Monday 17 September 2012

Objectivity in Documentary



Objectivity in Documentary

by Peter Morris


In their essay Redefining Cinema: other genres, Izod and Kilborn state that ‘the photographic realism of the documentary, for instance, can easily conceal the extent to which it often actively constructs a particular view of the world…documentaries can never be wholly objective; they will always involve a greater or lesser degree of intervention on the part of the documentarist.’


Documentaries hold a particularly resonant role in the society of today as a visual medium in which to learn and evaluate the facts of a certain situation.  We are expected to believe what we see and as viewers and consumers of this information, we expect to be shown the truth of an event or events that take place on the screen before us…as the saying goes…”a picture never lies”.  But what if we can’t see the whole picture, the bigger picture, the picture cut from view, the edited expression of the reality of an event?  Do we as the viewer have to construct this bigger picture ourselves?  Are we expected to derive the truth from the information given to us by the photographer?  Is that the lure of this medium of expression?  Dai Vaughan, a documentary film editor for over thirty years, suggests that “realism has nothing to do with totality but involves, on the part of the recipient, a sparkling of understanding across gaps in the text; such creative response, such active construction of meaning by the recipient, lying at the heart of aesthetic pleasure.”¹  This gives the documentary the ability to select and discard, allowing a certain margin for the creative processes of the human mind…this is John Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality”2, a phrase that has been and will be debated on many levels for many years to come.

The Lumière Brothers were the first to produce moving pictures of real people involved in real world situations.  These images of workers leaving their factory workplace on a bright evening astounded their viewers…this was the first instance of a real situation being presented to an audience, and is probably one of the most honest attempts at documenting a particular event with no sense of bias, or subject, or objectivity, or treatment of the images for the viewer.  This didn’t last long.  Soon, the Lumière Brothers discovered that to show the demolition of a stone wall in reverse could astound any viewer.  The creative treatment had begun.  And, in the decades that followed, the search for truth in documentary got more and more difficult, more and more hidden behind the emerging abilities of the film-makers and their ever evolving equipment.  This new forum for expression had begun and the documentary film began to grow, from the simple images of factory workers to films which can cause political, social and moral unrest, affecting millions of people.  Documentaries can be used to promote one’s subjective views or to analyse the subjective nature of institutions and individuals across the world.  A forum that can bring to us the world of a lonely individual or the strife of an entire nation, the remembrance of something that is now gone or the promotion of something that is yet to come.

This form has, since its inception, taken many different shapes, each with its own unique take on how the “creative treatment of actuality”2 should be recorded and presented to the general viewer.  Film writer Bill Nichols describes these various modes…the expository mode is described as “Voice of God commentary and poetic perspectives sought to disclose information about the historical world itself and to see that world afresh, even if these views came to seem romantic and didactic” (Watt and Wright’s Night Mail (1936), Alberto Calvacanti’s Coalface (1935), John Grierson’s Drifters (1929)), the observational mode “of representation allowed the film maker to record unobtrusively what people did when they were not explicitly addressing the camera…But the observational mode limited the film maker to the present moment and required disciplined detachment from the events themselves (Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967 ), Albert & David Maysles’ Salesman (1969), Robert Drew’s Primary (1960)), the interactive mode “arose from the…desire to make the film maker’s perspective more evident.  Interview styles and interventionist tactics arose, allowing the film maker to participate more actively in present events (Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), Nick Broomfield’s Tracking Down Maggie (1994)), and the reflexive mode which “arose from a desire to make the conventions of representations themselves more apparent and to challenge the impression of reality which the other three modes normally conveyed unproblematic.” (Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988), Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room (2005)).3  These different modes of documentary-making changed over the years partly due to technological innovations in equipment, most notably in sound recording equipment and hand held cameras, and partly in the ability of the film-maker to push the boundaries in terms of the presentation of the truth as a viable mode of creative communication.  Izod and Kilborn argue that “The photographic realism of the documentary can easily conceal the extent to which it often actively constructs a particular view of the world.  This view is determined, among other things, by the film-maker’s own preconceptions, by the perspective from which the events are witnessed, and by the structuring principles according to which the material is edited.  In other words, documentaries can never be wholly objective; they will always involve a greater or lesser degree of intervention on the part of the documentarist”2 Even with these varying modes of documentary, the holy grail of pure objectivity is still elusive, lost amongst the techniques involved in the film making process, but some have come close and regardless of what style of documentary, in the majority of attempts, an accurate portrayal of the truth is paramount.

Direct cinema was America’s answer to the cinema veritè movement that was blooming in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s; led by such film-makers as Chris Marker, Jacques Rozier, Pierre Perrault and Jean Rouch, whose film Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un Été 1961), had a huge influence on the cinema veritè movement4.  The direct cinema style of documentary making focused on a lack of participation on the film-makers behalf, in terms of influencing the reality of the situation they are recording, a form of the observational mode of film-making mentioned earlier.  The Maysles brothers were integral in the establishment of this mode of film making, along with Robert Drew (credited as the father of direct cinema), Richard Leacock, D.A. Penneaker and Frederick Wiseman, who all believed that this form of documentary making was the only true objective form of documentary, even more so than their European counterpart’s version; cinema veritè.  Erik Barnouw defines the differences – “The direct cinema documentarist took his camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinema veritè tried to precipitate one.  The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the Rouch cinema veritè artist was often an avowed participant.  The direct cinema artist played the role of uninvolved bystander; the cinema veritè artist espoused that of provocateur.  Direct cinema found its truth in events available to the camera.  Cinema veritè was committed to a paradox: that artificial circumstances could bring hidden truth.”4

Made in 1969, Salesman follows the fortunes of four salesmen as they attempt to sell expensive bibles, door to door, to low-income households across New England and Florida.  The film was produced and directed by brothers Albert and David Maysles along with Charlotte Zwerin and followed the mandate of the direct cinema mode – no interviews, no voice of god, no intertitles, no participation.  The film focuses on the struggle of Paul Brennan A.K.A. ‘The Badger’, an Irish – American salesman, under pressure to increase his sales numbers.  Even upon its release the film was both praised and ridiculed for its stance on realism.  Salesman follows the rules laid down by the direct cinema mode but has still been criticised for not being able to be wholly objective.  The presence of a camera can influence how people react and the unavoidable use of selective editing was the basis for much of the criticism given to Salesman, and indeed, to the direct cinema movement as a whole.  Vincent Canby of the New York Times said in 1969, “they have eliminated from the film all evidence that the people being photographed – the salesmen and their customers – are aware of the presence of the camera.  Obviously, they also photographed much more material that is included in the finished movie, allowing them to impose a certain narrative order on the events, and with that order, a point of view.” 5   “You could call it that,” Albert Maysles responds, “but if the POV is set up to give you a message – the hell with the facts – that’s where POV gets into trouble.  When you’re getting into “purposes”, then you’re getting into POV.  If your purpose is just to reveal the human condition, then that’s ok.”6   Regardless of the critics’ comments in terms of the objectivity of direct cinema, it showed a new and engaging attempt to portray the subjects of their films with a truth, a reality and an honesty that had not been seen before in any other mode of documentary.  In an interview on the force of reality in direct cinema, Albert Maysles says; “in Salesman, for example, you’ll see Paul (Brennan) sitting in a cafeteria, and it’s quite a long sustained shot of him just looking off into the blue.  Now, I would venture to say that any other documentary filmmaker would have thought it smart to say, “But Paul, what are you thinking of?  We want to know what you are thinking.”  You probably would have needed cutaways, because there would be questions and answers, and you can’t just go along continuously that way.  So, you’d have cutaway shots, food on the table or a waitress walking, or whatever.  Instead, in our film, the audience is totally absorbed in the man’s thinking, whatever it is.  And you don’t exactly know what it is, but you can pretty damn well guess.  In fact, in that guessing process you become all the more engaged, because now, more than ever, the process of identification is taking place.  You are identifying with that person.  You are in that person’s shoes.  You are with him, heart and soul.”7  It is this engagement, this truth of the human being that the Maysles brothers sought and brought to the screen in Salesman and subsequent documentaries such as Grey Gardens (1975), a character study of real people going through real events.  These events are portrayed as authentically as possible, considering there is the buffer of a director between the characters and the audience.  In direct cinema this buffer is minimised to the best it can be.  Is it objective realism or is it a constructed view of reality?  Either way this buffer is present and a very real determining factor in what we are expected to feel.

In 1988, Errol Morris released a film that chose the truth as the subject matter of the documentary.  His film The Thin Blue Line (1988) studies the case of Randall Adams, an innocent man who was convicted of murdering a Dallas police officer in November 1976 and sentenced to death for his crime.  Morris’ film is both an investigation of the murder and a nightmarish meditation on the differences between truth and fiction8 which used interviews, archive footage and re-enactments to portray the facts of a convoluted miscarriage of justice.  These rather stylised devices, alien to the world of the Maysles brothers and direct cinema, were a new step in the creative reflexive mode of documentary making, especially the re-enactments, which were shot much like a noir film; rich in texture and resonating with the viewer, as they played out the various accounts from various perspectives of the shooting on that fateful night in Dallas, to the haunting score by composer Philip Glass.  These re-enactments drew the attention of many critics who felt that Morris was taking liberties with the truth by using these stylish re-enactments as a medium to portray the realities of an actual event.  He defends himself, “My re-enactments focus our attention on some specific detail or object that helps us look beyond the surface images to something hidden, something deeper – something that better captures what really happened…The engine of uncovering truth is not some special lens or even the unadorned human eye; it is unadorned human reason.  It wasn’t a cinema veritè documentary that got Randall Adams out of prison.  It was a film that re-enacted important details of the crime…I use re-enactments to burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth.”9  And he understands the power of these pictures, and understands the power he wields as the director and buffer of the truth between subject and audience, “If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves – because, regardless of what it is – we are likely to uncritically believe it.”9  There is no doubting that Morris was very subjective in this film, he wholeheartedly admits believing that Adams was innocent of the murder before he started filming10 and used these re-enactments, collected evidence and interviews with all the people concerned with the investigation to prove the innocence of Randall Adams.  A year after Morris released The Thin Blue Line Adams was released from jail after serving twelve years for a murder he did not commit.  It was up to Morris to solve the case that the court system in Texas couldn’t, even though there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary of Adam’s guilt. 

One critic, Stephen Rowley states; “It’s fashionable amongst certain academic circles to argue that there is no such thing as objective truth; that any account of events is inherently a fiction, shaped by our own prejudices, beliefs, values and so on.  In re-enacting every perspective of events without distinction, Morris at first seems to be ascribing to his view.  Each version is another tale, apparently equally valid.  Yet Morris never loses sight of the fact that although different people might reconstruct real events in different ways, somebody pulled the trigger that night.”11  There is inherently an understanding in Morris, as a documentarist, to show only truth in his films.  With The Thin Blue Line, he went one step further, he showed not only what was true but what was perceived to be true and what was utterly false.  There is no arguing that the ‘the photographic realism of the documentary can easily conceal the extent to which it often actively constructs a particular view of the world.’ 2  In the case of The Thin Blue Line this particular view of the world turned out to be the only view based on actual truth.

The idea of pure objectivity in a documentary film is simply impossibly.  There is inherently a creative process involved in the making of any documentary film, be it an observational film or a reflexive film, an interactive film or an expository film, there is somebody behind the camera who chooses to point it here and not there, there is somebody sitting in an editing suite choosing what is important and what is not, there is somebody who decides they want to make a film about this person or that object.  Errol Morris and the Maysles brothers sit on very opposite sides of the objective film-maker divide, but both aspire for the same thing – a fundamental truth in their films, be it the world of Paul Brennan or the world of Randall Adams.  The objectivity of direct cinema reveals to us the truth about how people act and perceive the world, the subjectivity of Errol Morris reveals to us how the world can act on the people within it.  Both will agree, there is only the truth as they see it, that they can perceive.

“But I’ll make every effort to tell the truth…but what I tell will be the truth as best as I know.  What is documentary but one divine accident after another?  I mean, reality is a force outside of ourselves that we play just a small part of.”7
- Albert Maysles - 2007



References:
  1. Jordan, Randolph (January 31st 2003) The Gap: Documentary Truth between Reality and Perception (Online) http://horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/documentary_truth.html
  2. Hall, J. Ed & Church Gibson, P (1998) Oxford Guide to Film Studies Pgs. 426 - 433 (Oxford University Press)
  3. Nichols, Bill (1989) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
  4. Barsam, Richard M. (1992) Non-fiction Film: A Cultural History Pgs 299 - 305 (US: Indiana University Press)
  5. Canby, Vincent (April 18th 1969) New York Times Review: Salesman (Online) http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=2&res=EE05E7DF173AA52CAB494CC4B679958D6896&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
  6. Lewis, Anne S. (February 11th 2000) Stories That Tell Themselves.  The Texas Documentary Tour: Meet the Maysles (Online) http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/print?oid=75859
  7. Zuber, Sharon (2007) The Force of Reality in Direct Cinema: an Interview with Albert Maysles (Online) http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-33571787_ITM
  8. Maslin, Janet (August 25th 1988) Review/Film; Anatomy of a Murder: A Real Life Whodunit (Online) http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=940DE2DA1F30F935A1575BC0A96E948260&pagewanted=print
  9. Morris, Errol (April 3rd 2008) Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One) (Online) http://morris.blogs.nyimes.com/2008/04/03/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-one/index.html
  10. Wisconsin Public Radio (July 2nd 2004) A Conversation With Errol Morris (Online) http://www.wpr.org/news/errol%20morris%20iv.cfm
  11. Rowley, Stephen (2007) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris) 1988 (Online) http://cinephobia.com/thinblue.htm

Bibliography

Films Cited
  • Night Mail (1936) - Dir. Basil Wright, Harry Watt
  • Coal Face (1935) – Dir. Alberto Calvacanti
  • Drifters (1929) – Dir. John Grierson
  • Titicut Follies (1967) – Dir. Frederick Wiseman
  • Salesman (1969) – Dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
  • Primary (1960) – Dir. Robert Drew
  • Roger and Me (1989) – Dir. Michael Moore
  • Tracking Down Maggie (1994) – Dir. Nick Broomfield
  • The Thin Blue Line (1988) – Dir. Errol Morris
  • Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room (2005) – Dir. Alex Gibney
  • Chronique d'un été (Paris 1960) (1961) – Dir. Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch
  • Grey Gardens (1975) – Dir. Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer

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