The Creative Treatment of Actuality

The elegantly refurbished and artistically rejuvenated BFI Southbank has turned its attention to the art of the documentary film. Stranger than Fiction: Focus on Documentary, is the banner under which a series of programmes have been assembled to showcase a selection of films that belong to this increasingly important and prolific cinematic form. The first of these seasons looks at ten documentaries from different parts of the world whose impact affected a measurable change upon the societies they examine. Mark Cousins, the series’ curator, decided to “set aside questions of aesthetics to ask an empirical one: which films have had a demonstrable impact on the social, legislative or political climate in which they were made?” Is the role of aesthetics redundant in the field of the documentary, and is it possible to assess the impact of any created work when its artistic component is assumed to be obsolete? John Grierson, widely considered to be the ‘father’ of the documentary, defined the form as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. The camera’s selective abilities, enabling the multiplicity of ‘reality’ to be presented in manageable form, facilitates a portrayal of its real life subject in which subjective manipulation is disguised as objective observation. We are presented, therefore, not with an unmediated reflection of the world, but the reshaping of ‘actuality’. The documentary film, which claims to represent the real, is by definition of its medium an artistic creation.
The documentaries selected to form this season have ‘shaken’ the world by means of skilful persuasion, demonstrating the ways in which film may be used as a powerful and immediate propaganda tool. Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine (2002) made the top ten, is considered by numerous critics to be essentially a skilful propagandist. The immediacy of the social and political issues he addresses invites our sympathy and compassion, but this does not mean that his films are unbiased, or even entirely honest. Films have the power to influence and persuade, and the viewer of any documentary must be conscious throughout of the motivations of its creator. Documentaries will always be subjective, and the truths they present must be considered as part of a larger truth which the eye of the camera has closed its shutter upon.
It is misleading to believe that high-impact non-fiction films are always liberal or humanitarian. As Leni Riefenstahl’s Wagnerian epic The Triumph of the Will (1935) demonstrates with unsettling assurance, visual manipulation and the reconstruction of reality may be used successfully with catastrophic consequences. Commissioned by Hitler as a cinematic record of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, the Führer glows with all the grandeur and mystery of a deity, in a film constructed to aggrandise his presence to unearthly proportions. Aesthetics are the source of the film’s vitality and command. The Convention itself was planned as spectacular film propaganda, so that while, as Riefenstahl’s asserts, nothing in the film did not really happen, it was the advent of the film that caused the events to occur, in a staged spectacle planned meticulously in order to facilitate the creation of what would become one of the Nazi’s most important pieces of propaganda.
Hossein Torabi’s film of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, For Freedom (1979), is still shown in Iran every year on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s victory. Torabi captures the mass rallies and fervour of the people, in a film planned as a victory celebration. Of the ten films selected, it was this that I found least persuasive, and hardest to relate to: interestingly, Torabi insisted that when filming, ‘there was too much emotion and excitement to care about styles’. Aside from cultural unfamiliarity, it was the artlessness of the film, the lack of construction, of staging even, that was its crucial weakness. If a film is to comprise of little more than impressive crowd scenes and speeches, there must be a design and structure to underscore its treatment of reality: Grierson knew what he was talking about. For Freedom lacked the persuasive power imparted by construction and creativity. Torabi simply set out to document a turbulent and formative period in the history of his country – undoubtedly a brave and valuable undertaking. But the lack of craft was all too evident; I didn’t feel I had learnt anything, and found myself uncomfortably bored even whilst I knew I was watching scenes from a crucial moment in recent history.
On the other side of the spectrum lies Erol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988). The documentary, which sparked numerous miscarriage-of-justice films, concerns the murder of a Texan policeman and two suspects, one guilty but acquitted, the other innocent but scapegoated under the shortcomings of a corrupt justice system. It is a highly stylised film, with beautifully re-staged enactments of the murder like a film noir, layered with a richly evocative score by Philip Glass. The investigative nature of the film assisted in the eventual reprieve of the innocent suspect: the artistic power to unsettle and provoke indignation should not be underestimated, and Morris’s film is a crucial example of the importance of documentaries in addressing issues that have been silenced by bureaucracy.
Recently, the most important and widely marketed documentary films have carried anti-corporate messages. Michael Moore’s oeuvre has received unprecedented media attention, and Bowling for Columbine retains the power to shock and infuriate. Other examples of the anti-corporate documentary featured in this season included the Japanese Minimata: The Victims and their World (1972), following 29 families who sued the Chisso company for pouring methyl-mercury into the Japanese watercourse, and the British McLibel (2005), documenting the court case of two environmental campaigners as McDonalds tried to sue them under UK libel laws. A David and Goliath story of the individual vs. the corporation, the film itself was simple, low budget and unpolished; even the dramatic reconstructions directed by Ken Loach were a little cringe-worthy. But the film attested to the power of subject matter. Some documentaries are memorable for their captivating aesthetics; others purely for their compelling story and the weight of their argument.
John Pilger’s Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994) was screened alongside Michael Buerk’s 1984 BBC Report on Ethiopia, reaffirming the power of TV news reportage in its immediate exposure of crucial moments in current history. Pilger’s report, filmed covertly in a country that denied entry to all foreign nationals, revealed the atrocities of the genocide in East Timor. It was screened at the UN, and played a vital role in drawing the attention of the international community to events that had for so long been ignored. In turn, Michael Buerk’s short news report with its biblical scenes of mass starvation inspired Live Aid. Both Buerk and Pilger report with a sincerity and detachment that somehow increases the intensity of our own response. In these films, the sense of actuality prevails – artistry seems irrelevant when the evidence of such horrendous reality is unravelling before our eyes. We forget the camera, and assume our position as indignant and horrified observer of a distant reality.
Marcel Ophüls The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) is an epic two-part documentary about the French resistance to the Nazi occupation. Ophüls quietly dismantles the established view of the heroic anti-Nazi resistance, exposing collaborative fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies. Consisting almost entirely of interviews, interspersed with archive footage, the film provides a powerful reanalysis of a crucial period in modern history. The face of every subject is filmed with unsettling scrutiny; whilst revealing uncomfortable truths, we are allowed to understand the impossible circumstances with which each individual was confronted, in an account that exposes the truth without condemning it. Ophüls facilitates a kind of talking-cure exhibition, allowing his characters and his audience to understand and come to terms with a painful truth that must be acknowledged in order to be purged.
With the BFI making such ample space for the documentary film to take up residency, one must assume that this reflects a growing interest and demand on our part. An increasing number of fiction films are constructed like extended docudramas, where recent history is recognisably dramatised and we leave the cinema feeling just a little more knowledgeable and informed. Our thirst for the detachment of a cinematic experience portending to represent, if not be reality, is growing. Perhaps the traditional escape of the cinema is being overtaken by a desire to learn, to understand, and to be influenced. Technology has made the spread of information immediate, and so in a sense, perhaps we no longer have any excuse for ignorance. The documentary film plays a role somewhere in-between the news bulletin and the fiction film, and this role has ever increasing importance. With this change, where does the role of fiction lie? Will audiences still be satisfied with imitations of reality, with representative stories, when as compelling a tale may be told with the authority of actuality? Firstly, I firmly believe that there will always be a place for the symbolic importance, let alone the escapist enjoyment, of the fiction film. Surely, its role in our cultural world will never be obsolete. And here, again, we must remember Grierson: the documentary is ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, and an artistic form in its own right. The art of the cinema is changing, but this does not mean it is becoming less artistic; rather that the power of the medium to communicate is being productively exploited to portray realities of which we are too often unaware, and to which the lens of the camera is more perceptive. Those documentaries that have the ability to ignite change and re-shape the world, are those that manipulate history and reality with the most subtlety and command, allowing aesthetics to play a vital and formative role. Change is propelled by force, not reflection, and the documentary film aspires to epitomise Brecht’s famous dictum: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”