Chapter 1: What Is a Movie?

Essay: Factual and Dramatic Aspects of Documentary Film

Nanook with spear

Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), a pioneering nonfiction film, established a debate that is still with us: does the use of storytelling and other dramatic techniques compromise a factual film's claims to authenticity and historical accuracy? Flaherty spent years in the north living with the Eskimo, or Inuit, bringing his camera and film laboratory into the field to record the lifestyle and hunting practices of this nomadic people. After accidentally setting fire to his footage during the editing process (celluloid was extremely flammable in those days), Flaherty returned north and filmed a second time. Released through Pathé, a French company with extensive experience distributing international newsreels, the film became an international success.

Robert Flaherty with Inuit woman

Much later, film critics and historians of the factual-film tradition criticized Flaherty and Nanook, noting that most scenes depicted in the film were staged reenactments and that Flaherty had encouraged the Inuit to use older, more "traditional" hunting and fishing techniques for the film instead of their then-current practices. Another criticism was that Flaherty's obvious love for and dedication to the Inuit led him to romanticize them. Although it claimed to be a straightforward presentation of the facts, Nanook has been described as the cinematic equivalent of the Western lamentation for vanishing Indian cultures that have been forced to adapt to a changing world. Some have also faulted the film for its embrace of a traditional Western humanism that places a heroic humanity at the center of a brutal nature that must be conquered and overcome. This sensibility is reflected in the film’s opening titles:

Filming on location

However, no one who watches Nanook could argue that the film’s portrayal of the Inuit and their nomadic northern lifestyle is a complete failure. The challenge for the viewer is to untangle Nanook's nonfiction functions from its dramatic license, to view its anthropology apart from its artifice. Such a task requires a broad appreciation of both the film and its subject from cinematic, historical, and scientific perspectives. We tend to assume that a wide separation exists between fact and fiction, historical reality and crafted story, truth and artifice. The difference, however, is never absolute in any film. Some fiction films seem quite honest and true and some nonfiction films seem duplicitous. Because both types of filmmaking may employ similar equipment, techniques, and traditions (cameras, editing, sound tracks, directors, on-location shooting), it can be difficult to isolate the essential differences between the two types. Furthermore, fiction films and nonfiction films influence filmmakers and the culture at large and so go on to influence each other; some fiction films incorporate factual, instructional, documentary, and even propaganda filmmaking techniques, and some nonfiction films employ methods straight out of Hollywood. "Mockumentaries" such as Rob Reiner’s seminal This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind (2005), and fiction films such as Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88 (1988) and Tanner on Tanner (2004), which inserts actors into footage of real events, remind us of just how fluid the boundary between "real" and "staged" can be.

Fishing for the camera

Indeed, we might say that fiction films and nonfiction films differ primarily in terms of allegiance: fiction films begin with an allegiance to dramatic storytelling, but nonfiction films begin with allegiances to the recording of reality (factual films), the education of viewers (instructional films), or the presentation of political or social analyses (documentary films). Whatever their allegiance, all nonfiction filmmakers employ storytelling and dramatization to some degree in shaping their material. If they didn’t, their footage might end up as unwatchably dull as a surveillance video recording everyday comings and goings. As Looking at Movies repeatedly illustrates, all elements of cinematic language - from the camera angle to the shot type to the lighting to the sound mix - color our perceptions of the material and are thus subjective to some degree. And no documentary subject that knows she is being filmed can ever behave exactly as she would off camera. Given the complex and dynamic relationships between accuracy, honesty, and craft, simplistic denunciations or endorsements of particular nonfiction approaches simply won’t hold. Rather than trying to make one list of perfectly accurate and honest nonfiction films and another list of compromised ones, we should view the many varieties thoughtfully, always trying to understand the ways in which the act of storytelling and the art of dramatization help create the filmmaker’s interpretation of the truth.

In the following brief looks at individual filmmakers, we will consider the ways that documentarians approach their subjects.

Barbara Kopple: Direct Cinema in Service of Political Critique

Major films:

Harlan County USA (1977)
American Dream (1991)
Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993)
Wild Man Blues (1997)

In Harlan County, at first nobody trusted us and the women gave us phony names. They called themselves Martha Washington and Florence Nightingale, and they said, "OK, you can be on the picket line tomorrow; you have to be there at 5 A.M. in the morning."

We were staying in a little motel on this huge mountain; it had no guard rails and it was pouring rain and a car came and went past us and we flipped over on our car, and, um, we were all OK We just crawled out in the pouring rain and walked to the picket line with all our equipment. News travels fast in, you know, these little areas in the coal fields and after that happened they knew that we were all right.

Barbara Kopple, interview from Independent View

Barbara Kopple's Harlan County USA won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 1977 and is included in the National Film Registry of American Film Classics. The film documents a year-long Kentucky coal miners’ strike in 1973–74. Risking her life and the lives of her crew, Kopple aligned herself with the United Mine Workers of America, who were intimidated and sometimes shot at by strikebreakers for the Eastover Mining Company. During the film, Kopple's cameras begin to focus on the coal miners' wives, who encourage, cajole, and chastise their men to maintain the strike, walk the picket lines, and hold their families and communities together. To contrast and connect past labor struggles with the present one, Kopple uses footage of and ballads from strikes of the 1930s and 1940s - when the region was dubbed "bloody Harlan County.".

	Striker put under arrest
Crossing the picket line

Kopple's Harlan County USA is a powerful example of the nonfiction filmmaking style direct cinema. While many documentaries include onscreen or over-the-shoulder interviewers having conversations with subjects (as in the short films on television’s 60 Minutes), direct cinema documentaries eschew interviewers and even limit the use of narrators. Instead of having voice-over narration to encourage the audience’s indignation about the crime, scandal, or corruption being exposed, direct cinema involves the placement of small, portable cameras and sound recording equipment in an important location for days or weeks, recording events as they occur. The resulting documentary may never include a question from an interviewer; instead, it enables the audience to overhear conversations and interactions as they happen.

While direct cinema can help reveal a subject in profound and unexpected ways, this technique may not remove the narrative voice and perspective so much as hide it or transfer its function to the more "invisible" power of other filmmaking systems. The editing process, for example, can include and exclude materials, ironically juxtapose people, events, and ideas, and arrange and order reality to suit the filmmaker's perspective. In Harlan County USA, Kopple uses the editing convention of the graphic match (discussed in Chapter 6) to link a police cruiser of 1973 with a tank from the 1940s era of bloody Harlan County, in effect making a visual argument that things have not changed much over the years and that the authorities continue to suppress the miners.

Graphic match across eras that emphasizes armed response to strikers
Leader of the strike-breakers: "Unions are full of communists"	A pointed title on coal country economics
A miner uses his oxygen machine

Errol Morris: The Self-Reflexively Artful Documentary and the Philosophical Quest

Major films:

Gates of Heaven (1978)
Vernon, Florida (1981)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
A Brief History of Time (1991)
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997)
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara . (2003)

The form Morris uses for his existential explorations [in The Thin Blue Line] is a new one - a sort of documentary thriller. And his method, which marries a True Detective sensibility to the fact-gathering techniques of the documentarian, keeps asking us to make comparisons between art and reality. On the surface, the film is a James M. Cain tale told "Rashomon" style - a single dramatic event seen from multiple points of view.

Hal Hinson, The Washington Post, September 2, 1988

Bold and brilliant, some might say reckless, Morris's defense of convicted prisoner Randall Dale Adams might not stand up in a court of law, or a screening room of documentary purists. But it would transfix the lot.

Morris takes the hybrid docudrama genre to its outer limits, intercutting newspaper headlines, bullet-wound diagrams and Texas road maps with grade-B film noir fare: a hypnotist's swinging watch, overstuffed ashtrays, smoking guns and repeated replays of the incident that changed Adams' life - the fatal shooting of Dallas police officer Robert Wood in cold blood one November night in 1976. The dramatic embellishments, which include a pointedly eerie score by Philip Glass and Morris's chilling final "kicker," fly in the face of "objective" fact-finding. But Thin Blue Line earns its documentary impact with the impassioned testimony of real people involved in the case.

Desson Howe, The Washington Post, September 2, 1988

No documentarian of late has so skillfully combined dramatic styles and methods with the documentary form. To this typically spartan form, Errol Morris brings artfully crafted extreme close-ups, beautiful slow-motion effects, dramatic reenactments, and original music from composers such as Philip Glass. One of his best-known films, The Thin Blue Line,is the result of Morris’s thirty-month investigation into the case of Randall Adams, who had been convicted of killing a Dallas police officer, Robert Wood, in 1976. Largely through Morris and his film, Adams was cleared and the young witness against him, David Harris, was implicated in Wood’s murder. In achieving this noble result, however, Morris influenced the story he was documenting and so violated a standard of impartiality and distance many documentarians try to follow. Indeed, despite its clear advocacy of a cause, The Thin Blue Line was marketed not as a documentary but as a "murder mystery," with a promotional poster that quoted Siskel and Ebert, presented the tag line "Solving this mystery is going to be murder," and described the film as "A new kind of movie mystery by acclaimed director Errol Morris."

Most significantly, The Thin Blue Line utilizes many sophisticated lighting, staging, and editing effects familiar from fictional feature films. For example, when two people being interviewed mention films, Morris cuts to brief clips of the films. As various witnesses describe the events leading up to the murder and each presents conflicting details, Morris presents a series of different highly stylized reenactments. At one point, the getaway car and its license plate appear in many varieties, illustrating the diversity and confusion of "eyewitness" accounts. By combining the documentarian's dogged persistence for getting at some kind of truth with a catalog of filmmaking techniques that includes those of the fictional film, Morris invites us to explore a new kind of documentary that challenges the distinction between fact and fiction.

A slow-motion image used to dramatize the sequence describing the hypnotist who was brought in to help the surviving officer remember details from the crime	A "Hollywood"-style high angle used for the reenactment of the murder
Another dramatic use of lighting in the murder reenactment	A close-up used to dramatize the reenactment of the typed murder "confession"
Morris cuts from reenactments of the gunfire that night to crime-scene autopsy evidence
Could the surviving officer remember what the license number was?
Was the killer's car a Comet or a Vega?

Ken Burns: Folk History and the Voices of Authority

Major films:

Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
The Civil War (1990)
Baseball (1994)
The West (1996)
Thomas Jefferson (1997)
Frank Lloyd Wright (1998)
Mark Twain (2001)
Jazz (2001)

In 1990, Burns completed what many consider his "chef d' oeuvre": the eleven-hour The Civil War, which earned an Emmy (among other honors) and became the highest rated miniseries in the history of public television. Civil War was the apotheosis of Burns' master mixture of still photos, freshly shot film footage, period music, evocative "celebrity" narration and authentic sound effects.

Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Working on the borderline between factual filmmaking and documentary filmmaking, Ken Burns seeks to bring history alive, presenting historical documents, photographs, locations, and artifacts to public-television audiences in an exciting and inspiring style. Burns's approach to history balances the traditional biographical concern with "great men" and leaders with the more contemporary interest in "bottom-up" explorations of working people, minorities, and average citizens. One measure of his success in striking the right balance is that his multipart series The Civil War and Baseball were the most widely seen shows ever on public television, both reaching over forty million viewers.

As writer, director, cinematographer, editor, producer, and music arranger, Burns frequently spends years developing his films; The Civil War, for example, took six years to produce. He has been known to film thousands of historical photographs in his signature manner, where the camera glides and the framing tightens; such "dramatic" camera movements emphasize details and link them to the narration and historical observations. Burns describes his filmmaking style as:

the careful use of archival photographs, live modern cinematography, music, narration, and a chorus of first-person voices that together did more than merely recount a historical story. It was something that also became a kind of "emotional archaeology," trying to unearth the very heart of the American experience; listening to the ghosts and echoes of an almost inexpressibly wise past.
("Why I Decided to Make The Civil War")

Among the major actors who have recorded narration for Burns’s films are Julie Harris, Jason Robards, Morgan Freeman, John Cusack, Ossie Davis, Anthony Hopkins, Gregory Peck, and Eli Wallach, to name only a few. The voice talents of skilled actors, especially actors who specialize in voice work such as Keith David, who narrated Burns's epic Jazz, give the documentaries a level of professional dramatic gloss that other historical documentaries lack.

In Jazz, gritty historical pictures convey Louis Armstrong's tough childhood neighborhood in New Orleans

Louis Armstrong speaks in Jazz	Celebrity narrator Wynton Marsalis demonstrates the trumpet technique of Joe "King" Oliver

Michael Moore: Impresario with a Camera

Major films:

The Big One (1997)
Roger and Me (1989)
Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

Since his 1989 debut with "Roger and Me," Michael Moore - gadfly, provocateur, muckraker, authority-questioner - has perfected what some might call an art, others a shtick. Posing as a latter-day Candide, naively bumbling around America's hinterland to uncover the depredations of crony capitalism, he has entertained a devoted audience with mocking portraits of the corporate class, all the time casting himself as the noble voice of pure reason.

Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post, October 18, 2002

Like Errol Morris and Ken Burns, Michael Moore has developed a style of nonfiction filmmaking that defines itself against the mainstream. Moore's darkly humorous, self-aggrandizing style of muckraking documentary has won over many filmgoers and perhaps outraged just as many. Blatantly outspoken in his leftist political convictions, irreverent toward any and all sacred cows, the sloppily dressed Moore serves as the comical and sarcastic center of all his films. In Roger and Me, Moore is the "Me" who goes on a quest to interview Roger Smith, the General Motors CEO who oversaw the deactivation of the GM plant in Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan. In Bowling for Columbine, Moore seeks to understand the high rate of gun assault and murder in the United States, venturing far beyond single, common answers in his analysis.

Moore’s detractors accuse him of achieving humor and rhetorical effect at the expense of fact, chronology, and motivation. Additionally, Moore stages his interviews so calculatingly and with such pointed agendas that they strike many as sophomorically unfair. In his review of Bowling for Columbine, film critic James Berardinelli discusses both traits:

While there will always be a debate about the authenticity of Michael Moore's documentary techniques, there's no arguing that Bowling for Columbine succeeds equally well as a provocative essay on gun violence in America and an opportunity for the writer/director to engage in some heavy self-promotion. Whether you like him or hate him, it's impossible to deny Moore's charisma and persuasiveness as a showman. He takes a thesis and runs with it, and, while some of his conclusions may be a little farfetched, his probing often pays unexpected dividends.

Viewers attending a Moore film should be aware that the director has a history of "faking" scenes. So, unlike in a more traditional documentary, not everything that appears on screen can be believed. Moore is skillful enough that we don't recognize when we're being fooled. It took a Film Comment exposé by Harlan Jacobson to unearth all of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans in Roger and Me. When Moore starts barging into houses in Toronto to determine whether Canadians keep their doors locked, this could easily have been arranged before the cameras rolled. We just don't know. Moore claims one thing; his history argues another.

Michael Moore attempts to walk in unannounced to the fourteenth-floor office of Roger Smith, General Motors CEO	Abandoned homes in Flint, Michigan
Some swells at a charity party remind Michael Moore that Flint offers ballet and hockey opportunities for children	Moore attempts to use his Chuck E Cheese discount card in lieu of a business card
One of many eviction notices in Flint	Civic advertising in the face of massive layoffs and recession
Michael meets a young woman who is trying to make ends meet raising rabbits: pets or meat?

 

After positioning himself as an outsider and iconoclast for many years, Moore recently achieved a level of mainstream acceptance when he won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Bowling for Columbine. Moore used his acceptance speech to denounce President George W. Bush for the war against Iraq, a position many Academy members did not share at the time.

Moore’s next film, the notorious Fahrenheit 9/11, used his controversial approach to attack the Bush administration’s justification and handling of the war. Although the film went on to gross $222 million dollars worldwide, making it by far the most successful documentary release in history, Moore failed in his stated goal of crippling Bush’s 2004 reelection bid.

In addition to working in film, Moore has brought his provocative style to television and publishing. His series TV Nation won an Emmy award, and his books, Downsize This! (1996), Stupid White Men (2001), and Dude, Where’s My Country? (2003), have all been best-sellers.

FOR FURTHER READING

Berardinelli, James. Review of Bowling for Columbine.

Burns, Ken. "Why I Decided to Make The Civil War."

Erickson, Hal. "Ken Burns." Yahoo! Movies.

Hinson, Hal. Review of The Thin Blue Line. The Washington Post, September 2, 1988.

Hornaday, Ann. Review of Bowling for Columbine. The Washington Post, October 18, 2002.

Howe, Desson. Review of The Thin Blue Line. The Washington Post, September 2, 1988.

Independent View. "Interview of Barbara Kopple."

Michael Moore: michaelmoore.com.

PBS. "Ken Burns."