The stories documentaries tell are different from other stories because they deal in a view taken of the real world. There are two principal means to this end. Some film-makers approach the task like a sculptor exploring a block of marble to find the sculpture hidden within. They shoot a great deal of material, usually over a long period of time, following many threads, and cultivating a sensitive instinct for knowing which thread to follow at any time. An hour-long story is then hewn out of perhaps fifty or sixty hours of shot material. Such filming can produce studies of great depth of detail and intimacy, perhaps the closest there is to representing the fine-grained texture of the real world—of course filtered through the film-maker’s personality and opinions. It is also expensive.
Other film-makers choose a different way of working, more like a sculptor in clay adding material, piece by piece, to an armature. They devote most of their time not to filming but to informing themselves and learning about their subjects with the aim of distilling their understanding into the shooting of a relatively small number of significant and heightened scenes. Heightened, in the sense of being composed of only chosen moments, rather than the random disorder of the real world. While the stone sculptor is ultimately limited in scope by the size of the marble. The clay sculptor is not. Nor is there any limit to the breadth and sweep of a film made with the equivalent technique.
Once filming, the documentarist’s task is to capture reality. Films—cinema and television, drama and documentary—are, with few exceptions, records of real events. That is to say: something actually happened in front of the camera and was photographed. If what happened was that paid actors performed to order, it is called fiction. If people appeared as themselves, improvising their own lives, perhaps even unconscious of being filmed, it is called documentary. But that distinction is somewhat false. Both fictional and factual films are records of performances. Indeed contributors to documentaries are often judged by their ‘performance’. Do they become tongue-tied in front of the camera? Do they suddenly forget how to do the simplest tasks? Are they too knowing? What is being asked is how good are they at acting—at acting as themselves.
In spite of its factual basis, the television documentary is a descendent of the theatrical presentation. It has a dramatic shape, and dramatic values inform the audience’s response. Every attempt is usually made to avoid revealing the presence of the film crew and its equipment. Cameras, microphones, lights are usually studiously hidden from the viewer’s awareness—even in news films. Contributors are discouraged from looking at the camera. Technical or artistic demands as well as equipment failures mean that contributors may be asked to repeat the same actions many times. People will be asked to do things for the shot rather than for themselves: walk along there, stop at that point, pick up that glass and drink, take your coat from the hook and put it on.
The justification, for those who use such filming techniques, is the attempt to recreate reality: to restage for the camera an event or an action that really has already happened. Some film-makers also allow themselves to include events that could reasonably be expected to have happened, even if they didn’t. And of course there are documentary makers who include events which they merely wish had happened.
The stone sculptors adopt a different principle. In the interests of an honest depiction of reality, the camera team spend so long with the contributors that they become part of the everyday environment. The camera is hand-held and moves around the scene following developments as they happen. The crew does not interfere or often even speak. Nobody is asked to do anything for the camera. The contributors are intended in the end to forget the presence of the film crew—just as Greek audiences reputedly ignored the actors who froze like statues when not involved in a scene—and simply get on with their lives.
Even so, efforts are usually still made to hide the technology and its operators from the audience. Being part of the participants’ unnoticed environment, they are deemed irrelevant to the scenes being shown. True, some documentarists make a feature of not denying the camera’s presence at all. It becomes part of the action. The photographer or director allows him or herself to be addressed by the subjects of the film. Sometimes allowing his or her own voice to be heard asking questions, prompting responses, suggesting actions. The camera and its operator become part of the story.
The debate about which approach to documentary is the more honest and truthful has been going on a long time. Documentarists have always been concerned about how much their own presence distorts reality. The film equivalent of Heisenberg’s principle surely operates here. Just as observing and measuring a physical particle or event cannot but influence its motion or position, so it is equally clear that the presence of a camera crew cannot avoid influencing any situation in which it finds itself. ‘Fly on the wall’ is a neat description, but a film crew comprising camera operator, sound recordist, perhaps director and even production assistant is some fly. Even without lights, a solo cine-photographer filming the proceedings hardly goes unnoticed in most company, though it only be nephew Albert with his new camcorder. On the other hand, experience suggests that if people are performing a task with which they are familiar and which is important to them, their occupational persona takes over, and this is usually considerably less affected by being observed than is their private self. In The Young Offender,1 an improvised drama-documentary about a juvenile defendant, the staged interrogation by real police was rough enough to alarm press reviewers. It was clear to the director that the officer involved had quickly forgotten the fictional nature of the situation.
Where documentarists position themselves in the spectrum of non-interference principles will depend on many factors: their own personal predilections, the practicalities of the situation, the funding of their work. Making ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentaries involves shooting a great deal of material, far more than when a film-maker decides in advance what story is to be told. Such a use of film-stock is expensive. Even on videotape, the amount of editing time needed, even only to view the recorded material, can make for a swollen budget.
What counts in the end is honesty. Every documentary filmmaker must take a position on the truthfulness of his or her work. There is an implicit claim in every documentary that ‘the following is true as I see it.’ But there is no way that the viewer can tell whether the promise is fulfilled. It can only be a matter of trust. It is the implicit duty of every documentary maker to stand by the accuracy of the film’s claim to truth.
But the people who appear in the film often also have their own agenda, quite irrespective of the film-maker’s wishes. Nobody is completely natural in front of a camera because nobody is completely natural anywhere. We all have a self-image, or a series of self-images, that we try to project. As Goffman showed in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, all of life is a performance of one sort or another: to our relatives, to our friends, to our colleagues—we even perform to ourselves. And performing for the camera is just one particular way of presenting oneself, neither less nor more true than any other. Many people apply an artistry to that performance which may lead them to remould reality, while it is actually happening, into a more artistically satisfying shape.
Barnardo’s Children,1 a series about adults who had been brought up in Dr Barnardo’s homes for unwanted children, told the story of John Williams, a black man given away to Dr Barnardo’s as a child by his white family many decades before. In one extraordinarily moving sequence, Williams meets the older brother he last saw with their mother, when she put him on the train to the children’s home, sending him away from his family for ever. It was a scene to make—and really did make—many viewers cry, so powerful was it. Writing later about the experience, John remembers:
‘Then suddenly he was there, walking down the stairs, a balding overweight white man dressed up in a smart suit and tie. “Is that you, John?” he called out and the waiting was over. He made as if to offer his hand but instead I embraced him. That’s what I mentally rehearsed I would do. It would fit in with the rest of the film… There were a few shared tears, some inconsequential conversation, then, taking charge, my brother placed his arm around my shoulder and said: “Come on, let’s go home.” I was taken by surprise and felt suddenly elated. I’d waited all my life for the relief of hearing such words.
‘Out through the entrance hall and five yards down the steps my brother stopped, turned me round, and led me back inside… I immediately realized we shared one thing in common. We both aspired to be actors, and like a true professional, Brian had acted out his script. The journey home had only lasted for as long as we were in shot.’2
Notes
1 BBC 1974
1 BBC 1995
2 Guardian, 17 November 1995, quoting from ‘Printer’s Devil’