To gain an impression of the whole film is the purpose of the filmmaker’s final procedure: the review. The later stages of editing and dubbing have been so concerned with the technical minutiae of film construction that it is all too easy to lose sight of the wood and see only the trees, to forget the appearance and function of the building while concentrating on the precise way the bricks fit together. So it is important to have the opportunity to sit back and watch the documentary from start to finish, seeing it for the first time as the audience will.
This is not merely to check for faults and errors. There should not really be any by this stage, though it must be admitted that on occasion mistakes do only now come to light. One television producer woke in a cold sweat at three in the morning, suddenly realising that the wrong cameraman’s name had appeared in the credits of the film he had been reviewing ten hours before. Even now it should not be too late to correct gaffes of that kind. The schedule should allow for last-minute corrections. Other faults will not be so easy to correct and a judgement will have to be made over whether their seriousness warrants unpicking the film and reassembling parts of it, with the resulting impact on cost. Budgets rarely allow for over-meticulous perfectionists to have their way.
The aim of the review is, in any case, not merely to allow a film-maker to make sure that the work is ready for delivery to the client. To see one’s own work as the viewer does is the only way to appreciate exactly what one has made—good points and bad. This is an essential part of learning and growing as a film-maker. It is true that watching a documentary in a viewing theatre is not the same experience as seeing the same production when broadcast on television or when played to its target corporate audience. The environment in which the film is shown—home or office—the events that precede and succeed it on the screen, all have a strong effect on the way the documentary is perceived. But the review is an opportunity to take time out to concentrate on viewing the work in the round, to judge pace, flow, balance, variety, intelligibility, interest and all the other qualities upon which the impact and elegance of a documentary depend. It is an opportunity to think about what worked well and what could have been done better.
A modern novelist has said that the aim of constantly rewriting his drafts is to detect ‘false notes’ in the text—those moments which, like a cracked bell, somehow don’t ring true. When reviewing a film, a documentarist has similar aims. But the workings of film are less mysterious than those of prose. A filmmaker will usually be able to say with considerable precision why something in the documentary isn’t quite right. And most documentarists find something they dislike in almost every example of their work. Some of these antipathies are reasonable: when shots don’t quite reveal what they were supposed to, or show more than they should; when sequences don’t quite convey the information or the emotion intended, when interviewees don’t quite express the thoughts or feelings they were chosen to expose.
But equally film-makers often cringe and groan at moments in their work that nobody else notices or finds exceptionable. We all carry engraved on our memories, like Calais on Queen Bloody Mary’s heart, moments that we would give almost anything to be able to change. There is a sound edit towards the start of The Last Exodus, where the president of the Jewish community of Odessa is describing the mass emigration of the city’s remaining Jews. ‘This really is,’ he says, ‘the Last Exodus.’ Because the statement came in the midst of an unstoppably rapid flow of words, isolating the thought left the end of the sentence audibly cut off and hanging in the air. Audibly maybe, but only to a fluent speaker of Russian with a particularly good ear for intonation. British and American viewers reading the subtitles have been completely oblivious to what still seems to me a less than elegant truncation.
When I was executive producer of one particular BBC documentary, I noticed that whenever the film-maker was showing me the current state of progress of the production, she would always go into paroxysms of coughing at one particular point in the film. Guessing that she was trying to distract me from noticing some fault in the assembly, I cajoled her into admitting what the problem was. It was that in one of the key images of the documentary, the film-maker herself could be seen lurking in the background of the picture. Of course only those who knew her well would have recognised the tiny blurred figure, but that didn’t prevent her embarrassment and bitter dislike of the shot, which was, nevertheless, too important to be omitted. Until she pointed it out, I hadn’t even noticed.
Such responses to one’s own work are inevitable. Edna St Vincent Millay said of writing: ‘A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book, nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him.’ Exactly the same can be said of a documentary film. And, as with a book, the principal difficulty is than one never quite knows whether one’s work is good or bad. The temptation is to suspect the latter. Even Mario Puzo said of his stunningly successful novel The Godfather ‘I wish I had written it better.’
Whether a documentarist’s negative response to moments in his or her own work is well-founded or irrational, coming to terms with it is an essential part of the film-making process. An error is only an unmitigated disaster if nothing is learned from it. One might go even further: it could be claimed that when a documentarist, like any other artist, is always totally satisfied with what he or she makes, it means that growth and development have ceased and that now is probably the time to stop and take up another profession.
For most film-makers the aim of the editing process, maybe even the entire production process, is to achieve an impression of unquestioned inevitability. The intention is to make the viewer feel that the film could not have been constructed and perfected in any other way. This is just an alternative formulation of the traditional notion that a product of the creative imagination should be accepted ‘as is’, that its technique and means of realization should be hidden from and left unexamined by its audience. For the arts in general that can be called a pre-modern attitude. Today’s creators no longer take such a view for granted. Much of the history of art in the twentieth century has been about confronting the audience with the artificiality and arbitrariness of the techniques by which artists convey their vision to their public. And as we have noted, some of the devices of the television documentary of today’s ‘post-modernist’ times are concerned, not with the content, the ‘meaning’, of the images, but with their appearance.
Every documentarist will make his or her own decision on whether to follow the path of the nineteenth century naturalistic novelist, that of the twentieth century iconoclast, or that of the new-age net-surfer. The decision will depend on the film-maker’s ultimate purpose and will have its consequences. The new ‘multimedia’ style, which a British television channel controller once described as having ‘a heavily worked surface’, as if film were a kind of painting, is specifically designed to attract the young. It may also repel the not-so-young. The traditional still has considerably more immediate general public appeal than the avant-garde—how revealing that one still refers to the ‘modern’ movement even after almost a hundred years, and that it has been necessary to invent the self-contradictory term ‘post-modern’. It took a towering protean genius of modernism like Picasso to break through to recognition by the man and woman in the street. In a recent poll for the nation’s favourite poem, the British public firmly endorsed ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ may be a greater work of art but many fewer people have ever read it, let alone know it by heart, let alone derive wisdom and comfort from it.
That may of course not matter. It all depends on what one wants the result of one’s work to be. Many documentary makers just wish to make a living by serving the needs of others. That is a perfectly respectable purpose. Some are above all concerned to speak to, and entertain, as large an audience as possible. Some are more interested in exploring a subject in serious depth, no matter how small the number of viewers prepared to follow. Some are involved in the creation of art-works, whose raison d’être is simply to exist. Yet others wish their films to do something in the world—to have an impact on society or politics. This is no different from artists working in any other medium. P G Wodehouse said that there were two ways of writing novels: ‘One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.’ Remove the phrase ‘ignoring real life’ and much the same can be said of the television documentary.
The greatness of our medium is that it can accommodate all these aims.
The documentary has been through many stages in its time. The very first moving film of all was a documentary—workers leaving the Lumière brothers’ factory. In its cinema days it became first an art form, then a movement, predominantly of the liberal left. When broadcast television became the principal mass medium of the age and the chief source of public information, documentary films gained political power. As journalism, television documentaries have often contributed to the public debating agenda. Social documentaries broadcast on tv have often changed society’s self-perception in important ways. Television documentaries have even had an impact on national developments in technology. Now the Chips Are Down,1 a film in the BBC’s science strand Horizon, led to questions in Parliament, the setting up of a select committee to report to the House on the future for information technology in Britain, and the establishment with public money of INMOS, a company to manufacture silicon chip microprocessors (long since—alas—sold abroad). The Computer Programme,2 from BBC Education, broadcast in more than twenty countries, resulted in a generation of British school students growing up familiar with the BBC Micro, one of the earliest affordable personal computers, making Britain at the time the most computer-literate country in the world.
There are those who question whether any television production could have the same impact today. Until the mid-1980s, there were few channels available and it was possible for a single powerful programme to become the subject of conversation the next day in what seemed at the time to be a majority of homes, workplaces, pubs and clubs. Now that the number of channels is increasing and satellite, cable transmission and videotape players are poised to fragment the viewing audience, a television documentary may have to work harder to arouse a similar level of general interest. Yet the changes now under way have their compensations. As suggested at the very beginning, the new technological era has opened up the possibility of documentary making to all, and particularly to those who have previously been mute, to those whose place in life it always was to be the subject of documentaries rather than to make them—people, as one might say, more filmed against than filming. Many channels now carry documentaries shot on high-end consumer equipment. The BBC Community Programmes Unit has shown that productions created by ordinary people about their own lives can have great public impact.
The effect on our society of the advent of television has often been compared to that of the introduction of printing. Though the time-scales are dramatically different, there are indeed some similarities. An original Gutenberg Bible cost about the same as a small landed estate. When television broadcasting first began, buying a receiver was a considerable investment. In both cases more and more people could afford to become engaged with the new medium as the technology cheapened and spread. Ultimately the printing press lead to mass literacy, and even more importantly, mass access to printing technology and therefore to a mass readership. By our own times, anyone from any walk of life can write and be published—as long as, that is, he or she has something to communicate.
It is clear that a similar development is now beginning to take place in the film—or rather, the video—medium. As suggested at the beginning, the time will soon come when all who wish to do so will be able to make documentaries about their own particular ideas, beliefs, perceptions, interests and obsessions.
Unquestionably this will introduce into the public arena a chorus of new voices, original thoughts, and unfamiliar experiences, greatly enriching our culture and our civilization.
But learning to make films is not quite the same as learning to write. Writing is in effect no more than permanently petrified speech. Written text originally developed as a kind of low-tech recording device. The speech was encoded into symbols; when later read again—aloud—the sound of the original words was reproduced. When we read, we still recreate the sounds of the words inside our heads and then listen to what they say. (It is not just those with learning difficulties who move their lips when they read; we all do, though most of us unconsciously suppress it.) That is why writing can use stylistic devices like onomatopoeia, assonance, alliteration and rhyme, that depend for their effect on the actual sounds of the words.
Thus once the coding system has been learned, for anyone who can speak, writing comes more or less naturally. This appears to be very different from film-making technique, which seems non-intuitive and must be painstakingly learned and carefully studied. Or is it and must it?
In any literary or visual medium, artistry and style can only be acquired by effort, practice and experience. But what of the fundamental principles? One of the aims of this book has been to suggest that the basics of film-making are almost as natural and as closely related to our everyday perceptions as writing is to speech. The technology used may change—just as letterpress printing has given way to offset litho—but the fundamental idea remains the same. The documentary technique is an attempt to put the viewers into a situation as if they themselves were there, to show them what they themselves would see and let them hear what they themselves would hear if they were really present. The model for the viewer is, and can only be, the film-maker him- or herself. So to work on putting a documentary film together is, in a sense, to study the way we ourselves see and hear the world, and how we respond to it. To make a documentary film is in essence a form of self-exploration and self-discovery. What is principally demanded of you, as a television documentary maker, is not so much the mastery of principles and the understanding of technology but a desire, perhaps even a passion, to show to others what you have seen yourself, and in the way that you have seen it. Like great portraiture in painting, the truthfulness of a documentary depends not so much on its likeness to the external reality of its subject, but more to its expression of the documentarist’s response to that reality. As has been said about writing books, a film-maker is not ‘a person who wants to say something, but a person who has something to say.’
Notes
1 BBC 1979
2 BBC 1980