Claiming the Real

Documentary: Grierson and Beyond

Brian Winston

• Editore: British Film Institute
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715106
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Acting & Auditioning

Claiming the RealIIdescribes the origins, development and current stateof documentary cinema, and the social, political, industrial and ethical factorsthat determine its production. This new edition addresses the ethical quagmires, digital technologies and proliferating forms that have transformed documentary cinema.

PART I

The Creative Treatment of Actuality

1

The Documentary and CGI

One of the sci-fi tools imagined in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) is a device for enhancing a photograph, allowing the viewer to restore the three-dimensionality of the original plastic material that the camera has flattened into two dimensions:

Deckard [a policeman played by Harrison Ford] inserts a photograph into his electronic enhancer, and the inert object is thereby converted to the digitised and serialised bits and bytes of the electronic image. . . . the 'depthless surface of the screen' is probed, tested and finally entered. (Bukatman, 1993, p. 136)

Deckard walks (albeit virtually) into the photograph looking for clues.

A quarter of a century later, we are not quite at this point, but we are closer. Second World War aerial reconnaissance photographs can now be digitally melded with large-scale ordnance contour maps to produce moving images with an illusion of depth so effective that the eye is drawn into a virtual three-dimensional world. This computer-generated footage accurately re-creates the original terrain with all its features, natural and man-made.¹ The viewer can follow Deckard (as it were) into the image. This is exactly what is done in the twenty-two episodes of The Lost Evidence (2006–7), two documentary series on major Second World War battles in the Pacific and in Europe, produced by Taylor Downing using orthophotographic software developed by his production company. The films have the familiar mix of witness testimony, reconstruction and archival footage but their innovative transformation of stills into moving images impacts on the relationship between these elements.

Normally, the happenstance of archive footage does not permit the accurate or detailed illustration of the witness's account but, at best, presents general contemporary footage of the action being remembered. In The Lost Evidence, this is reversed. The testimony is illustrated exactly down to, for example, the actual position of a bunker or a building – but this footage is, in fact, an enhanced, animated digital moving image of the scene. Its documentary value lies in the fact that aerial reconnaissance photographs, like police mug shots, are among the most 'scientific' – the most evidentiary – of images.

For nearly 170 years we have, however naively, tended to believe that, unless there was strong reason to suppose otherwise, the photographic camera did not lie. This assumption is grounded in the original positioning of the camera as an instrument of science and one of its consequences has been the possibility of the photograph being considered as evidence. It is the foundation upon which the documentary film rests; but it is being undermined by the digital. The Lost Evidence might use the technology in a search for veracity, but, clearly, it would be just as easy to use it to undercut photography's original claim on the real.

The Lost Evidence: 'aerial reconnaissance photographs digitally melded with large-scale ordnance contour maps'

Already in the early 1990s 'a growing concern at the ease with which [still] photographs can now be electronically altered' was being noted in the newspaper industry. The UK tabloid The Sun, for example, had manipulated a picture of a monk, 'said to be at the centre of a love tangle', and a woman by substituting a habit for the ordinary clothes he was actually wearing in the original photograph. The report in the UK Press Gazette for 5 July 1993 continued: 'In an official statement, The Sun said: "We have superimposed the monk's habit to make it clear to the readers that the story is about a monk." 'Incidents of this sort were increasingly coming to light and causing public scandals.

Prototype parallel technology for the moving image already existed by this time. Music video director Ethan Russell, for example, spent six days with a 'Harry', an early computer programme enabling moving-image manipulation, altering 42 seconds'-worth of Hank Williams Senior's lips. In a unique 1952 telerecording, the only film of the man in performance, Williams sang 'Hey, Good Looking'. After Russell had finished with 'Harry', somebody else's lips were digitally sutured into this image and Williams appeared to be singing 'Tears in My Beer'. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has now become a commonplace, especially in the feature-film industry where CGI special effects are a major attraction for Hollywood's young demographic. Its use in documentary, though, has been largely in historical programming such as The Lost Evidence and there has yet to be a scandal of the sort that has implicated journalism, from National Geographic digitally moving the pyramids in 1982 to the London Daily Mirror in 2004 running digitally manipulated photographs of supposedly abusive British soldiers in the Second GulfWar (Winston, 1990, pp. 30ff;Winston, 2004, pp. 3ff.).

The diffusion of this technology, contrary to the common but erroneous belief in ever-accelerating technological change but actually in accordance with technology's far slower historical norms, will take – is taking – decades. Nevertheless, it is not hard to imagine that, by the end of this process, every documentarist will have to hand, in their video-editing laptop, the wherewithal for complete fakery. Technology, by finally and irrevocably dissolving the connection between the image and the imaged, must therefore have a significant potential impact on the documentary film. The camera's capacity to capture the real will not be erased by this, but a far greater sophistication on the part of the audience will be needed to determine documentary's authenticity.

I know of no theoretical position, no definition of documentary, that does not in some way reference the relationship to the real – from the phrase coined by John Grierson, the founder of the British documentary film movement, who described it as the 'creative treatment [that is, image-making] of actuality [that is pre-existing reality]', to Michael Renov's 'direct ontological claim to the real': 'Every documentary issues a "truth claim" of a sort, positing a relationship to history which exceeds the analogical status of its fictional counterpart' (Renov, 1986, p. 71). But it is now vital, if documentary is to 'show us life' (as Dziga Vertov, another pioneer put it), to find a replacement for 'truth claim' legitimations that rely solely on some innate quality of the image.

Public reception of the documentary still turns too much on an unproblematised acceptance of cinematic mimesis. Documentarists have, for years, obfuscated basic issues so that they could, at one and the same time, claim journalistic/scientific and (contradictory) artistic privileges. As a result, the documentary, unclear as to its legitimations and confused as to its raison d'etre, is not in a good position to counter current doubts as to its authenticity.

Yet there have been significant advances in the study of documentary in the last four decades. The long march through both the paper and the film archives began, as has re-evaluation, through close text readings of the films themselves. There has been a growth in scholarly interest to the point where it is possible to speak of 'documentary studies'. The great row occasioned by direct cinema and cinéma vérité forty years ago brought us closer to fundamental issues than at any time since the LEF Arena debates on these matters in the USSR forty years before that; but now, arguments about the fundamental theory of documentary are more widely rehearsed, philosophers and anthropologists as well as film-makers and film scholars contributing. In the public sphere, the last decade has witnessed a rising cacophony about documentary's ethics, while in the background, still, there is the steady advance of the digital.

It is in the light of all these developments that I am trying here to understand what the 'First Principles of Documentary' (as Grierson's 1932–4 manifesto puts it) actually were; where they came from; how they were legitimated; how these legitimations changed through time; and what, from time to time, their practical effects were, on the screen as well as politically and ethically. Therefore, this study does not propose a fresh forage through the primary sources. Its aim is more modest, merely an examination of Grierson's idea for the documentary, its sources, its practice, its development and its current state, with some thoughts as to its future possibilities.

It is, therefore, primarily a study of the realist documentary idea, and for two reasons. First, the realist documentary makes the greatest 'truth claims' for itself. Second, realist documentaries constitute the dominant tradition, not just in the United Kingdom and North America but also in the rest of Western Europe and all other parts of the world where Griersonian realists trained local film-makers. Although the case can be made (as I shall do in Part Five below) that this is changing, the history of the documentary from the outset until the recent past has been a history of the realist documentary, specifically in its Griersonian mode and the derivatives thereof.

It could be that we are now entering a 'post-Griersonian' phase, but in all candour, I do not see any easy solution to the radical difficulties either the Griersonian or the post-Griersonian documentary now faces in theory, ethics and technology, except to seek in past and current practice some indicators as to what can be salvaged, or avoided, for the future. It is with that ambition that this book addresses itself to a single question: whence came and what were, are and can be the legitimations for the documentary project?

2

The Documentary Film in 1914

'Documentary value' was the phrase John Grierson used in 1926 when reviewing Robert Flaherty's Moana for a New York newspaper. This is usually credited as being the first occasion on which the word 'documentary' was applied, in English, to this specific sort of film. Grierson noticed, and, it must be said, dismissed as having secondary importance, the 'documentary value' of Moana, which he thought was a result of the film's 'being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family . . . But that, I believe, is secondary to its value as a soft breath from a sunlit island' (Grierson, 1981, p. 24). This is where conventional accounts of documentary begin. (See, for example, Ellis, 1989, p. 4; Jacobs, 1971, p. 25; Barsam, 1973a, p. 7; Winston, 1978, p. 2.)² Grierson's enormous abilities as a publicist, and his achievements in setting up a production unit systematically dedicated to producing 'documentary value', quite swept away other claimants to the honour (such as it is) of recognising documentary as a distinct type of film. For instance, not even the efforts of Erik Barnouw, in a standard history (1974, p. 26), and Jay Leyda in his work on compilations (1964, p. 15), could substitute Boleslaw Matuszewski for Grierson.

In La Photographie animée, ce qu'elle est, ce qu'elle doit être, published in Paris in 1898, Matuszewski saw film as an instructional medium, documenting history, daily life, artistic performances, even medical procedures.³ Notwithstanding this, Grierson remains the documentary's Adam, because Matuszewski is ruled out of court presumably as he was a Pole writing in French and because Barnouw and Leyda offered no evidence of a connection between him and Grierson.

Edward Sheriff Curtis, however, is a different case. Curtis worked as a photographer of Native Americans for nearly thirty-five years. His 1,500 sepia-coloured prints are central to our collective photographic image of The North American Indian, as his twenty-volume masterwork was entitled.

In 1914, Curtis made a movie, In the Land of the Headhunters. Virtually lost shortly after its release until the late 1940s, the film has now been restored with a Kwakiutl soundtrack and a new title, In the Land of the War Canoes.⁴ When Curtis was preparing for this venture, he issued a prospectus for The Continental Film Company: 'Associated with several of Seattle's leading business men, Mr Edward S. Curtis has formed a small company for the making of commercial motion pictures of the Indian and the Indian life' (Holm and Quimby, 1980, pp. 113ff.). The prospectus goes on to stress Curtis's extensive experience with the tribal peoples, and proposes a series of films on all the tribes of North and South America. 'Exceptionally substantial dividends' are promised, not least as the proposed films will have, because of their historical and ethnological importance, increasing value, unlike the entertainment pictures that 'go to the junk pile' after six months. Then comes this:

The question might be raised as to whether the documentary material would not lack the thrilling interest of the fake picture. It is the opinion of Mr Curtis that the real life of the Indian contains the parallel emotions to furnish all necessary plots.. . .All pictures made should be classed among the educational, and should be preserved as part of the documentary material of the country.... In making such pictures, the greatest care must be exercised that the thought conveyed be true to the subject, the ceremony be correctly rendered, and above all, that the costumes be correct. It must be admitted that the making of such a series of pictures would be the most difficult thing attempted in motion photography, but it can be done, and will be one of the most valuable documentary works which can be taken up at this time. (Emphasis added)

'Documentary material', 'documentary works' and a definition of the documentary film stressing authenticity; by 1914, at the latest, Curtis was using the term 'documentary work' in a clearly Griersonian sense.

Curtis was exploiting a minor vogue for melodramas set in exotic locales. For instance, one of the Méliès's brothers produced two such South Sea dramas in 1913 (De Brigard, 1975, p. 18). The genre was established well enough in France to be named documentaires romancés and distinguished from documentaires, which were films of the locales without the melodrama, as it were. Curtis's contribution, beyond importing the term into English, was grounded in his photographic practice. Although after the fashion of the day, In the Land of the Headhunters is a crude melodrama, Curtis worked hard to ensure that its setting and costumes were authentic, albeit of a previous age. His is a dramatic ethnographic film, a romance perhaps, but ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the 2nd edition
• PART I The Creative Treatment of Actuality
• PART II Creative: Documentary as Art
• PART III Treatment: Documentary as Drama
• PART IV Actuality: Documentary as Science
• PART V The Post-Griersonian Documentary?
• Envoi
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright