Kerry McLeod looks at how the documentary genre is evolving in modern-day cinema and speaks to two filmmakers about their experiences (working title)
Documentary film has a long and noble tradition. Those words may not excite the same frenzied response as, say, ‘Spiderman 2, out this summer,’ but the latest UK box office figures show that there seems to be a renewed interest in this most venerable if maligned genre.
In 2003, 21 documentary films were released, up 50% on 2002. While the highest grossing documentary – Ghosts of the Abyss, James Cameron’s reality addition to his Titanic obsession, screened in Imax cinemas around the country – is not perhaps a classic example of the renaissance that appears to be taking place, it grossed over £4 million. Quite an accomplishment for a genre that generally precludes mutant heroes or space battles on a grand scale. Other successful releases over the past two years have included Bowling for Columbine (2002’s best-performing documentary), Etre et Avoir and Touching the Void, the film that won a BAFTA for the best British film (note, that was film and not just documentary) and that is still playing in theatres despite having been released before Christmas.
Articles have appeared hailing this renaissance and looking ahead to a bright future for documentary. But before someone says, “The documentary is coming!” – drawing echoes of the so-called British renaissance – it’s worth asking what’s brought about this change in the hearts and minds of audiences and the industry, and whether it has long-term potential?
From Cinema to TV… and back again?
From the documentary’s earliest beginnings, recordings of actual events through to docu-don John Grierson’s reign as the father of documentary in the 1930s and forties, documentary had a place in the cinema. It developed its own generic champions and conventions alongside the emerging fiction genres. With the arrival of television, documentary made the transition to the small screen. It had a natural place in the schedules; cheap to produce and fulfilling public broadcasting remits for informative television, as a genre it grew and developed through the next forty years. Simultaneously, it seemed to lose its already marginalised position in the cinema, with a few notable exceptions.
In recent years, however, as reality TV has pushed documentary from the schedules, it seems filmmakers and audiences alike have been looking elsewhere for real life. Ken Faro, the director of Injustice, a film that follows the families of those who died in police custody over a seven year period as they seek justice, reached a point where he could go no further with television. His film about Joy Gardner, who died in 1993 while under arrest for immigration offences, was the last film he made for Channel 4. The broadcaster received 200 complaints, the filmmakers were forced to appear on the Right to Reply programme to defend their film and the channel cut its agreement with the production company. They were not interested in a feature, so Faro, with co-director Tariq Mehmood and their collaborators, began a process of funding the film themselves, a process which would take another seven years to complete. Understandably, he’s disillusioned with television, but emphasises that it’s “not just sour grapes” when he states that “TV helped to destroy documentary making”.
John Battsek, producer of the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September, plus last year’s well-received examination of the nineties Britpop scene Live Forever, agrees that the BBC and Channel 4, once the home of television documentary, are more interested in formats like Wife Swap, but he also points to the changes happening in cinema. As fiction becomes increasingly epic and fantastic in scale, there’s a gap for smaller films dealing with real life.
The films themselves benefit from theatrical releases and while they’re not playing at every multiplex and grossing figures in the millions (the majority anyway) it’s worth remembering that their budgets are that much smaller too. No big stars to keep happy; no huge sets or expensive effects. It’s not a case of revenue for filmmakers so much as longevity. Faro points out that with cinema, the film has a life beyond the actual screening, unlike television. He cites the example of someone walking past a cinema, seeing a poster and thinking “that’s interesting”. The film has an opportunity to build up momentum and to remain in the cultural consciousness for a longer period of time. Take Michael Moore’s first film as an example: Roger and Me was released in 1989, ostensibly following Moore’s attempts to secure an interview with Roger Smith, the Chairman of General Motors, about his decision to close factories in his home town of Flint and move production to Mexico. However, that is more of a framework for a tirade about the impact of modern capitalist downsizing strategy on an industrial town; the unemployment, the poverty, the hypocrisy. The film was picked up at a festival by Warner and given a substantial release – for a documentary. With a wider audience, the controversy surrounding Moore’s methods and chronology also grew, which in turn created a film that hung around for far longer than most television documentaries.
Battsek cites films such as Hoop Dreams and When We Were Kings as signifying a growing interest in documentary. The latter was an immensely popular film even before it won its Oscar in 1996, and brought an audience to the cinema that perhaps would not otherwise have been interested in a documentary. The same is true of Michael Moore’s latest film, Bowling for Columbine. It too won an Oscar but it also won a wide audience of fans, who were able to go to regional cinemas to see one man’s rant against gun culture in the States. The film had a wide release for a documentary, owed largely, Battsek says, to the fact that the film “captured the sentiments of 80% of the globe at the point at which it came out. The perception was that people were fed up with America’s [world stance]”.
Celebrity, controversy and drama: the new documentaries
There is also, however, the little matter of Moore’s own celebrity status. The film is just as famous for Moore’s anti-war Oscar acceptance speech at the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq, as it is for its actual content. He was dramatically cut short by the nervous organisers cueing the music, and made headlines the world over; handy publicity for his film no doubt. His device of making himself a central figure in all his films (appropriated from the leading British documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield) creates a whole new spin on the selling of a factual feature. Could it be that documentary is increasingly relying on a combination of celebrity and controversy to sell itself?
Battsek certainly considers it a possibility, noting that filmmakers – himself included – would be willing to use such devices “in order to get [the films] to do big numbers at the box office”, but he holds back from endorsing that view wholeheartedly: “Take the controversy of Aileen [Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Nick Broomfield’s follow up to his earlier documentary]… Maybe she should have been killed, maybe she shouldn’t have been. That’s controversial, but it’s not going to rack up huge numbers of box office.”
He instead points to the enduring popularity of Kevin McDonald’s (who he worked with on One Day in September) latest film Touching the Void which deals with universal fears and challenges in its telling of the experiences of two climbers facing death on a climb-gone-wrong in the Andes. “The truth is that real stories are incredibly gripping,” he says. Faro agrees, drawing on his own considerable experience making a controversial documentary stating that the distributors “don’t give a fuck what the subject is,” as their aim is to “show films that people want to see”. Perhaps it’s really that simple? After all, last year’s gentle hit Etre et Avoir followed the fortunes of a rural French school over one year. No death, no perversion, no politics: just a teacher and his dozen pupils learning about reading, writing, maths and life.
How does Faro think the controversy has affected the success of Injustice? Let’s look at what happened after it was completed: at its first screening at the Metro cinema in London, it was cancelled at the very last minute due to threatened legal action (the audience, containing many family members of those involved in the film, was already seated). Following other, abortive, attempts to screen the film it went underground in a way: screenings were advertised at one venue, only to take place somewhere else, and Faro and others launched a programme of touring screenings that continues today, over three years later. The BFI stepped in with a deal to screen it at regional film theatres and the Prince Charles in London still shows it to this day. Faro points out that the favourable reviews and the press take up – CNN devoted a report to it – came before the controversy erupted, but admits that it has gained a certain longevity that it perhaps might not have had. It has come at a price, however; ask what’s on the cards for him now, and he says that while a follow-up is possible, his life is devoted to the welfare of his film; keeping the film going has crippled him but it’s made sure the film sticks around.
Yet if we return now to the spate of documentary films currently showing or opening in cinemas, controversy still lures us into their world. There is the latest Oscar-winner, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, in which former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara shares his views on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. In so doing, the film invites viewers to draw parallels between that controversial period in American history and this one, as the troubles in Iraq escalate. The explosive Bus 174, about the story behind a bus hijacking in Rio de Janeiro, uses TV news footage from the inept police handling of the hijack with interviews to paint a picture of Rio’s forgotten street kids. Then there’s the shocking Capturing the Friedmans, an intelligent and enthralling study on the subjective nature of truth and the break down of a family, completely overshadowed by the hype surrounding its subject matter: paedophilia. It’s tapped into a zeitgeist in much the same way as John Battsek points out that Bowling for Columbine did, dealing with a major media preoccupation and arriving at a rather pertinent time. Perhaps what is most shocking about The Friedmans is that it approaches its subject matter with such intelligence and empathy; it strikes a chord with anyone who’s picked up a newspaper recently and read the universally damning and sensational stories surrounding the naming and shaming of paedophiles. In the same way that people sought answers after the spate of high school shootings in America, so there is a need for a wider debate on child sex-offences, and on the wisdom of invading a foreign country for ambiguous aims; this is a niche into which documentary slips comfortably. It’s not reliant on presenting a balanced view, or constrained by network guidelines (on the whole) and can present us with an alternative point of view.
The next question surrounding documentary’s renaissance is whether it can sustain itself. Both Battsek and Faro have emphasised the enduring importance of an element of entertainment, and the success of Ghosts of the Abyss confirms this. When asked about getting his projects off the ground, Battsek mentions this as the ”business of cinema in whatever form”, that even documentary has to obey eventually: “Previously the problem’s been that documentaries have been kind of stodgy and… the more you can make it feel like a piece of entertainment the more successful it will be… If everyone could make a Blair Witch Project then they would.”
It’s an interesting point, as in many ways the phenomenally successful horror film borrowed conventions from documentary that have since been imitated – both successfully and abysmally. No-name actors, verité camera work, the rumour that the actors really didn’t know what was happening next and complete with video diary footage; the film proved how filmmakers don’t need special effects and CGI to scare the living daylights out of an audience. Touching the Void, Battsek’s favourite example, is a thriller with a central protagonist cheating death all the way, but it’s a documentary not a drama. Kevin McDonald, the director of this and One Day in September said in an interview with indieWire: “There's definitely something strange going on at the moment in the interaction between fiction and documentary, with American Splendor, which combines animation, documentary and drama, and Michael Winterbottom's In This World, which comes at documentaries from the drama point of view. For one reason or another, it's a very rich seam at the moment.”
Gus Van Sant’s Palme D’Or winning Elephant and Robert Altman’s upcoming release The Company both borrow stylistically from the observational documentaries of Fred Wiseman. Bowling for Columbine includes an animation contributed by the creator of South Park, and Capturing the Friedmans harnesses the home movie, long loved by fiction filmmakers for its inherent, authentic dramatics. Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line used dramatic reconstruction extensively over 15 years ago; dramatic reconstruction in documentaries is not new, whether admitted or not, but never have such dramatic conventions been used so vividly as now.
Then there’s the star figure of Michael Moore, bringing his own meaning to his films by his sheer presence; we can pretty much expect the bumbling concerned citizen turn to pop up at least once in the same way, though to a lesser extent, that we can expect sharp and obstinate observations from Nick Broomfield’s appearance in his films. Place on top of this the narratives of films like Touching the Void and One Day in September and it’s clear that documentary is exploring new options as it evolves into a strong presence in independent cinema.
A dose of reality
Of course, it’s not just a question of succeeding at the box office that looms over theatrical documentaries. The same problems of funding and distribution that affect independent fiction filmmaking in Britain apply here. On one hand is Ken Faro’s example of someone shunned by broadcasters and going it alone, subsidising his film with money from other projects over the long gestation period that so many documentaries require. This has been his life for the best part of ten years. Leon Gast, director of When We Were Kings, beats that record – it took him over twenty years to get his film to the cinema (and, deservedly, an Oscar; it would have merited one for dedication alone). On the other hand is John Battsek’s example; thanks to good links with distributors and support from BBC’s Storyville, One Day in September took the relatively speedy period of only two and a half years. The question is, which is the norm? It looks like an uncomfortable merger of the two; most documentaries are co-productions, and where Faro rejects the role of broadcasters and funding bodies such as the Film Council from personal experience, in favour of truly independent filmmaking, Battsek insists on the importance of both to inspire the confidence of other financiers. It’s a Catch-22; both are equally valid points of view, but both also highlight the problems facing documentary makers today.
When it comes to distributing and exhibiting the films, there’s another issue. Faro laments the lack of a British presence in theatrical documentary; One Day in September does not, he feels, constitute a British film, and Nick Broomfield is too elitist. It’s an understandable point of view – the same has been said about British cinema in general – but as Battsek points out, “there’s as much a British presence as any other”. Documentary is still a marginal genre, despite its recent and lauded advent, and there is no national cinema that really covers reality as well as fiction.
What seems to be happening now, however, is that it is emerging from the venerable, Griersonian roots that have defined it until now and tackling a new set of audiences and a new set of cultural priorities, giving us all a much needed dose of reality. And it’s not all doom and gloom: Faro has lost none of his passion, if indeed he’s lost anything, and Battsek loves the genre enough to be working on another documentary, Once in a Lifetime, that’s due out early next year and recreates a sense of New York in the seventies. The evolution continues.
*Ken Faro and Tariq Mehmood’s film Injustice is still screening nationwide. For details of screenings coming up, or to organise a screening, see the website: www.injusticefilm.co.uk
Kerry McLeod
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