Monday 17 September 2012

The Influence of H.R. Giger


The Influence of H.R. Giger
by Peter Morris

“I do not know anybody else, who has so accurately portrayed the soul of modern humanity. A few decades from now when they talk about twentieth century, they will think of Giger.” – Oliver Stone, 2001

H.R. Giger is regarded as the foremost artist in Fantastic Realism, an art-form that can disturb, inspire, alarm and arouse in equal measures.  His dreamscapes, imagined deep in the furthest most corners of the human imagination often depict suffering and pain, but often, closer inspection shows that this suffering and pain is a warning to the community...a warning regarding the direction the human race is taking, a warning regarding the pain that loosing humanity to mechanical forces can have, and a warning regarding the industrialisation of the human soul.

His work often depicts the cross breeding of human and machine, a kind of deformed offspring, human in shape but void of humanity, mechanical in structure but organic in nature.  These unique blends of mechanics and humans are often referred to as “Biomechanoids” and this style of artwork has had a huge and long reaching effect in the world of fantasy and abstract industrialism.  His work, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, model designs and album covers has been influenced by what Giger has seen happen to the human race since the beginning of the 20th century – World Wars I and ii, the Holocaust, Stalin’s Purges, chemical and biological warfare, weapons of mass destruction, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, civil terror in China and other communist countries, atrocities by South American dictators and the brutality of the South African Apartheid, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the genocides of Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the wars in the Middle East, all against the backdrop of the explosion of the mechanical and technological revolution.  This century has seen more bloodshed and more advancement than any other.  These two go hand in hand in Giger’s work...his painting Dune II being a prime example, the mechanised fat cat of the industrial world rolling over the bodies of the lesser people, with violence in hand and streamlined efficiency being paramount.

In 1977 Giger released his third and most famous book “Necronomicon”, which served as his first and most recognisable influence on the world of film-making.  His designs of alien creatures in this book served as the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s alien in “Alien”.  Giger would design the creature and the supporting environments and these designs won him an Academy Award in 1980 for Best Achievement in Visual Effects.  These designs based heavily on the concept of streamlined efficiency...the alien being the ultimate killing machine.  Scott says of Giger’s work on “Alien”,I think you would have to compare Giger's work on Alien to the great German expressionistic films of the early part of this century, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. Although I don't think Giger's work is specifically reminiscent of these films in terms for aesthetic, it does harken back to them in the sense of originality and vision. It is extremely difficult to attain a "special tone" to a film which isn't seen as interfering with the story or worse yet, regarded as "artsy" - a very pejorative word in mainstream cinema.



He also worked on creature design and set elements on many other films including artwork for Dune, Species and Alien3. 

Giger’s influence on the arts was not solely confined to the darker side of emerging science fiction directors, but also highly regarded by some of the world’s most renowned musical artists, including Emerson Lake and Palmer, Debbie Harry, Carcass, Danzig and Pankow.  In 1981 Giger was approached by Debbie Harry of Blondie fame and commissioned to design an album cover for her debut solo album Koo Koo. 

This image showing Debbie Harry being pierced by four needles representing the four elements caused a huge uproar and was banned from being advertised in the London underground.  This album cover was amongst many that Giger designed and his influence on the music industry does not stop at album covers.  In 2000 he was approached by Korn front-man Jonathan Davies and commissioned to design a microphone stand for their world tour. 


This microphone took the form of a biomechanoid woman in an erotic pose and served as a key prop in the design of the stage show.

Giger’s career as an alternative industrial artist has had a long and lasting position in terms of his influence on the world of art and design.  Since his revolutionary design for Ridley Scott’s Alien, the world of science fiction and horror have not been able to re-create a creature or monster that can embody the fears of the human soul.  This has been Giger’s ambition in regard to his own artwork...an attempt to see inside the modern human...to look at the mechanics of our being and to decide how that form should be represented.




Scene Analysis - Psycho



Psycho: The Shower Scene


Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) stands as an iconic masterpiece of modern cinema, with the famous shower scene becoming a true moment of film history.  This scene is one of the most well-known and commonly referenced moments in horror and suspense using various factors of editing, sound design and composition to portray the true terror of murder, so much so that in 1998 Gus Van Sant made an almost shot-for-shot remake of the entire film.

The scene itself is 3 minutes and 13 seconds long and occurs 44 minutes into the film.  Up until this point the story of Marion is full of brief glimpses into her world leading the viewer down the road as to whether she will get away with her plan of stealing money from her boss or will she be caught, however the shower scene immediately changes the mood, tone and pace of the entire film, turning it from a story of robbery to a story of psychological horror.  This shocking twist so early in the film caught many viewers off guard further enhancing the mood of suspense and establishes a new and pronounced fear that echoes throughout the rest of the film.

Unlike the rest of the film the shower scene is a multitude of quick and furious edits, 55 cuts in just over 3 minutes, each expertly devised to whip the audience into a heightened frenzy of fear, anticipation, shock, and suspense.  The scene can be viewed as three separate sections, divided by the content of action.  The first part of the scene consists of ten shots with an average length of 4.3 seconds each.  These consist of Marion getting into the shower, closing the curtain and turning on the water.  There is a noticeable lack of music or sound in the first three shots before Marion turns on the shower and closes the curtain.  The running water serves as the basis for the sound-scape for the entire scene.  This encloses the viewer inside the shower both visibly and audibly with the sound of the running water overpowering all other sounds.  The next seven shots show Marion as she washes, allowing the viewer to adjust to an equilibrium of familiarity tainted with unease.  The last shot of the first section, in classic Hitchcock style, shows the viewer what the protagonist cannot see, using an over the shoulder shot and a long zoom the audiences eye is drawn to the ominous arrival of a dark figure behind the drawn curtain of the shower. 

This shot leads us into the second section of the scene, where the looming character behind the curtain begins their vicious attack.  It is at this point and further heightened by the loud screaming of Marion that the infamous and much recognized music begins throwing the viewer from a state of suspense to a state of terror.  This section of the scene consists of 33 cuts in a brief 21 seconds, alternating between the frenzied composition of Marion’s reactions within the frame (close-ups of her mouth screaming, hands moving in and out of frame, her head turning frantically from side to side) to the powerful statue-like and silhouetted figure of the attacker, who’s only movement is that of the rhythmical, robotic like stabbing motion.  This stabbing action is accompanied by the almost exaggerated ripping sounds of the knife entering and exiting the skin.  These sounds enhance the unseen brutality of the knife actually entering the skin within the imagination of the viewer.  This section sees the climax of the action within the scene and the extremely fast cutting between POV shots and extreme close-ups, along with the frenzied music and the unique sound effects, makes this a mutli-sensory experience of brutality that Hitchcock wanted to portray in a simple and effective manner.
The third section of the scene consists of 11 shots lasting 1 minute and 45 seconds.  These rather longer cuts mirror that of the first section, and bookend the scene with the inevitable death of Marion as she slides down the white tiles of the shower, her attacker turning and fleeing.  These shots comprise of many close-ups of Marion’s hand as it slowly slides down the tiles before grabbing in vain at the shower curtain...her last attempt at leaving the shower before succumbing to death.  As the curtain tears away the music finally drains out leaving only the sound of the running water, again mirroring the first section of the scene.  The blood washes down the drain in an symbolic moment as her life comes to an end.  The final cut in the film is a cross-dissolve between the drain and her unblinking eye before panning across the bathroom, out the door and resting on a view of the Bates house.

In Gus Van Sant’s 1998 version of Psycho the shower scene is again the pivotal point in the film.  His almost shot-for-shot remake of the scene also contains these three separate sections within the scene, however lacks a certain connection between the viewer and the protagonist and certainly suffers from being shot in colour, along with intercutting shots of fast moving clouds and dilating eyeballs into the fast paced stabbing section of the scene.  Van Sant also follows more modern and conventional modes of film-making by showing the stab wounds on Marion’s back along with blood smearing along the white tiles of the shower.  The remake of the scene does convey the same terror and fear as Hitchcock’s original, however, it lacks the subtlety, smoothness and relies far too heavily on spoon feeding to the viewer the horror of the scene.  Hitchcock trusted his audience

Justine Wright - Editor



Justine Wright: Editing with Reality and Cutting with Style

by Peter Morris




On the crest of releasing her fifth collaboration with director Kevin Macdonald, editor Justine Wright has become one of a rare breed of modern day editors, she edits documentaries and fiction films, and she edits them conversely tackling the documentaries like fiction films and the fiction films like real life.  This unique ability shows the true range of capacity and experience needed by an editor who works across both fields of her discipline.  Being the creative force of the post-production aspect of her films, Wright brings her own unique style to the films she edits, be they for Kevin Macdonald or whomever else she is cutting for, however out of the nine feature films she has edited, five have been with Macdonald, the fifth of which Eagle of the Ninth will be released early this year1.  The truth being that their understanding and insight combines to the success of their work; the four films released together earning a number of Oscar nominations, and winning two. 

Wright utilises both the aspects of realist and formalist styles to her cutting, threading a fine line between the two across her career.  The first feature she edited was Kevin Macdonald’s One Day In September (1999) which recounted the horrific events of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany at which a group of Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli hostages, eventually leading to the massacre of both groups in the bloody finale at the Munich Airport.  The film cuts between stock footage from the numerous cameras present at the games, along with key interviews with some of the victim’s relations, police and even one of the surviving terrorists.  Added to these documents of the event is a re-enactment of the scenes inside the hotel where the Israelis were being held hostage.  These re-enactments serve as the backbone for getting inside the tragic event and putting faces on the victims and the perpetrators, an important if somewhat formalist approach to the documentary, first utilised in the form of Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line in 1988.  These elements combine and with the hand of Wright, come together in a unique and absorbing way.  The opening shot of the documentary, in some people’s eyes the most important cut of all, is an advert from German television in which happy people celebrate the coming of the Olympics to the city of Munich.  This opening shot cuts to black, and a voice is heard saying, “Well, nobody could foresee what later on happened.” And as the opening credits role, voices from archive interviews is heard telling of the brutality and shock of the incident.  Wright sets the documentary up from the start and throughout the viewer is engrossed by, not just the story, but the visual medium by which it is told.  The film jumps quickly from interview to archive to re-enactment to rostrum to interview again, sometimes employing a split-screen technique in keeping with the timeframe of the events that happened.  This highly stylised structure to the film further augments the role of Wright as a master of her craft.  Despite the horrific nature of the events the viewer is witnessing, the speed and volume of information thrown at them allows the film to become so much more accessible to audiences who would not usually watch documentaries, the formalist style of the editing combining with the arduous subject matter.  The film was not without criticism, with Wright and Macdonald’s decision to show a montage of action shots of the dead bodies of the Israelis and Palestinians after the bloody shootout against the sound of Deep Purple’s Child In Time was described by Roger Ebert as a “tasteless conclusion2” to the film.  Regardless of this criticism, One Day In September went on to win Best Documentary at the 2000 Oscar ceremony.

In 2003 Macdonald and Wright’s next film together was released, a documentary re-telling the events that led to an inspiring fight for survival for two climbers in the Peruvian Andes.  Touching The Void again proved that Wright had a great aptitude at cutting documentaries in a very formalist style, with the majority of the film being composed of a re-enactment cut between interviews with the two survivors.  This is the truly remarkable thing about the editing done by Justin Wright in this film; the viewer knows the two men survive but as the climax approaches she builds the tension to breaking point, where the stress levels the viewer feels is mirrored by the overwhelming emotional anxiety of the images on the screen.  The tension mounts and mounts even though the viewer knows the two men are alive and well nearly twenty years after the event has taken place.  The pacing of the film is also worth note.  As the film draws ever closer to the inevitable catastrophe that cripples the climbers, the cuts become shorter, and lines of voice-over from the interviews are sharp and direct, and at one point when one of the climbers is cut loose and falls into a crevasse, he literally disappears from the screen; there are no images of him from the re-enactments or from the interviews and his sharp and direct lines of voice-over are bleakly absent, and then as he re-appears and tells his individual story of survival, the images of the other climber vanish and his voice goes silent.  The pacing slows down as the horrible plight of the men becomes a struggle of endurance rather than adventure. 

It has been described as a “pseudo-documentary3” due to the use of these re-enactments and thus is seen as a stylised documentary, taking its cues from the real world but presenting them as a fictional film would.  Wright skilfully utilises this docu-drama style to allow the film’s tension and heartbreak to manifest itself fully.  With this shift from traditional documentary cutting, which was already evident from One Day In September and furthered by Touching The Void, it was not surprising that Wright and Macdonald were going to move away from the documentary and into the world of fiction.

They worked together three years later on The Last King Of Scotland (2006), a dramatic retelling of the relationship between a Scottish medical graduate and Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, and again in 2009 on State Of Play, Wright and Macdonald’s first foray into the Hollywood machine.  State Of Play tells the story of a traditional journalist who tries to help solve a riddle regarding the death of his best friend’s aid.  It’s a taut complex thriller which is based on the gritty BBC drama of the same name; however this time set in America.  Macdonald approached the film from his British and European background and along with Wright they created a resolute and definite style to the film.  Through Macdonald’s direction and the work of Wright in post, State Of Play stands out as a Hollywood film born of the reality of Britain, with long cuts and little music, a slow and honest pace, allowing the film to breathe, unlike so many Hollywood films before it and after.  Here, Wright cuts the fictional film as though it was reality and the stylised approaches she took to One Day In September and Touching The Void are left out and to great effect.  Rather than seeing this film as a plot based thriller, she saw it as a human based story of betrayal and honesty, against the backdrop of changes in our society.  These were elements of the story that needed to be exposed but not forced, and if Wright was to start cutting the film like, say, One Day In September, with split-screens and speed, then these definitive elements would be lost.  The gritty realism of the film is its most crucial asset and without the knowledgeable Wright this would have been an impossibility.

It is obvious that Macdonald and Wright have a close relationship, with Wright and composer Alex Heff being his only two regular crew members4, working on his five major features.  Their common knowledge of the differences in style transcends the entire outlook of their finished films.  Without Macdonald, Wright could not choose, and without Wright, Macdonald could not complete.
Justine Wright is an important editor in our time, as she can tackle both drama and documentary in unexpected manners, resulting in some of the most prominent films of the last ten years.  Using style for reality and reality for style Justine Wright’s abilities as an editor are worthy of further examination, allowing us an insight into the variations and choices we have as editors, not just in what we are cutting but in what we can do with the cuts that have been given to us.


Bibliography:
  1. Internet Movie Database (Online) http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0942549/
  2. Ebert, R (2001) One Day In September (Online) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010309/REVIEWS/103090303/1023
  3. Urban, A.(1997-2010) Touching The Void Reviews (Online) http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=9004&s=Video_files
  4. Blair, I. (2006) Kevin Macdonald: The Last King of Scotland; Shooting some of the film on 16mm saved enough for a "proper" DI (Online) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HNN/is_11_21/ai_n27098590/

References:
·         Ralske, J (2010) Touching The Void Review (Online) www.jadwin.net/268/facts/touching.doc
·         Landmann, D (2004) Touching the Void (Online) http://www.moviefreak.com/dvd/t/touchingthevoid.htm
·         Young, N (2000) The Filth and the Fury and One Day In September (Online) http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/filth.html
·         Haneke, T Distilling the Documentary

Filmography:
·         Eagle of the Ninth (2010) Dir. Kevin Macdonald
·         One Day in September (1999) Dir. Kevin Macdonald
·         The Thin Blue Line (1988) Dir. Errol Morris
·         Touching the Void (2003) Dir. Kevin Macdonald
·         Last King of Scotland (2006) Dir. Kevin Macdonald
·         State of Play (2009) Dir. Kevin Macdonald

The Coen Brothers & Hollywood




Defying the Genre
The Coen Brothers and their Aversion to the Hollywood Dogma.

by Peter Morris





We're only interested in one thing, Bart. Can you tell a story? Can you make us laugh? Can you make us cry? Can you make us want to break out in joyous song? Is that more than one thing? Okay! Jack Lipnik, Barton Fink - Written by Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991. [1]

For over 25 years, Joel and Ethan Coen have created some of the most unique and undeniably curious films to grace the cinema screens of the world.  These two brothers from Minnesota have, over the course of their careers, been responsible for creating a genre onto themselves; their films are Coen-esque, in some ways the simplest way to describe them.  Often darkly humorous, drenched in satire and black irony, and filled with unforgettable characters that are heavily characterised regardless of their importance to the overall film with even the small roles standing out with distinctiveness and influence.  The lead roles the Coen Brothers have created are dense and quirky but none-the less utterly unforgettable, with one character, that of The Dude from their 1997 film The Big Lebowski, gaining his own religion, Dudeism, from his cult fans on the internet.
Importantly, over these 25 years, the ability to write original screenplays together, concocting this distinctive style of writing, and developing their films has never waned, and importantly, has never been subject to influence from anybody outside their own two heads, with 20th Century Fox releasing the majority of their films.  They write their scripts together and continue on to produce, direct and edit the projects themselves.  For many this would be an extremely difficult process; however the Coens themselves describe it as more of an organic process. Ethan describes it as “basically just us sitting around in a room, moping for hours.”[2] Their coy answers, common amongst interviews with them, often hint at a refusal to explain these methods of writing, and indeed, this awkwardness is understandable as the creative process can be personal, even if it is shared between two writers.  They do both agree however, that they never argue regarding this process [2]
Their films are often a post-modern homage to the genre film, taking the formula but re-interpreting it through their own idiosyncratic minds.  Their first film, Blood Simple, written in 1984, was a take on the noir thriller but was fused with sardonic black comedy.  It paved the way for nearly 25 years of filmmaking, writing and directing 13 films which range in genre from the screwball comedy homage of the 30s like Raising Arizona and Intolerable Cruelty to the intricate twisting of  The Man Who Wasn’t There.  Between these you’ll find westerns (No Country For Old Men), gangster films (Miller’s Crossing), surreal comedies (The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou) and a few films which seem to deny a rooting to any specific genre, instead fusing them together to form a pastiche view of the world (Fargo, Barton Fink).  Although they have tried a film in practically every genre that Hollywood recognises, none have been specifically related to the genre itself.  Each film is a unique view, a unique voice and a unique example of how the Coen Brothers will not succumb to the cohesion of writing a single-facetted genre film.  Perhaps it is their own upbringing in rural America that has given them this mysterious ability to avoid the usual and concentrate on the specific and highly distinctive worlds they create, often setting their films in the past to further glorify the time period with their own exaggerated motifs. 
The Coens live in New York City and have spent their careers in the financial shadows of the Hollywood machine, a place they are more than happy to stay, and it is their 1991 film Barton Fink which shows their own personal view on what would happen to a young screenwriter newly arrived in Hollywood.
Barton Fink tells the story of the a young, Jewish, idealistic, leftwing playwright (Barton Fink) from New York in the 1940s, who is commissioned by a studio to write a wrestling picture, however after reaching Hollywood and checking into the hellish Hotel Earle he is overcome by a bout of writers block.  The story itself takes place for the most part in Barton’s claustrophobic and sweaty hotel room, a place written as;  
                                                
The room is small and cheaply furnished.  There is a lumpy bed with a worn-
yellow coverlet, an old secretary table, and a wooden luggage stand.[1] 

Here he meets his neighbour Charlie Meadows, a salt of the earth salesman, who may be a vicious serial killer. 

The Coens wrote the script in just three weeks, whilst themselves suffering from a bout of writer’s block while attempting to complete the intricate Miller’s Crossing.  They mention, amongst others, the writings of Otto Freidrich and Jim Thompson as influences on the story along with the Roman Polanski films The Tenant and Repulsion.  Ironically, when the film went on to pick up three awards at the Cannes film festival it was chaired by Polanski himself.  Thematically the film is a maze weaving in the quick fire satire of the Hollywood machine with the desperate journey of Barton as he egotistically struggles with lowering himself to the level of writing a B-movie.  Along with this are themes of Nazism, the idea of art imitating life (and vice versa), and the dangers of living within one’s head.  Add to this a bout of murder and left-wing cowardice and it’s your standard Coen Brother’s mesh of intricate subject matters which seem to hint at certain things without ever letting you interpret them cohesively.  Generically, even the Coen’s don’t know what it is, they say, it’s a comedy, a buddy movie, a coming-of-age story, a horror [2].
As screenwriters the Coen follow the basic three act structure with Barton coming to Hollywood in the first act, and losing his ability to write and falling in love in the second act.  The third act however, takes a dismal and sinister turn to an eventual surreal and thoroughly dark finale.  The Coens prefer to play with the structure in keeping with their own dark humour regarding genre.  The structure is there and the genre is there but there is something not quite right about them.  This style of writing echoes in many of their scripts, particularly in their 1996 film Fargo.

The Coens employ a rather dialogue heavy style to their script with many characters talking at ferocious speed, not for specific expositional reasons but rather for the embedding of the characters idiosyncratic nature on the audience.  It is because of this that so many of the Coen’s characters over the years have been so memorable, along with the unforgettable nature of the stories they are involved in.  In Barton Fink the studio head Jack Lipnik, written to resemble Jack Warner, speaks at a pace resembling that of a machine gun and represents the Coen’s view of the fallacy of Hollywood.  An excerpt from the script:
LIPNIK
That's okay, that's okay, that's okay - that's
just fine.  You probably just walked in here
thinking that was going to be a handicap,
thinking we wanted people who knew something
about the medium, maybe even thinking there was
all kind of technical mumbo-jumbo to learn.
You were dead wrong. The point is, I run this dump and I don't know the technicalmumbo-jumbo.  Why do I run it?  I've got horse-sense, goddamnit.  Showmanship.  And also, and I hope Lou told you this, I bigger and meaner than any other kike in this town.  Did you tell him that, Lou?  And I don't mean my dick's bigger than yours, it's not a sexual thing - although, you're the writer, you would know more about that.  Coffee? [1]

This sort of dialogue appears in the majority of the Coens scripts and puts aside the writing of specific image systems, however, considering the two write the scripts that they themselves will direct then it is hard to know whether these image systems are created but just not written, a sort of unspoken knowledge of how they will appear concocted during the writing process. 

Throughout Barton Fink the Coen Brothers hint at what they feel about the Hollywood machine and the lure money and glamour has on the imagination.  As the final act descends into its hellish fiery finale, the Coens seem to be telling Hollywood that they are not tempted to do a genre film, much in the same way that Barton himself is reluctant to do a wrestling film.  This, perhaps, hints at their own self-deprecating humour.  They like the idea of writing a film that plays with the viewer’s perception of a specific genre, whether it is to play with the genre itself, or whether it is to write a film that seems to be a web of genres as intricate as the plots written to support them.  Either way, the screenplays they write form some of the most unique and compelling films of modern times, attracting praise and attention to both the visual style and the idiosyncratic writing that has made Joel and Ethan Coen a creative force unrivalled in the field of film-making.



Bibliography:
1.      Coen, J & E, (1992) Barton Fink & Miller’s Crossing Faber & Faber
  1.      http://cinepad.com/coens.htm

Additional Reading
·         Coen, J & E, (1996) Fargo Faber & Faber
·         Coen, J & E, (1988) Blood Simple Faber & Faber
·         Simon, A (0000) Brother’s Keeper (Online) http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2008/02/coen-brothers-hollywood-interview.html
·         Cowen, D. S. A Viewer's Guide to Barton Fink (Online) http://www.coenbrothers.net/viewer.html
Filmography:
  • Barton Fink (1991) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • The Big Lebowski (1997) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • Blood Simple (1984) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • Raising Arizona (1987) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • Intolerable Cruelty (2003) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • Miller’s Crossing (1990) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • Fargo (1996) Joel and Ethan Coen
  • The Tenant (1976) Roman Polanski
  • Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski



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.” 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.”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 knowWhat 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