Documentary in the Digital Age

Maxine Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136054259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

If you want to learn from the leading lights of today's revolution in documentary filmmaking Maxine Baker has written the guide you need to own. You'll discover the many different and innovative approaches to documentary form and style arising from the use of innovative new technology. A tribute to the mavericks of creativity, inside you will find interviews and advice from groundbreaking documentary makers from the UK, USA and Europe as well as extensive listings of useful worldwide contacts and organisations. Any and every fan of the documentary will experience anew the passion and wonder of the Factual Film.Published review: "This is a must-have insight into modern documentary; the principles that govern it and the conventions it often breaks. It deserves a place on the shelves of film commissioners, film students and documentary consumers as prominent as the place these documentary filmmakers have carved for themselves on our screens." - www.shootingpeople.org

1 Errol Morris American Iconoclast

Errol Morris

Errol Morris, the American documentary film-maker, is a complex character. At university, he studied the History and Philosophy of Science, an unlikely sounding background for a popular filmmaker. But these academic influences inform all of his work. His films are always stylish but also packed with innovative ideas. They work on a number of levels and at the same time they are highly entertaining. Often, they interrogate the very form of the documentary genre in which they belong. Maybe that is the reason why it took many years before the American Academy of Motion Pictures finally gave him the Oscar he deserves, for The Fog of War (2003), his film about Robert McNamara. The Academy is conservative in its judgements and in its ideas about form.

For years, American documentary was dominated by the style of film-making once described as ‘direct cinema’, now more commonly known by the French expression, cinéma vérité. Errol says that when he first started making movies he made a conscious attempt to break with the vérité tradition. He says:

You take any of the principles of vérité, I was interested in doing the exact opposite. Perhaps because of a certain contrary inclination by nature, but also it seemed to me that the idea of vérité, the metaphysical baggage of vérité, seemed to be quite false. I have nothing against vérité as a style of shooting but, to me, the idea that if you adopt a certain style of shooting, that would make what you do more truthful, strikes me as utter nonsense.

Vérité, he says, developed ‘a crazy set of rules’. You are supposed to handhold the camera, use only available light and remain as unobtrusive as possible. He says that, from the beginning, his films broke those rules. He tells a story about a book that influenced him. The book was about imaginary numbers, the usual light reading you would expect from a person with postgraduate degrees in the history and philosophy of science. The book discussed the difficulty of introducing the idea of the square root of minus one. It quoted Gabriel Garcia Marques, who described how influenced he had been by Kafka when he first read him as a teenager. Errol says that Kafka has the best opening lines in the business. Marques read the first paragraph of Metamorphoses, ‘One fine day, Gregor woke up and found himself transformed into a giant dung beetle.’ Marques said, ‘I didn't know you were allowed to do that.’

As far as breaking the vérité rules was concerned, Errol did not know you were allowed to do that. But he did it anyway. He says about his early films:

In Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, The Thin Blue Line, we always put the camera on a tripod, we tried to be as obtrusive as possible, we used the heaviest equipment we could find, people looked directly into the camera, which is considered to be the great ‘no-no’. To break that cinéma vérité notion of observing without being observed, I lit everything. I can't think of a single instance where I used ‘available light’. For me, available light is anything you can produce, anything you have at hand.

Errol points out that The Thin Blue Line, which examined the case of Randall Adams, a man who had been wrongly convicted and sent to jail for a murder he did not commit, would have had no evidentiary value at all if vérité was correct in its claims. Yet, he says, he is hard pushed to name another movie which resulted in a man being released from prison, not because the movie had drawn attention to the case and raised a public outcry, but because there was evidence recorded during the making of the movie that could be produced in a court of law and used to prove that the major witnesses in the l977 trial had committed perjury.

The Thin Blue Line has become one of the most influential films in recent documentary history, not only in factual film-making but also in fiction. It has become fashionable these days for fiction films to use the language of documentary, and the influence of Errol Morris can easily be spotted, particularly in films coming out of Hollywood. At the same time, The Thin Blue Line also uses many of the techniques of fiction. At the time of its release this caused great controversy and was mainly responsible, Errol was told, for stopping the film from being nominated for an Oscar. The re-enacted sequences, highly cinematic in their execution, were said to make the film ‘not a proper documentary’. Nowadays, the techniques are commonly used in documentary though, it should be said, rarely as skilfully as in The Thin Blue Line.

The movie opens with a simple credit sequence, with Philip Glass music playing over the graphics. The first three shots of the film show the Dallas skyline at night, lights flickering, the back sky blue. The scene is vaguely familiar. Something about it is reminiscent of the television series Dallas, still hugely popular all over the world when The Thin Blue Line was made. The Glass music emphasizes the feeling that something dramatic is about to happen. Over the third shot, a voice-over begins. A man tells how he and his brother were driving to California from Ohio and stopped in Dallas. One more cityscape shot and then the picture cuts to the person talking. He is not identified, in the conventional manner, with a caption or commentary. The background picture gives no clues. He simply tells his story. He is looking directly at the audience. He says he got a job within half a day of arriving in the city, ‘as if I was meant to be here’. With the Glass music still running quietly under the picture, it cuts to a revolving red light, a police car light. Another man, younger, wearing a red shirt, is now talking. He tells how he ran away from home a couple of times, at 16 took a pistol and a shotgun, stole a neighbour's car and ended up coming to Dallas.

The young man describes a night out with the first man – who he names as Randall Adams – and his brother. There was a lot of drinking, marijuana and a movie, no suggestion of anything unusual. The only hint of menace up until now has been the softly playing music of Philip Glass. Randall Adams then appears, expressing what sounds like an internal monologue. He got up and went to work on Saturday morning. Why did he meet that kid? Why did he run out of gas at that time? He doesn't know. Suddenly, the film cuts to a dramatized reconstruction. This, the first of a number of re-enactments of the crime, fundamental to the story, is carried on picture and music alone. The first shot shows a car pulled up at the roadside, a police vehicle behind it. The scene continues with very short shots, dramatically lit. The point of view seems to be that of the driver of the car, looking through his rear view mirror, seeing a policeman getting out of the police car and coming up to him. We only see the driver's hand. When the policeman is level with the car of the driver who has been stopped, a hand clutching a gun begins to shoot. The cutting is now very fast. From the gun to police artists' line drawings of the bullet wounds the police victim suffered. The dead policeman lies by the side of the road, a foot stamps on an accelerator and there is the sound of a car driving off at speed. Now a policewoman jumps out of the police car and shoots at the disappearing vehicle.

A morgue photograph of the dead policeman is cut with pictures of his bullet-riddled uniform and a colour picture of him smiling, in uniform, a handsome young man. There follows a rostrum sequence, cleverly conceived. A newspaper front page, the camera tracks in to the headline: ‘Officer's killer sought’. Then the picture story: ‘Officer killed Sunday. Robert Woods.’ The camera roams around, picking out key words: ‘12.30 a.m.’; ‘Oh my gosh’. Then, a hugely enlarged, grainy picture of the victim. Another quote, ‘The description could not be the assailant.’ The date ‘November 29’ mixes into ‘December 22 1976’. The camera pans down to a picture of an official-looking guy, holding onto the arm of a hapless arrestee. A voice-over interview begins. The picture cuts to the man we saw at the beginning of the film, Randall Adams. He is the man in the newspaper photograph, but no longer resembles him. He has been in jail for many years.

The film now begins a detailed analysis of what actually happened on that night, 27 November 1976. There are a number of interviewees, police and public, lawyers, witnesses, all talking to, or just past, the camera. They are all framed the same way, head and shoulders shots, no camera movement. There are no name captions but it is obvious from the content of the interviews what role each person plays in the story. It is a painstaking investigation, tracing and retracing, step by step, the events of that night and the backgrounds of the convicted man and the chief witness for the prosecution. Randall Adams is convicted but is he really guilty? Ultimately, the mystery is solved. Adams is innocent and the real killer is the young man in the red shirt, David Harris.

While the story itself is utterly absorbing, I am just as interested in the visual, musical and graphic techniques that Morris uses to drive his story along. The simply framed interviews are compelling because the people talking are articulate and lively characters with a murder mystery to tell. In principle, however, we can see a good factual cop story on television any day. What distinguishes this film from investigative television is the skilful storytelling and the juxtaposition of interview, reconstruction and other diverse visual illustration. The key images in the film revolve around the scene of crime itself. As the story progresses, the point of view of the camera changes as different witnesses discuss what they claim actually happened. The murder of the policeman is shown over and over again, but each time it is filmed from a different angle and each time the audience is being given new, usually contradictory, information. Errol says, ‘It is a re-enactment of lies. Not reality. It is unreality, falsehood. Based on the point of view of the witnesses, you are treated to the spectacle of imagery which you are told shows you something of the real world but which is untrue.’ The high production values of these episodes, stylishly shot like a Film Noir movie, enhance the feeling that this cannot be real, we are watching fiction. Then the picture cuts back to a simply shot interviewee and we realize that it is indeed a factual account we are hearing. But which of the people in this film are lying and who is telling the truth?

Sometimes the visual material is used in an almost satirical way, debunking what an interviewee has said, or is about to say. At one point, the lawyers for the defence explain that the judge at Adams's trial would not let them introduce evidence about a crime spree that David Harris had been on. One of them says that she felt that the reason why the judge was determined to put Randall Adams on trial and not David Harris was because Adams was 28 and could be given the death sentence, while Harris was only 16 and could not. An artist's impression of a scene in the courtroom shows a picture of the trial judge. So we recognize him when he appears as the next interviewee, talking about how he learned to respect the law from his father, who was an FBI man in Chicago in the 1930s. As he speaks, the picture cuts to an old black and white movie showing a man in 1930s clothes shooting a rifle. The judge is still talking when a classic movie episode, in which John Dillinger is assassinated, is shown. He says his father was there when it happened and tells with glee how, as a child, he had been told about the people who dipped their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood for souvenirs. On the picture, guns are blazing, there is absolute mayhem on screen but no soundtrack, only the voice-over interview with the judge and Philip Glass's music. The sequence is vintage Errol Morris, acutely perceived and wittily executed. It is also a very effective way of underlining the casual attitude to the death penalty that prevails in the state of Texas, a penalty that could be handed down to the unfortunate Randall Adams.

Adams was convicted in May 1977, on the basis of evidence given by David Harris and two other key witnesses who came forward very late in the day and perjured themselves. He was still in jail in December 1986, when Errol interviewed David Harris about the murder, for the last time, on sound only. The final shots in this richly cinematic film are of a cassette recorder, filling the frame and filmed from every conceivable angle. The starkness of the image makes the content of the interview even more shocking.

EM:	Is he innocent?
DH:	Did you ask him?
EM:	Well he has always said he is innocent.
DH:	There you go. Didn't believe him huh? Criminals always lie.
EM:	Well what do you think about whether or not he's innocent?
DH:	I'm sure he is.
EM:	How can you be sure?
DH:	Because I'm the one who knows.
EM:	Were you surprised that the police blamed him?
DH:	They didn't blame him. I did. A scared 16-year-old kid. Sure would like to get out of it if you can.

The interview ends with Harris asserting that Adams is probably only in jail because he would not give Harris a place to sleep for the night after he had helped him when he ran out of gas.

A final caption reveals that Adams has been in jail for 11 years. David Harris is on death row in Huntsville, Texas for a murder he committed in 1985. Material recorded for The Thin Blue Line was introduced as evidence at an appeal by Randall Adams. The witnesses who lied were proved to be perjurers and Randall Adams was finally set free.

Mr Death (2000) is another film which caused a great deal of controversy. It is subtitled The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. The opening credit sequence owes something to the Hammer House of Horror genre of movie making. The music, composed by Caleb Sampson, is pure Ealing Studios, circa 1955. A series of images, intercut with black flash frames, show what looks like a mad scientist's laboratory lit up by the lightning that comes with an electric storm. It is obviously a set, elaborately dressed and lit. Almost subliminally, we see a man is sitting there. This must be Mr Death. You get the feeling that Errol and his regular collaborator, production designer Ted Bafaloukos, had a lot of fun putting this elaborate pastiche together.

In the last shot in the sequence, a light shines directly on the man and we see him more clearly, albeit briefly. The picture cuts to black for a full five seconds. Then, we see a man's eyes reflected in the mirror of a moving car. He is wearing glasses. It is the man we just saw in the laboratory. Cut to a hand on the driving wheel. These two shots are in black and white. Soothing, contemporary music plays over the pictures and the man's voice-over begins. He says, ‘I became involved in the manufacture of execution equipment because I was concerned with the deplorable condition of the hardware that's in most of the state's prisons, which generally results in torture, prior to death.’ Cut again, this time to colour footage, back of head shot, the driver suddenly seems like a rather ordinary-looking fellow. He carries on talking. ‘A number of years ago I was asked by a state to look at their electric chair. I was surprised at the condition of the equipment and I indicated to them what changes should be made to bring the equipment up to the point of doing a humane execution.’

A humane execution? Who is this man and what sort of a world is Errol Morris inviting us to join him in? When I spoke to him, Errol asked the questions himself:

What is going on in Leuchter's head? He has a whole set of beliefs which one could honestly describe as being utterly repellent. He is in love with the death penalty. I think that is the best way to describe it. He loves execution devices. Loves them. And he has become a Holocaust denier. One question I have, is he for real? Is this just some whacky joke or has he really invested in these beliefs? Is he an anti-Semite or a Nazi, who is this man? And is it possible to hold a set of utterly wrong, ridiculous, pernicious beliefs and still imagine oneself to be a good guy?

And this is where I suddenly begin to understand why this philosopher/film-maker wanted to make this film. He says:

It is an endlessly interesting story to me because people, after all, do generally believe in their own rectitude, do not think of themselves as bad people or evil agents. They see themselves as acting from the best of all possible motives. Leuchter sees himself as having a collection...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Life on the run
• 1. Errol Morris: American iconoclast
• 2. Nicolas Philibert: French sensibility
• 3. Paul Watson: Influential innovator
• 4. Pawel Pawlikowski: Eastern European analysis
• 5. Kevin Macdonald: Oscar-winning polymath
• 6. Norma Percy: Popular television history
• 7. Brian Hill: The musical documentary
• 8. Victor Kossakovsky: The Dogme from St Petersburg
• 9. Sean Langan: Journalist with a camera
• 10. Clive Gordon: The Berlin aesthetic
• 11. Sean McAllister: Director/cameraman with attitude
• 12. Maxine Baker: Lessons for life – some of the things I have learned about making documentaries
• Appendix 1: International documentary film festivals
• Appendix 2: Sources of funding for documentaries
• Index