placed somewhere, and wherever the camera stands, there stands the viewer. The camera must provide an image of something, and whatever it may be, that something will be invested by the viewer with significance. These factors do not draw attention to themselves. Audiences are mostly unaware of them. They are, as it were, the unobserved subtext of the film. Yet they give the filmmaker powerful support in depicting the broad and complex sweep of reality, while using relatively modest and simple means.
A clear and simple subject is matched by a clear and simple thread. If the subject of a story is the answer to the question ‘what is the story about?’ then the thread, theme or line answers the question ‘what route do we follow through the story?’ The thread can be any which relates to the subject: the actions and experiences of a person, the survival or otherwise of an animal, the creation or destruction of an object, the history and consequences of a concept, the development or pursuit of an idea. Just as the television documentary form favours subjects which are easily grasped so it only welcomes threads which are easily followed. Yet documentary takes its themes from life and life is often very confusing. One of the first major interpretative acts a documentarist must make is to draw out of the confusions of reality a single strong, continuous and compelling thread.
In the course of following that thread, the story may well digress. It may occasionally proceed down side-paths. There might be explanations of phenomena, descriptions of events, background histories of people. The strength of the story will depend on the extent to which the digressions are related in the minds of the audience to the central theme. It is not enough that the digressions offer useful additions to the story. The viewers must be persuaded to expect them, want them and demand them. That is to say, the digressions must be motivated. The motivation for an explanatory digression is that it tells the viewers what they want to know, and no more than they want to know, just at the moment when they want to know it. The documentarist will strive to be an entertaining raconteur rather than a bore. No film-maker wishes to be thought of as given to long digressions, in a memorable phrase: ‘beyond the speaker’s competence and the listener’s interest.’ Afterwards the story will immediately return to its theme as it continues its journey onwards. If the story is the engine that pulls all the other materials in the film along in its train, then the thread represents the couplings that connect the wagons together.
Like the couplings on that train, each scene in the story links itself onto the end of the last one, and holds out a hook for the next to hang on to. Every passage answers the question ‘what happens next?’ and the answer itself—this does—contains the same question at its own end. The impetus of the story, like the pull of the locomotive, is passed on from scene to scene all the way through the film.
The scenes of the documentary story are the records of events through which the story is told. This happened and then that occurred, this was learned, next that was researched; this was proposed, finally that was concluded. But it is still not quite enough for a story to be just a sequence of related events. A story has to have something to show for its journey through time and its passage through the viewer’s consciousness—and the something that it must show is change.
J B Priestley, who was a fine story-teller, once wrote that we register time by noticing change. We tell the time that way too: the change in position of a clock’s hands, the drip of water into a measuring container, the reduction in height of a marked candle. Without change there is no time. And without time there is no story. Stories involve change, are about change. And change has a direction: from before to afterwards. The direction of change is what reveals which way the pointer at the end of time’s arrow is facing. The story follows the course of the subject through the change from before to afterwards.
Where does a television story begin? At the first moment of change. Where does it end? When the change is complete. That is easy to say, but choosing the moment is not always simple. Makers of cinema fiction are often advised to begin with the action already in progress, the later the better, film is an art of movement. The Roman poet Horace, in his Art of Poetry, gave the story teller a Latin tag to use: in medias res, auditorem rapit—he plunges the listener into the middle of things. But all stories, excepting perhaps the book of Genesis, start with a situation that is inherited from the past. Every story-teller has also to cope with the need to fill in the background of the tale, so that the audience can understand and appreciate the opening situation. The beginning of nearly every narrative work contains a résumé of what has gone before.
The successful story-teller will find a way to include the story’s pre-history in the narrative in such a way as not to stop the forward movement of the story once it has started. Explanatory flashbacks and asides, if they appear at all, will move off from the main route only at a place where there is a natural pause in progress. Once back on course the story must pick up again in the middle of things, lest the story signals to the audience that common failing: a false, stuttering start and a second beginning.
Some story media have a simple start and the luxury of leisure to paint a picture of the status quo ante. A play begins with the rise of the curtain and a stage playwright knows that the audience is not going to get up and go home just because it takes five minutes of stage dialogue to establish who is who and what is what. Even cinema-goers will not leave their seats because the movie has a slow atmospheric start. Other media, the novel is one, need to get the story moving at once—how else to attract the bookshop browser?—but having done so can relax the pace in order to sketch in some needed history. The television documentary has a more difficult task. Because television is so uninvolving a medium, the story must start right off from the opening shot if the interest of the viewer is to be retained.
Furthermore, just as the nature of television demands simple treatment of subject and theme to compel the viewer’s attention, so it also suggests that once the viewer’s attention has been won it must be held onto. The documentary story will usually hit the screen running—and continue to run until the end. The need to persuade the audience to give their concentration is so strong that many television films—and not only those intended for broadcasting—no longer begin with an opening title sequence. The story is kicked off first, before the title, which is not introduced until the film-maker feels that the viewers’ attention has been gained. The story itself gets going from the very first image, sometimes with a preview, at other times with a preamble.
The end of a film might seem to need less careful consideration than the beginning. After all, the audience must have remained attentive all the way, if the ending is being watched at all. Yet if the purpose of a documentary is more than just to fill time or offer a temporary diversion, the end needs as much care and attention as the beginning. The closing moments of the story will decide what the viewers take away with them from having watched the work. It is the place for the conclusion, the moral of the tale. And even if an explicit and overt moral message has little place in contemporary documentary, the viewer will expect, perhaps demand, to be left with some lasting impression, feeling or understanding, after the final image has faded from the screen. A Hollywood mogul is famously reputed to have said: ‘If I want to send a message, I call Western Union.’ That was disingenuous. Neither a fiction film nor a documentary film can avoid leaving its audience with a message, even if its maker and creator had no such explicit intention. The aim of the film-maker is to make sure that the message the audience receives is one he or she means to send.
The meaning of a film, like that of a person’s life story, is never fully established until its end. It is established partly by its end. Yet in one sense, the events depicted in a documentary have no ending. The last scenes of a documentary are as tightly linked forward into the future as the beginning is connected back to the past. The world of a documentary is the real world, which has no ending. The final moments of any one story are always the first of another. Thus closure, the tying up of all loose threads and the sealing up of all opened accounts is not normally the way a documentary film can conclude its look at a subject. There are exceptions of course. Historical biography and obituary must both, after all, end in death. Yet even here, because we are watching the account of a person’s life after its final completion, we know that afterwards the world went on its way. And in looking back from now to the past, hindsight can never be ignored. A biographical film will inevitably project the subject’s shadow from its own time onto the present. Why else would one wish to watch the life story of a someone who has died, if not to learn something about his or her legacy to the world, his or her contribution to history, the consequences of his or her having once lived?
So just as to begin a documentary story is to merge the initial state into the ongoing change, to bring it to an end is to combine the final with the inconclusive. It is the relationship between the end result of change and the continuity of the world that gives the film its meaning. Whatever the subject, whatever the theme, the film-maker can never ignore the fact that the audience will always construct some final meaning to the story for themselves. The task is thus to make sure that the viewers has been left with the necessary materials from which to build their own conclusions.
One further factor, other than a single subject and continuous thread, makes a documentary story different from a mere sequence of events. A story is a shape placed on events by the interpretation of the human mind. It has no real concrete existence in the world of things. A story is a human concept and involves human emotion. The emotion is derived from the concept of intention.
The change with which the story starts creates a response from the subject. As the story begins, an aim or purpose emerges. In fiction, this is usually a human intention. The movement of the story through time and change is associated with an intention or desire on the part of to the subject of the story. The subject wishes to, aims to, intends to get to the desired goal or end from the given beginning. In fiction the intention is often quite simple, even stereotyped. A man wants to attract a woman, a detective wants to catch a crook, a singer wants to find stardom, a general wants to bask in glory, an artist wants to create a masterpiece. From the very starting point, the subject will form an idea of where he or she wishes to get to by the end. It is the film-maker’s responsibility to communicate the subject’s intention to the audience.
By contrast documentary films, being concerned with real people and real life, have no such easy options. Real human motives are, as often as not, complex and self-contradictory. And documentaries are frequently about inanimate objects or non-corporeal ideas to which intentions cannot be directly ascribed. But that does not relieve the film-maker from the task of establishing an intention of some sort. How can this be done? To solve this problem, the conventional idea of the nature of the intention, as propounded by makers of conventional fiction, must be taken rather further. For intention is actually not what it seems at first sight.
Examined more closely, it is clear that the intention of the story’s protagonist is not itself the critical factor. It is there to generate similar feelings—identification—in the audience. When audiences identify with a character, they take on that character’s intentions and respond emotionally to the snakes and ladders of that character’s fortunes. The impetus to a story is not really given by the desires of the characters of the story themselves, but by the audience’s emotions on their behalf. The subjects for whose emotions the audience stands proxy do not have to have intentions of their own at all, often they cannot have. Ivo Andric’s great historical documentary novel The Bridge Over The Drina, certainly involves the audience in strong tension and emotion on behalf the bridge, even though the author never presents it as anything other than an unfeeling object, a stone construction. What the bridge comes to signify in the novel is, of course, far more than that. It comes to bear on its ancient piers the whole history of the little town which it created and in which it stands. The bridge is not personified by Andric at all, yet by the end the reader comes desperately to care about its fate. The intention which drives the book along is the desire to survive, to be permanently present. But it is actually felt, not by the bridge, but by the reader.
Andric’s ability to make the reader feel for the bridge is the product of great artistry—he received the Nobel Prize for his work. But the task he set himself is not an uncommon one for the documentarist. The film-maker dealing with an object or an idea, and sometimes a person too, must always be looking for ways to engage the viewers’ emotions in the story. One common, if obvious, solution is to present the material as told by an on-screen character, thus giving the audience a human subject to identify with. That screen character may even tell the story by addressing the camera directly, becoming in the process a presenter, whose aims and intentions can be written into the script.
Because the ability to address the camera in a natural way is not universal, film-makers wishing to use a presenter sometimes engage a professional to do the job. This is not always an ideal method. The degree to which an audience identifies with a professional presenter is likely to be less than the level of sympathy granted to someone whose real life is the subject of the film. And the constraint on the number of possible stories imposed by a professional presenter is a serious limitation. The presenter can really only tell one kind of story: this is where I went, these are the people I met, these are the things I saw. In some contexts, this can be a most effective narrative device, particularly if the presenter’s path is a rough one, and the resulting discoveries worthy of it. A personal quest or exploration is a most natural purpose for a presenter. The quest then becomes the subject of the film, its progress and vicissitudes become the story, achievement of the presenter’s goal becomes the intention which drives the film along. On the way, information can be collected, situations can be described, exposition of ideas can be undertaken and the presenter’s own personal emotional responses explored. In some contexts too, particularly on the US television channels, the presenter’s name in the title is what counts with the audience. But there is an infinite number of different ways of telling the same story and most film-makers will try to search out as original and unexpected a way as they can.
The intention of the subject is the starting point of the story. Tracking the fate of that intention gives the story its substance. For a story is not just the account of one damned thing after another. The progress of the subject in pursuance of the intention will not be a smooth unhindered flow from start to finish. Stories depend for their interest on some impediment to the flow of movement. In a dramatic story, setbacks and resistance to the leading characters’ intentions are what gives the story its tension and excitement. ‘Will cop get robber, boy get girl, victim get revenge?’ and more generally, ‘will they succeed in realising their aims?’ are the kinds of questions the audience is led to ask. The uncertainty of the resolution is one of the major factors which gives the story its edge.
There are others. Theatre audiences in classical Greece knew very well the outcome of the stories and themes of their dramas. No modern theatre-goer is surprised by the ending of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Every reader of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, about an attempt on the life of President de Gaulle, must know that in point of fact de Gaulle was not assassinated but died, advanced in years, in his bed. And viewers of any episode of a popular detective series know perfectly well that the detective will somehow win in the end. And if the outcome of fiction is often predetermined, how much more so in documentary work, which so often pictures a world and a history already well known to the viewers. Thus the question for the audience may not be: will the subjects’ intentions succeed? Instead they will ask: how will the subjects behave along the way, how will they try to achieve their purposes, what will happen to frustrate them, or even: what new truths will tonight’s performance reveal?
The ups and downs of the subject’s intention: smooth success alternating with angry rebuff, is the stuff of which the story is built. The movement of a story is like that of a stalled motor car being pushed to start. It takes an effort to get it going; then it rolls a bit until it comes to some bumps in the road; after a struggle to overcome the bumps, the car finally accelerates until it has enough momentum for the engine to be started. The aim is to start the engine. The impediments are the bumps in the road. The ending is when the aim has been satisfied or has failed. The car drives off or is abandoned. Life goes on.
The subject’s intention is not always fulfilled. Or the ending can be ambiguous. In fact in the documentary genre the outcome is not usually cut and dried. In The Last Exodus, the film about the emigration of Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union, the story tells of the Jews’ attempts over the last 100 years to find a viable life for themselves in Russia. That intention is not realized. They fail. In the last scene of all, the arrival of a plane-full of Russian Jews in Israel, the story ends and the future begins in a mixture of grief and joy, hope and anxiety. We know, as perhaps they do not, that the security and peace that they yearn for, is unlikely to be found in their new home in the turbulent Middle East.
Every story one might wish to tell in a television documentary is shaped by the conflict between intention and obstruction. And all are likely to have an indeterminate end, for they are about real things which are never neatly concluded. ‘They lived happily ever after,’ may be a possible ending for a fairy tale, but life is not like that and documentaries reflect this fact. And the reverse is also true. An unhappy ending in the real world is not always necessarily for ever either. The convict condemned to life imprisonment may yet, one day, be released, or the executed felon may be granted a posthumous free pardon.
These uncertainties always influence the audience’s reaction to the end of a film, even when the outcome seems absolutely cut and dried. Many documentaries about the history and origins of the Second World War have focused on the intentions of the leaders of Western European nations—to avoid war. A film might tell the story of how historical and social forces and events conspired, in the teeth of what the leaders thought were their best efforts, to send their nations into the bloodiest war in history. Here the audience may well identify not with the historical characters shown, but with the unseen millions who the audience know will perish at a time after that represented in the film. Yet though the intentions of the film’s subjects are frustrated, the audience knows that, in the end, the Western Allies win. Tragedy and victory are intermingled.
The same considerations apply even to the comparatively unemotional world of scientific research—not the researchers, who are certainly not unemotional, but to the pursuit of understanding itself. A film about the search for the W particle (an elementary nuclear particle) was about the attempt to demonstrate the existence of the particle in the face of the many obstacles constantly thrown up by resistant nature. Here the identification of the audience was directed, not so much towards the human personalities doing the searching, but towards the very search itself, an entirely abstract notion. Success or failure were, in a sense, irrelevant. As the film ended, the audience had seen yet more questions thrown up and knew full well that the search for knowledge is never ending.
The film-maker is not always able to control the identification of the viewers. In one episode of a technology series called The Limit,1 the story was told of the design problems and difficulties involved in developing a super-airliner. The viewers were offered a character—Hubert the French designer and father of the project—to identify with. But the viewer’s heart—and even that of the commentary writer—were quickly stolen by the romance and drama of the project itself, as one obstacle after another was faced and overcome. Hubert’s own personal story was rapidly eclipsed. He was saying more than he knew when he summed up both the aircraft project and the story’s thread with the words: ‘this programme is a jumping race.’
Just as much as in a fiction film, the audience for a documentary hitches an emotional lift by identifying with the subject. The task of the film-maker is to control the course of that ride, how exciting or how sedate it is to be, where the bumps and the downhill runs should come, by showing the audience a sequence of events over time. The events are the moments of change in the story. To determine how to lay them out needs an appreciation of the place of time in the film. To do that, we must return to the subject of time and examine it rather more closely.
Though time is the characteristic dimension of the film medium, it is not all that it may seem. To be sure, a film is spread out over time, but that time is not real time—’time of day,’ as video engineers call it. It may not even represent time at all, for it may be used almost interchangeably in place of other dimensions and other processes, and not just the progression of minutes, hours, days and years.
Film time lends itself readily to conversion and translation. Just as in the comic strip, time is represented by the arrangement of the frames on the flat page, the readers moving through time as their eyes pass across it, so film time can represent space. The translation is easily made. It is a commonplace to follow Einstein in interpreting time as a kind of fourth spatial dimension. The ‘journey through time’ is a frequently used metaphor. To swap time for distance commits no assault on our concept of what a dimension is.
In a documentary about the river Nile, for example, the subject was the river itself and the film recorded its journey from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea. The course of the film was the course of the Nile. It seems fanciful to speak of a river having an aim, and that aim being impeded in some way. But even without explicitly personifying the world’s longest river, it is not hard, as one stands at the headwaters flowing out of Lake Albert in Uganda, to think in terms of the destiny of the flow, easy to be swept up in the romance of the immense journey on which the waters are about to embark, plunging over waterfalls, passing through gorges, impeded by cataracts and slowed by reed marshes, flowing through ancient valleys and over the fields of the fellahin, to end four thousand miles away in the sea.
More symbolic, less concrete, is the use of time to represent the development in breadth of an idea or a concept. In one documentary looking at the current state of research into Hodgkin’s disease, progress in time through the film was translated into progress in researching the disease. The aim of the subjects of the film, the researchers, was fully to collect together everything that was then known about it, believing that such a synthesis would reveal a new approach to treating the condition. The impediments to achieving that aim were to be found in the refractory nature of the biological world, the way in which underlying truths are hidden and evade the researchers’ best efforts to tease them out with their experiments.
Film time can, of course, represent real time too. As when time itself is the subject of a story, for a good story does not have to be complicated. Such simplicity can, however, be overused. Perhaps too many natural history documentaries are based on the story of a day—sometimes a season or a year—in the life of a particular animal. The story is clear: the sun rises; the animal begins its day; later it has an adventure; it returns to its home; the sun sets. The story has a beginning, sunrise, and an ending, sunset. Like all true pictures of life and all true stories, it starts in the middle of things, in medias res as the classical author described it, and ends while the world goes on. The story has a structure—the day—which everybody understands. The aim of the subject of the film—the animal—is to get through the day and find its food without itself being eaten. The obstructions to its aims are the skill of the prey in evading its attacks and the threat of its own enemies. Yet though such a tale fulfils all the criteria for story-telling, its very familiarity makes it hard to come away without a feeling of ‘so what?’ The natural history film-makers, for all their skill, might have done better to discover in their subject a fresher and more original story.
A film such as ‘A Day in the Life of…’ does, however, demonstrate one very important point. Though the passage of time can itself be the theme of the story, film time is not real time. A day in the life of an animal is presented in thirty or fifty minutes of film time. The film is a compressed, a speeded-up, account of a day. Yet the moving pictures of which the film is composed—the shots themselves—happen in real time. A shot of a ten-second event must last ten seconds. Even when slowed down or speeded up, we perceive the film time as if it were real time. A time-lapse shot of a plant amazes us when a flower grows before our eyes from seed to maturity in thirty seconds.
In principle, the change of time could be expressed in film. The film could speed up, even reverse as it runs, as if searching through an endless video recording of reality. It might be an interesting technique for some purposes, but it is not a technique currently in use.
In the documentary convention, time in the film can only be manipulated during the invisible junctions between shots. A writer can span a century with a paragraph and leap back a thousand years within a sentence. But on film, change of time is inexpressible and unexpressed. A film-maker can never show, only imply, time switching tracks at the joints in the flow of the pictures and sounds.
Thus the way time is expressed in a documentary film is as what can be called story time. Control of the story time is one of the central tasks of the film story-teller. Balance, flow, a carefully calculated and appropriate pace, all are important features of the documentary medium. For the way in which events are distributed in the story time will not necessarily be even and regular. Events often follow each other in haste, give way to long gaps, and are then followed by another flurry of rapid activity. The density of the events in the story time will be related to the power of their impact on the story’s thread. It will also be related to the viewers’ ability to absorb what is going on. Too many events, composed too quickly, will overwhelm the audience. Too few will bore them.
A film story, therefore, consists of chosen moments, running in real time, linked so as to elide, to make invisible, the time-gaps between them. Much of the art of story-telling on film lies in the decisions on what to choose to show, what to leave out, and where to place the elements within the story time. Since stories are about change, the most significant moments in the story are by definition the moments of change. A documentary tells its story in terms of a chain of significant moments of change. The documentary maker selects the moments out of the seamless continuity of real life. The moments are expressed in images and sounds, pictures and words—the materials from which all documentaries are built.
Note
1 BBC 1996