Until recently, film, video and television, both fiction and documentary, have been devised and created by specialized craft workers, using specialized knowledge and training. But now that is changing—and changing very fast.
That is not to say that professional film and video programme-makers are disappearing from the scene. Quite the reverse in fact. Britain, for example, has at the time of writing just under a thousand independent television film and video production companies—perhaps between two to three thousand directors and producers—mostly working in documentary, and all vying with each other to gain commissions from the limited number of broadcasters in this country. The same pattern is repeated on the continent of Europe, in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The number of programme-makers is growing all the time world wide.
What is new is that knowing something about film and video documentaries is rapidly evolving from being a difficult and complicated speciality, better left to the experts, to being a skill—or at least an understanding—now demanded from a large number of people in many different fields of work. The cost of video shooting and editing equipment has been falling for some time and is coming within reach of the general public. Its technical operation becomes ever simpler. Abstruse and arcane knowledge of electronic engineering is no longer a requirement. Unlike film, video does not have to be developed and printed; what has been shot can be seen and judged immediately.
As a result, a grasp of documentary film and video production, an understanding of how documentaries work and how they are made, is increasingly becoming part of the general literacy demanded of many walks of life. Of writers and journalists, of course, but also of teachers, public relations consultants, managers, university students, personnel officers—the list is a long one. And as older engineering industries are replaced by the new enterprises of the information age, it gets ever longer.
Film and video are becoming as central to communicating ideas and experiences in our late twentieth century societies as books, newspapers, magazines, leaflets, brochures, business reports, even diaries. The preferred mode for that communication is the genre of documentary. Whatever a person’s job or position, it is likely that at some time or other he or she will come into contact with a film or video documentary of some sort: either by being in one, by being responsible for one, by commissioning one, by being asked to come to a judgement about one, even by coming across a subject about which they wish to make one.
Most people have been educated to work and think in a written rather than a visual medium. We are all trained from an early age in the use of the written word. Success in teaching reading and writing are the first touchstones by which many judge the quality of schools. Later on we try to learn how best to express ourselves on the page. We read and analyse the work of great writers of the past. Later yet, we may buy one of the many available self-improvement books on writing stories, screenplays, newspaper articles, memoirs, business reports, even letters.
By comparison with the written word, the moving image is much less well understood. Even perceptive viewers of television may not be aware of the devices and techniques, not to say the tricks, used by programme-makers to persuade us of the reality of what we are watching. The programme-makers themselves may not fully understand how they are achieving their effects, relying instead on a mixture of routine formula, gut-instinct and occasional inspiration. Film-making grew up as a specialist craft, not as an intellectual exercise, and has traditionally been learned by a form of apprenticeship. In the great broadcasting organizations, to which most workers in the industry once belonged, film school training used to be rather frowned upon, as if breaching some kind of amateur code—except in the case of a very few high-profile film-makers who were licensed to pursue the documentary form’s artistic dimension. In most cases craft training on the job—’sitting next to Nellie’—was deemed all that was necessary for a documentary producer’s or director’s professional development.
A would-be director or producer would spend years doing one of the lowlier jobs in production until one day given the big chance. You might have a double-first from Oxford University, but you’ve still got to do your stint as researcher and assistant producer first. When formal training was given—in Britain it was mostly by broadcasters like the BBC—it was aimed at those doing such apprenticeship service, and was intended more to stop them wasting money than to improving their art. Over the years there seemed little need to think about and systematize the basic principles on which the medium depends and no point at all in working out how these might be taught to a much wider group of the population.
Today, the situation is changing. Many people are now involved in making films and videos of all kinds: people who cannot be expected to spend years learning on the job, but who are nonetheless expected to deliver a workmanlike product. Others are called upon to judge television documentaries commissioned in the course of their work. Still others would like to know more about the provenance of the documentary programmes they watch on broadcast television.
A distillation of what has been learned about the small-screen documentary, since its beginnings some fifty years or so ago, would be helpful to the many people who need to know something of the documentary production process or even how to look at and judge the documentaries they see on television or at work: to help them understand the principles of putting moving images together; to help them recognize the differences between the variety of techniques used in documentary making; to help them know something of the different stages of the production process and recognize the different skills that are called upon in each.
Documentry for the Small Screen is intended to introduce some of this. It cannot be the whole story. Film-making can no more be learned from an instruction manual than can sculpture or music composition. Nor can this or will this be the last word. Documentary is a living form and changes all the time in accordance with developments in our technology, our tastes, our fashions, our whole view of the world. It is in the throes of particularly rapid change as we career towards the end of the century.
Yet there are, I believe, some fixed points by which to steer. Film-making, like other creative arts and crafts, ultimately depends on the psychology of human perception. Though narrative conventions may change, we respond to story-telling in much the same way as our parents’ and our grandparents’ generations. Though our expectations of speed, slickness and style of filmmaking may differ, we react to a succession of moving pictures almost exactly as they did too. The illusion, usually called Persistence of Vision, which invests a series of still images with movement and is the base on which the whole television enterprise is founded, is a function of the brain and not the intellect. In the same way, unchanging human responses may be the foundation of many other of the principles of small screen documentary making. The film-maker’s task amounts to a constant experiment to distinguish the inbuilt from the acquired, the functional from the learned, the necessary from the arbitrary. This book is intended to help both the would-be documentarist and the working filmmaker in their journey of discovery.
I shall use the expression television documentary as a way of specifying a particular form, while avoiding commitment to a particular technology. The word television is important because a basic premise behind this book is that making films or videos for the small screen, designed to be viewed in an everyday domestic or working context, involves facing problems and finding solutions which are rather different from those which apply to the cinema screen, intended to be watched in a darkened theatre. So in this book the phrase television documentary will not necessarily mean a film intended to be broadcast. It will mean a production intended for the small rather than the large screen.
Another problem: it is very difficult to find a way to include both film and video in any statement without having pedantically to spell out the alternatives every time. This quickly becomes wearying. But there is simply no expression which properly includes both.
In spite of the fact that cinema features are today invariably broadcast over the air from taped copies, and that many people watch movies at home on video-cassettes hired from a video store, the word video is hard to use when meaning a documentary shot on film, and strangely wrong sounding even when applied to a documentary actually produced electronically. Of course all words change their meanings over time. The camera is no longer a room. The word film no longer refers just to the light-sensitive chemical coating which captures the image on a strip of celluloid.
I feel that the word film has by now extended its meaning far enough to permit me to stretch it just a little further to include work shot with an electronic camera and recorded on tape. In what follows, when I use the word film, it will be irrespective of the actual medium used to capture the images. Unless, of course, I write otherwise.