Innovations in Documentary I

Too often in the past two decades, the announcement has been made, “The documentary is dead.” But stubbornly it has not come to pass. The reason, principally, is the documentary's flexibility. For so long associated with educational and political goals, the documentary has more recently aggressively embraced the entertainment impulse that has swept through broadcast news and reality programming. Less obvious but no less important is the documentary's hold on past generations. Its affiliation with political, social, and educational goals has given documentary a gravitas or weight that is deeply meaningful. The form consequently has not lost its audience as so many other story forms have. Whatever the reason, the announcement that the documentary is dead has been an empty one. The documentary is alive and evolving. In this chapter we will address a number of its innovations, the changes in the personal documentary, the expansion in the use of narration in a fashion differing from earlier uses, and the interface between documentary and drama. First we turn to the shifts in the personal documentary.

   THE PERSONAL DOCUMENTARY

The personal documentary is different from the social/political documentary or the cinema verité documentary. The cinema verité documentary, which is rooted in the philosophy of filmmaking of Dziga Vertov, suggested that the great strength of the documentary and of film was its capacity to capture real life events as they happen. For Vertov, this represented the highest aesthetic of the medium. The result is films such as The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which was the inspiration for a school of documentary, principally the cinema verité school. The Free Cinema movement in England in the 1950s, the Direct Cinema in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Candid Eye series in Canada in the 1950s, all essentially owed a debt to Vertov. In the United States, the work of Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker in the 1960s gave way to the work of Barbara Kopple in the 1970s and to the self-reflexive filmmaking of Ross McElwee (Sherman's March, 1986) in the 1980s and of Rob Moss (The Tourist, 1992) in the 1990s. All are fundamentally cinema verité filmmakers. Finally, the Dogma films of Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and Kristian Levring owe much in terms of their style to the work of Vertov. They are, however, dramatic films rather than documentaries. Cinema verité then represents one of the three “paths” of the documentary.

The second ideology of the documentary is based on the ideas of John Grierson, the British filmmaker and executive producer who first established government film units in Great Britain and later in Canada. Grierson believed that the documentary should have an educational purpose. If we broaden the term education to include social and political education we see how this ideology also embraces the propaganda film (a particular education, or one we don't necessarily believe in, we call propaganda). Whether one looks at the British sponsored documentaries of the 1930s, or the work of Leni Riefenstahl, or of Frank Capra, or the later work of Grierson at the National Film Board of Canada, we see a continuation of this philosophy of documentary. Sponsored films, educational films, corporate films, all fall under this category. Perhaps a more precise definition of this ideology of documentary would be purposeful documentary.

The third ideology or “path” of documentary is that of the personal documentary, which we associate with the work of Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, 1922). Although he filmed on location in the Arctic, Flaherty shaped Nanook to fit his vision of the struggle of man against nature. This noble, romantic, epic struggle is repeated in Flaherty's films about life in the South Sea Islands, the Aran Islands, and the bayous of Louisiana. Flaherty chose real subjects, but cast, filmed, and staged it to suit his sensibility, as opposed to recording what he found in those far-flung settings. This is the nature of the personal documentary: its tone is personal, based on the views of the filmmaker rather than on the anthropological actuality in the field.

This particular approach is clearly at the heart of Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1932), the work of Humphrey Jennings (Diary for Timothy, 1945), and the docudrama work of Peter Watkins (Culloden, 1964) in the 1960s. Buñuel and Jennings use their subjects to convey their ideas about society and its obligation to its people, Watkins uses his subjects to convey his ideas about Scottish nationalism and British imperialism, just as Flaherty used his Louisiana story to convey his own ideas about childhood and its innocence. We now turn to the recent work in the area of the personal documentary.

A good starting point is to define particular characteristics that not so much delimit personal documentary as together distinguish this particular branch of the documentary. First, the striking visual character of the personal documentary. Most documentaries are content-driven, although the visual dimension has been critical in the propaganda documentary work of Riefenstahl and Jennings. In the personal documentary the visual aesthetic of the work is prominent. Flaherty had a poetic style suitable to his approach to his subject matter. Peter Watkins has a pseudorealistic style that supports the seriousness of intention in his work. In the case of Errol Morris, whose work we will turn to shortly, the style is distinctly oblique. In each case the visual aesthetic is so powerful that it draws great attention to itself beyond the organization of the content.

A second characteristic of the personal documentary is the mixed use of staged or performed footage with actuality footage. This finds its extreme form in Flaherty's work and in the more recent work of Peter Watkins. All of Watkins’ Edvard Munch (1974) is staged, but it is filmed as if it is captured or cinema verité actuality footage. More often the film is a mix, as in Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988). How the two styles of footage blend is often masked, although Morris’ staged material is so stylized (e.g., the murder scene) that it is clearly not documentary footage. The models for other extreme footage that blends easily with documentary footage are John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1965), both films that are entirely staged.

A third characteristic of the personal documentary is the use of irony. The source for this impulse is Luis Buñuel's Land without Bread. More recent examples include Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, whom we will turn to shortly. Herzog was very influenced by the documentary work of the West Coast filmmaker Les Blank, who documented Herzog's own filmmaking practice in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

The most vigorous characteristic of the personal documentary is the issue of voice. Voice can be established directly through the narration, or generated out of a distinctive visual style, or through the deployment of irony generated out of the counterpoint of the narration or music with the visual, or out of a combination of any or all of the above. Clearly the singularity of the personal documentary emanates from its distinctive voice. That voice may be grounded in the political, as in the docudramas of Peter Watkins, or it may allude to the political to highlight the personal, as in the work of Michael Rubbo (Waiting for Fidel, 1974), or it may be entirely personal, as in Herzog's My Best Fiend (1999). In each case voice is so pronounced that it overwhelms the more objective or general intentions of the documentary.

We turn now to the films and their filmmakers, beginning with Herzog's film My Best Fiend. Herzog is best known as the dramatic filmmaker of a series of films—Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1973), Nosferatu: The Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Woyzek (1979)—all made with the actor Klaus Kinski. Although Herzog made other dramatic films and documentaries, he is best known for these films made with Kinski. My Best Fiend is a personal documentary about his relationship with Kinski. As Kinski died in 1991, the film is an amalgam of clips from the films he made with Herzog: broadcast footage of a Kinski performance, amateur footage, as well as excerpts from Burden of Dreams (1983), the documentary by Les Blank about the making of Fitzcarraldo. Contemporary footage consists of interviews with two of Kinski's costars, Eva Mattes from Woyzek and Claudia Cardinale from Fitzcarraldo. Herzog also retraces the places of some of his work with Kinski, including South America for Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and Austria for Woyzek. He even visits the home where the would-be actor Kinski, as a boy of 13, rented a room.

My Best Fiend is not so much a biography or a vanity portrait of an important actor as it is an examination of a difficult, almost impossible relationship between a director and an actor. Were they friends or enemies? Did they creatively unleash a talent in the other that was more than the sum of their individual abilities? Is the film the portrait of madness as genius, or all of the above?

At no point does Herzog question his own attraction to extreme subject matter—the dictatorial impulse of a Spanish soldier 8000 miles from home in Aguirre: The Wrath of God; the mad act of dragging a boat over a mountain so that a town can have what the main character feels the town needs, opera, in Fitzcarraldo. What is clear is that Herzog himself is attracted to the madness in genius and to the genius in madness. Rarely does he approach the madness issue directly, but what lingers about Herzog's work is that there is a magical quality to those who struggle against nature, man, and their own nature to achieve their goals. What better actor could he choose to portray these complex but fascinating characters than the complex, fascinating Klaus Kinski?

This personal examination of the relationship between director and actor leads Herzog to conclude that he and Kinski were alter egos. They needed each other to make the magic they achieved in the five films they made together. As Herzog journeys back geographically to the places he made films with Kinski, we begin to understand that although Herzog is speaking about Kinski he is in fact revealing himself. My Best Fiend begins to look more like a portrait of a director's creative state, one fueled by an emotional war with his primary actor, Klaus Kinski. That state, however achieved, is the basis for one of international cinema's great careers. The play on words in the title, “best” and “fiend,” one word implying pleasure and the other torture, begins to take on a layered meaning: is Herzog invoking contradiction and chaos or constructed creativity? Whichever is his goal, Herzog creates a paradox—the triumph of the personal demons of each man to create together great art.

Whether personal documentary is about self-revelation, self-exploration, or simply self-promotion, voice is central to its articulation. Few documentarians have as singular a voice as does Errol Morris. In many ways he uses his voice to explore eccentricity in the American character. In Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1998) Morris celebrates eccentricity. In Mr. Death (2000) the exploration implies the tragic in eccentricity.

Mr. Death has as its subtitle, The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. In the first half of the narrative Leuchter, the son of a prison worker, grows up in Massachusetts to become a leading expert in execution equipment. He explains his mission: to make execution humane, whether by electrocution or lethal injection. Leuchter alludes to a creative touch that will bring death quickly and efficiently. As a tour guide of the mishaps and messy nature of execution, Leuchter takes a me-against-them attitude. “They” are the wardens, state officials, and so-called professionals that have been cruel and unusual in their punishment of death-house convicts. His matter-offact description of heads blowing off and eyes popping out is intended to support his mission as a humane hero to the soon-to-be-dispatched and their families. As Leuchter describes his growing professional success, his personal success, a marriage, all of which become the final act of his ascent, Morris intercuts black and white with color footage. By doing so Morris is implying a layer of artifice, mixed in with realism. The irony is unavoidable. The execution room scenes are highly stylized through the use of backlight. Mock heroism is the tone in this section of the film.

The second phase of the narrative takes up the late 1980s request by Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust denier in Canada, for Fred Leuchter to act as his expert witness. The mission is to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau to explore whether gas executions actually took place there. The visit becomes the honeymoon for the newly married Leuchters. The location scene is filmed in handheld cinema verité style. TV footage of the infamous Zundel trial, a trial prompted by Zundel's campaign against Holocaust denial, in Toronto is intercut with a more recent interview with Ernst Zundel.

To substantiate his investigation, Leuchter takes numerous rock samples at locations claimed to be gas chambers or adjacent to gas chambers. Back in Massachusetts he tests these samples and finds no trace of Cyclon B, the gas used to kill the inmates at Auschwitz. Leuchter writes a report claiming that no gassing of inmates took place at Auschwitz or Birkenau. The Leuchter report is submitted to the trial in defense of Zundel's claim that the Holocaust never took place. Historian and Holocaust denier David Irving is interviewed to illustrate the receptivity for Leuchter's report among a certain constituency, neo-Nazis in Europe and Latin America. The Canadian Court, on the other hand, found Zundel guilty, impugning its own assessment of the Leuchter report. In short order Leuchter moves from being a useful contributor to society to a pariah. First his business suffers due to the bad publicity his expert testimony yields, and indeed, he becomes a laughingstock. His business fails, and then his marriage fails. He moves West in an effort to restore himself, but the occasional speaking engagement isn't enough, and by the end Leuchter is destroyed. He remains provocative and unapologetic about his report, and by the end of the film we leave him on a road somewhere in California, a lonely and alone figure of ridicule. Only in this last phase of the narrative does Morris return to stylization.

Morris’ voice is focused on two devices—the mix of stylized or dramatized footage with cinema verité footage and the use of irony. Irony permeates the structure of the narrative. By elevating the creation of killing machines with a humane goal, Morris undermines the seriousness with which he constructs Leuchter, the hero, in the early half of the film. Morris carries on using irony as Leuchter chips away at the concrete bunkers at Auschwitz, earnest in his pursuit and tickled to be away from the United States for the first time. Although Leuchter is on his honeymoon, we never see him with his wife. He acts like a kid in a playground. But it's not a playground, it's Auschwitz—where 3 million people were killed. The irony is lost on Leuchter, who increasingly appears to be a naïf rather than an expert on anything. Zundel and Irving both appear to be canny, knowing, and unironic. Beside them, Leuchter looks more and more like the rube who's been had.

Death and the Holocaust: weighty matters, and yet Morris has chosen Fred Leuchter as his prism. Leuchter is an eccentric, but the subject—death— makes Mr. Death no laughing matter. Rather it's a human tragedy.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is Morris’ celebration of eccentricity. The film is basically a portrait of 4 men who are enthusiastic about their work. Each has a rather out-of-the-ordinary vocation, and each is a zealot about his work. Dave Hoover is a wild animal trainer; George Mendanca is a topiary gardener; Ray Mendez is a mole rat expert; and Rodney Brooks is a robot designer. Aside from their enthusiasm for their work, the animal kingdom is the linkage. The robots that Rodney designs look like large insects, and the leafy sculptures that George creates are in the image of animals, such as a dinosaur. Less apparent but no less common among the 4 men, is a sense of play. In the case of Ray and Rodney, they are almost childlike in their enthusiasm. George and Dave are more mature, more adolescent in their approach to their work.

Although the major focus of the film is the interviews with the 4 men together with visual illustration of their work, Morris intertwines 2 additional thematic threads in the story. First he cuts away to film serials, such as “King of Jungleland” and “Zombies of the Stratosphere.” King of the Jungleland stars Clyde Beatty, best known as a lion trainer prior to and during his Hollywood career. In the serial, Beatty has to fight lions and many human adversaries. Morris’ second intervention is circus footage, from clowns to lion acts to trapeze acts. The reaction of the audience is also a visual element. Both visual interventions are entertainments, both attract a young audience, and both are about the dangerous interface between the natural or animal world and man, and both are about adults playacting at being adults—they are really all kids at heart.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control has a very distinctive style. Whereas Morris mixed cinema verité and a dramatic style in Mr. Death, in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control he uses mostly interviews that are presented in traditional documentary style. The balance of the material runs from the dramatic (the serial) to almost hyperstylized footage. The circus material in particular is presented using oblique camera placements and angles. Whether Morris is trying to introduce the notion of instability or danger or both, he moves far from realism in the circus footage. The same can be said for the robot laboratory footage, where Morris tries to impute point-of-view shots that “humanize” the robot. He also uses oblique angles to film the topiary garden. The use of extreme angles and wide-angle lenses “animates” the animal sculptures. It also gives them a looming, menacing presence. In the case of the actual animals, the mole rats, lions, and tigers, Morris approaches them with a naturalistic visual style that emphasizes their being captive. The consequence is to create empathy for these animal “victims” of man. Camera placements and lens selection are utilized to capture this sense of the animals. The style distinctively sets up a sense of play about representing reality; indeed, the style seems the playful equivalent of the zeal the interviewees feel for their professions. Errol Morris isn't going to be left out. He feels equally zealous about his profession: filmmaking.

The clash of dramatic footage, from the serial, with the documentary or actuality footage is not quite as great as it was in Mr. Death. Morris’ approach to the actuality footage is so stylized that it seems more in harmony with the artifice of the serial than it does in conflict.

As in Mr. Death, irony is plentiful in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. Each of the interviewees is a grown man, but Morris chooses to focus on only one dimension of their adult lives—their profession, and the how and the why of it. As in the case of Fred Leuchter, these men have a vocation where they don't have to interface with others. They are loners working at an unusual profession that is enormously gratifying to them. But as in the case of Leuchter, they are not adding obvious value to mankind. They are marginalized men gaining their status from their work as an act of individuality, of free will. In a sense the irony is that regardless of the vocation, Morris is looking at each of these men as a purveyor as well as a victim of his acts of free will. I don't mean to overemphasize Morris as a film moralist, but on one level that's exactly what he's doing, and it's his sense of irony about man and animal that is pointing us in this direction. Which brings us finally to the issue of voice in Morris’ work.

We can say that Errol Morris wants to explore the American character, that he wants to look at men at the margin of society, that he wants to look at the eccentric in this society. I believe that Morris, as in the case of Werner Herzog, is looking at his own psychology. He sees wonderment, he sees difference, he sees play, and he sees the downside to excess. All these are themes he explores in his characters, and all these characteristics capture his approach to filmmaking. In a sense his films are probes: how excessive can I be, before I too suffer the fate of a Fred Leuchter? This is the creative path Morris walks down. He has chosen the documentary as his medium, but he has modified it to such an extent that it is barely recognizable as documentary. This is Errol Morris's contribution to the personal documentary.

   CHANGES IN THE USE OF NARRATION

Although narration is totally absent (by definition) in cinema verité, it is a formative presence in the other genres of documentary. Narration, as one of the three layers of sound (dialogue and music are the others), is a very powerful tool. As we will see in our discussion of Clement Perron's Day After Day (1965) in Chapter 28, “The Sound Edit and Creative Sound,” narration has the capacity to alter the meaning of the visual. The classic role of narration, “the Voice of God,” was essentially interpretive. Since filmmakers have begun to range in their use of narration, it is useful to look at the possibilities for narration and then to move on to novel examples of these uses.

If we were to summarize the uses of narration we could categorize the narrator as observer, as investigator, as guide, or as provocateur. Within these larger categories the narrator can be objective or subjective, intimate or distant, harsh or ironic, young or old, professional or anecdotal. Every choice will influence our perception and experience of the film. Consequently, the filmmaker must make a decision about how he or she wants us to experience the film narrative.

THE NARRATOR AS OBSERVER

Narrators as observers presume that their mission is to allow us to accompany them on a tour of a place, a person, or an idea. The position of the narrator can be as an expert, a companion, or an innocent in the process of discovery. This latter notion was made famous by Michael Rubbo, the Australian documentarian who made films for the National Film Board of Canada for two decades. Rubbo himself becomes a character in his work; he is a participant-observer. This is his approach in Vietnam with Sad Song of Yellow Skin (1970), in Cuba with Waiting for Fidel (1974), and in Paris with Solzhenitsyn's Children-.-.-.-Are Making a Lot of Noise in Paris (1979). Thematically, each film has rich subject matter: the effect of the war or the quality of life issues for expatriates trying to live in Vietnam; the potential meeting of a capitalist and politician from Canada with Premier Fidel Castro; the intellectual currents of a city where ideas mean everything in Solzhenitsyn's Children-.-.-.-Are Making a Lot of Noise in Paris.

Rubbo is an ingenuous observer. In order to personalize complex material but also to explore that material, Rubbo sets himself up as a curious observer who hasn't quite made up his mind. We know that his experiences will shape his views, and by acting as a guide who is processing the material as he discovers it, Rubbo, at times naive, at other times skeptical, provides us with an avenue into material that otherwise would be heavy slogging for the audience. His role as observer also makes his documentaries lighter and more entertaining.

Amir Bar-Lev's Fighter (2000) is no less ambitious than Rubbo's work, but his approach is to use a constant on-camera observer. Fighter is the story of two Czech Holocaust survivors, Jan Weiner and Arnost Lustig. Bar-Lev films their contemporary return to Czechoslovakia in order to trace Weiner's escape during World War II. They travel from Czechoslovakia to Croatia and then to Italy, where Weiner was imprisoned as an undesirable alien, and finally from Italy, his escape to join the British Air Force, where he participated in the Allied bombing of Germany. Bar-Lev intercuts archival historical footage as well as family photographs of Weiner. Arnost Lustig, now a friend of Weiner's as well as a fellow Holocaust survivor, is the observer for the film.

Because Lustig is a writer, he tries to interpret Weiner's actions throughout the journey. Weiner, the fighter of the title, is a man of action rather than words. The journey stirs up deep feeling and multiple wounds—the tragic loss of his mother in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia; the awful fact of the suicide of his father in Croatia in 1942 while Weiner is staying with him. His father commits suicide to allow the young Weiner to travel West, unburdened by an elderly, less able, parent. Lustig attempts to give words to the feelings of Weiner, but Weiner turns against his friend. Words detract and undermine Weiner's capacity to cope, to hold on, to go forward. He breaks with Lustig and, in effect, walks out on the film.

What is important about the use of Lustig as a character and observer is that the contrast between the two men allows the audience to feel the pain of a man who refuses to see himself as a victim. Jan Weiner sees himself as a fighter. We see this side of him, but thanks to the presence of Arnost Lustig as an observer, we also feel the depth of the tragedies in his life, and he becomes all the more admirable a character for that contrast.

THE NARRATOR AS INVESTIGATOR

Investigations imply a goal: to come to an understanding of an issue or person by means of the investigation. The consequence is a more purposeful documentary. Unlike the political or social issue documentary, the investigative documentary does not endeavor to make a case. Consequently, the investigative documentary is not at all a polemic.

In The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack (2000), Aiyana Elliott is trying to understand her father, the singer Jack Elliott. Mixing home movies, archival footage, contemporary interviews, and the equivalent of a current concert tour, Aiyana Elliott seeks to know a man she barely knows, her father. By looking at his professional and personal life, she may find the key to connecting with the most elusive significant person in her own life. Her father divorced her mother when Aiyana was a small child. Today, as a filmmaker, five years out of film school, Aiyana wants to reconnect with her father, and making a film about him is the logical vehicle for that attempt.

Jack Elliott, the son of a Jewish doctor in Brooklyn, decided he wanted to be a cowboy and eventually a cowboy balladeer. Elliott lived and performed with Woody Guthrie in the 1950s, and as his fame grew he became a powerful influence on Bob Dylan in the 1960s. But by the 1970s Elliott is a forgotten man, only to be rediscovered 20 years later by no less a fan than President Bill Clinton. Aiyana Elliott tries to understand the why of her father's career: his lack of ambition; his disorganized approach to his career; his chaotic personal life, including 4 wives. But in the end she sees that Jack Elliott is a man who is most comfortable on stage making up the set as he goes along; he is a great performer and a poor father. Although she doesn't seem to come to a deeper understanding of their relationship, she has made a film that is a tribute to an artist who was a transitional figure in folk music: the man between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.

Ray Muller also strives for understanding in his film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1995). Leni Riefenstahl, one of the towering figures in film history, is the subject. Muller interviews Riefenstahl, aged 90, at many of the locations of her films, and of course at an editing bench. He also interviews her at various Berlin locations. Interspersed with the interviews are clips from her films, the two most important being Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia, Parts I and II (1938).

The goal of Muller's investigation goes beyond a portrait of the filmmaker. Muller wants to know how involved she was with the Nazi party, with Hitler, and his goals. He wants to test the idea, how much did you know, and how much responsibility should you bear for making films for the Nazis? These are issues Muller goes back to around the 2 key films but also around a supportive letter Reifenstahl wrote to Hitler in the early 1940s. He also returns to these questions when dealing with Riefenstahl's postwar hearing at the hands of the Allies (she was cleared), which resulted in the end of her filmmaking career, and her consequent efforts to restore her reputation right up until this film is made. To the end Riefenstahl claims her goals were artistic not political, that had she known about the fate of the Jews and other persecuted minorities, she would have felt differently. She never recants, but does lament the suffering she has experienced for the past 50 years.

Muller draws no conclusion, but his continual probing poses the key questions about art and morality. He leaves us, his audience, with the conclusion we ourselves wish to come to.

THE NARRATOR AS GUIDE

If the investigator is looking for understanding, the guide already has it. Through the narration the guide helps us understand. Multiple guides are used to layer that understanding, usually first on an intellectual level, then on an emotional level. Mark Jonathan Harris uses multiple guides to engage us with his films in both of his Oscar-winning documentaries, The Long Way Home (1997) and Into the Arms of Strangers (2000).

The Long Way Home is the story of the survivors of the Holocaust from the end of the war in 1945 to the birth of the State of Israel in 1948. It is the story about people who survived Hitler's death camps only to discover they could not return to their former homes. Many who did not return were killed. And so their hopes turned principally to the West and to Palestine. The British Mandate resisted Jewish immigration into Palestine, and the consequent civil disturbance eventually caused Britain to end the mandate, the precursor to a UN-supported partition of Palestine with a homeland for the Jews and a homeland for the Arabs. The film ends with the birth of the State of Israel, implying that at last the survivors of the Holocaust have a home in Israel.

This brief précis of the narrative provides the skeleton. How does the filmmaker use narration to shape and to layer the narrative?

First, to provide unity and transition for the entire narrative, Harris uses the classical, informative guide who can explain the politics of President Truman's choice to support first Jewish immigration and then the State of Israel against the advice of his Departments of State and Defense. The narrator can also detail the story of the 1946 Kelce massacre of 41 Jews who had returned to their homeland in Poland after the war. These narrative knots, where considerable visual material would be needed to capture the issue, are explained by the principal narrator. The history, if you will, is the principle responsibility of the narrator. The actor Morgan Freeman reads the narration.

The other narrators are more personal. Here memoirs, letters, diaries, and oral histories of the 1945–1948 period provide the emotional texture of the narrative. These guides—survivors of the Holocaust, and American soldiers who liberated the camps, who guarded and supervised the camps, including the initial commander, General George Patton—offer deep insights into the emotional states of survivors and liberators. Despair, loss, hope, a future, all the planes of human feeling and existence are explored by these guides. Often actors are used to render these confessional pieces of narration. These “sound close-ups” emotionalize the archival footage. There are also interviewees: survivors, including the chief rabbi of Israel; 2 American rabbis who were instrumental in helping the survivors; an American volunteer who helped Jews escape illegally from Europe to Palestine; and Clark Clifford, who worked diplomatically for President Truman.

In The Long Way Home it is the multiple or layered use of narrators that guides us through the complex history of the period as well as its equally complex emotional turbulence. Harris uses the same layered strategy for his narration in Into the Arms of Strangers. But in this film the more personal guides also appear on camera. They are the children of the Kindertransport, now adults, 50 years after the traumatic war years. The story begins in 1933 with the ascent of Hitler to power in Germany. For children, the changes under the Nazis were subtle and not always apparent. But all that changed with the pogrom in November 1938, the night of shattered glass known as Krystallnacht. Throughout Germany and Austria and the Sudentenland, the annexed portion of Czechoslovakia, Jewish businesses were looted, Jewish synagogues were burned, and Jews were harassed, beaten, and killed. Many died. It proved to be a turning point for the Jews in Germany.

Consequent to Krystallnacht, Jews tried to leave Germany, but exit visas were hard to come by and entry visas to other countries even harder. Great Britain decided that it would accept as many children from Germany as possible. The conditions were that the children had to be under 17, that 50£ had to be paid for their support, and that a British home must be willing to take them in. The program, which began in December 1938 and continued until the beginning of World War II in 1939, was known as the Kindertransport. Children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia participated in the transport.

Into the Arms of Strangers tells the story of the Kindertransport and follows 10 children who participated. Their interviews as well as archival footage, home movies, and photographs provide the visuals for the film.

As in The Long Way Home there is a primary narrator who explains the historical progression. That narration, read by Judi Dench, provides the general informational shape for Into the Arms of Strangers. With the overarching narrative as the guide track for the film, Harris proceeds to use the 10 participants as the personal guides to the story of the Kindertransport. They include 6 women and 4 men; 5 are from Germany, 3 from Austria, 1 from Czechoslovakia, and 1 from Poland who had made his way to Germany by 1939. Their stories focus on life prior to 1938, Krystallnacht; their leavetaking from their parents; the transport itself; life in England; in the case of the young man from Poland, his transport to Australia on the HSS Deruna, and his return to join the army; the reunion with parents where the parents survived, or the experience of learning of the death of the parents; and the aftermath of the Kindertransport experience. What is clear from the stories is that the Kindertransport saved thousands of children's lives, but that it was a scarring event for the children; in a sense it was the seminal event in the lives of these 10 people.

In Into the Arms of Strangers, the narration provides multiple points of entry into a complex historical event. By using a general narration for historical information and participants for personal information, Harris has created a tiered entry into the narrative—informational and emotional lines emanate out of the two layers of narration. Although the narrators are on-camera in Into the Arms of Strangers, they serve the same purpose as the off-camera readings of letters, diaries, and memoirs in The Long Way Home—to personalize a complex historical event and to give emotional resonance to a Holocaust event too easily overwhelmed by statistics and scale. By using multiple narrators as guides, Harris brings us to the emotional core of the issue and we begin to understand.

THE NARRATOR AS PROVOCATEUR

The provocateur has a specific goal in his documentary: to promote change. The nature of the narration may be direct or ironic, but in both cases the goal remains the same. Justine Shapiro and B. Z. Goldberg in their film, Promises (2001), are very direct. They want their film to contribute to the possibility of peace in the Middle East. Goldberg is the narrator, both on and off camera.

Promises was filmed in Israel and in the West Bank from 1997 to 1999. The film follows 8 children, 4 Israeli and 4 Palestinian. In Israel, the children include an ultra-orthodox child, the son of a West Bank settler, and a set of twins, grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. In this sense, the full political spectrum, from liberal to conservative, is represented. Among the Palestinian children, the spectrum is from urban (settled) to refugee (unsettled) and includes a young girl. All other participants on both sides are male. Shapiro and Goldberg are interested in the attitudes of the children toward one another. The film includes their families but only in a limited sense. The major part of the film focuses solely on the children. The film's last section brings together the Israeli twins with the 2 children (male and female) from the West Bank refugee camp. The implicit question is whether the children can get along for an afternoon. They do, but when the filmmakers return to interview them 2 years later, they have not maintained contact and their attitudes have hardened.

Shapiro and Goldberg have tried with Promises to illustrate the complexity and depth of opposing attitudes in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians. They are also attempting to say, by the nature of the film's structure, that it begins with the next generation. We have to get them together if there is to be hope for peace in that region. Their direct approach is an emotional provocation to try.

Ron Mann's Grass (2000) takes a very different approach. Grass is an exploration of American attitudes toward marijuana from the 1930s through the 1990s. Both the government's and the public's attitudes are examined. The information line is essentially to trace the history of marijuana in the United States, from its entry via Mexican migrant workers at the turn of the century to its status today—as a criminalized drug that the government spends billions of dollars to eradicate. The dramatic line of the narrative is how marijuana has been affiliated with dangers to society. Over time it has been affiliated first with the outsider (Mexicans); then with a scapegoated minority (the black community); then with murder; then with mental illness and its consequences; then with heroin use; and finally, with “never fulfilling your potential” or, to put it another way, “to be a loss to society.” The government, primarily through the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 onward, mounted a vigorous attack to criminalize the drug. The head of that department, Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, made it his personal mission to eradicate marijuana from the American landscape. Although there are powerful figures, such as Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia of New York, who question and commission scientific studies to evaluate the drug, the government continues a 45-year assault on the drug and its users. The expense of this war and the number of users grow anyway. In 1977 then-President Jimmy Carter attempted to decriminalize the drug but his effort failed. Nevertheless, a number of states have since decriminalized marijuana usage. But until the end of the century marijuana use has remained a criminal activity from the point of view of the Federal Government.

Grass is a provocation to change the law and align it with scientific knowledge about the drug. The film takes an adversarial position to the law. To flesh out this position, the filmmaker Ron Mann uses as his narrator Woody Harrelson, an actor with a liberal reputation and a knack for portraying antiestablishment characters. The more extreme layer of provocation, however, comes from the visuals. Mann uses film clips from archival antimarijuana films as well as graphics, to make his case. The film opens with a clip about marijuana that poses the question: “Marijuana, Threat or Menace?” The clips increasingly become extreme, melodramatic illustrations of the madness, rapacity, and murder that follow from marijuana usage. The irony and provocation then arises principally from the visuals. But the narration also is provocative in its use of language. Mexicans are characterized as blood-curdling murderers. Commissioner Anslinger is called a “prohibitionist” and a “law-and-order evangelist.” Mayor LaGuardia, on the other hand, is “skeptical about government claims” about marijuana. Commissioner Anslinger is portrayed as a villain while Mayor LaGuardia is a fair-minded hero. This kind of characterization also presents Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan's opposition to marijuana and the youth movement and the movement for decriminalization as heroic. The narration, although more tempered than the visuals, advocates changing the marijuana laws in the United States. This is the provocation of the narration in Grass.

   CONCLUSION

The changes in the narration imply the richness that has kept the documentary lively and alive as a genre. It is important, however, to understand that just as there are subgenres within the documentary, innovation in techniques such as narration, as much as the movement to explore voice in the documentary, are responsible for keeping the genre alive and as critical a center for innovation as it was in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s.