Thoughts on documentary filmmaking

I start teaching my intro to filmmaking course at CCV tomorrow evening (a week late due to a snowstorm last week) and tonight I’m getting some materials together for it, so I’m thinking about the filmmaking process a bit.

As I was organizing my papers and thoughts, @VERMONTCAM sent out a tweet linking to this WikiHow article on how to make a documentary film. Now, regular Candleblog readers will know that I published my own how-to on doc filmmaking last fall and if you read them side by side, you’ll find that while the WikiHow piece is a lot less detailed than mine, they say some fairly similar things, in general. I think the WikiHow piece misses some important steps, but the thing that got me fired up enough to leave them a comment and then write this posts was this:

A documentary is meant to simply present the facts and allow the viewer to decide for them selves. Above all else, be sure you do not editorialize or impress your own, personal opinion, into the documentary. Once that takes place your work ceases to be a documentary and becomes propaganda.

Aside from the fact that this advice is both bad and wrong, it’s also contradicts some advice that appears just a few lines below:

A documentary, like all film, is storytelling. Most documentary film makers bend rules, reorder material to change context of interviews, etc. Don’t be afraid to make your story more interesting.

Which is it? Is a documentary supposed to “simply present the facts” or do documentaries mess with context and reorder material in order to make the material more interesting?

I wrote a comment on the wiki and then I noticed that the comment history is sporadic at best and goes back years and nobody is likely to ever see what I wrote, so I’m republishing it here, hoping to engender some discussion. Maybe my students will see it and get something from it. Who knows? Here’s what I wrote:

The idea that documentaries are somehow more “objective” than narrative fictional films is false. All films are subjective — they are the subjective view of the filmmaker. Every decision a filmmaker makes is informed by that filmmaker’s perspective. No matter how hard he/she tries to adhere to “truth,” at some point the filmmaker has to decide how a given subject will be presented — where the camera is placed, what sort of light to use, how much and what parts of the interviews to use and what parts to cut. There is no such thing as “objective” filmmaking. Errol Morris is no more objective a filmmaker than Michael Moore.

I teach filmmaking to college students and I try and impress them with the idea that the difference between narrative and documentary filmmaking is not the type of content in the films, but the *methods* by which they are made.

Narrative films tend to be creatively front-loaded in that there is a script and rehearsals, typically. Most narrative filmmakers have some complete sense of what their films will be before they turn on a camera.

Doc filmmakers may have an idea, but they don’t usually have the films in their heads before they start shooting. They find the film as they’re going, through a process like the one outlined here or something similar. I’ve given this quite a lot of thought and I’ve made quite a few films and that’s the best distinction between the two I’ve found so far. It’s a question of process.

If you’re recreating a script in film form, you’re probably NOT making a documentary. If you’re out in the world shooting targets of opportunity and organizing the images and sounds that seem relevant to you into a film of some kind, it’s probably a documentary.

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On February 4, 2009, arthur said:

While no filmmaker is truly objective, I think that we can still ascribe a a scale of objectivity to them. Like, for instance, I don’t think it’s inappropriate to say that Errol Morris may be a tad more objective than Michael Moore. Just because neither one of them is absolutely objective doesn’t mean that we can’t get closer to the truth by one or the other. Two extremes might be this: A single camera non-moving news-reel shot of a Hitler speech and a Leni Riefenstahl film about the same speech. I think it would take a real relativist to say that one of those films isn’t more objective than the other. We can notice subtle differences in objectivity from filmmaker to filmmaker without declaring anyone 100% objective.

If you don’t agree then you’re objectively a big poo head.
On February 4, 2009, billsimmon said:

I’ll preface my reply to Arthur with the note that anyone who’s ever cut a doc probably agrees that what I’m saying is obviously true. You can’t go through a documentary edit process and not inject massive amounts of subjectivity. I’ll take that a step further and say you can’t press “record” on a camera and not be subjective.

I hate to do this to you, Arthur, but please define what you mean by “truth.”

And despite the fact that you Godwined this thread in the first comment, I’ll take your Hitler/Riefenstahl example.

A single-camera shot of Hitler that never moves and never cuts, is every bit as subjective as the edited Riefenstahl version of the same speech (though maybe not as interesting or artistic). Here’s why:

A: someone had to choose where to put the camera. Is it a low angle? Is it a high angle? Is it over or under exposed? Is it a wide shot showing generals and the fawning crowd or is it tight on Der Fuhrer’s head? Are Nazi flags in the shot? Etc. All of these decisions are (perhaps unconscious) influences by the cinematographer.

B: an unmoving, unflinching shot of someone isn’t very “real” in most senses. If you and I were in the crowd at the rally, our “real” experience of the speech would be wildly different than the camera’s. Even if we were standing exactly where the camera was placed, our experience would be quite different than it’s. We have stereoscopic vision, for one, and the camera does not. We see in color, LR shot in B&W. We experience 4 other senses while the camera is limited to sight only. We tend to look around and shift and fidget while the camera stares blankly. You get the idea. A good example of this is the famous Howard Dean yelp in Indiana in 2004. The supposedly objective news camera recorded a very different version of that event than what those who were in the crowd reported. We all know the results.

*not* editing a piece of footage is as much an editorial choice as editing heavily, is my point. As soon as you turn on a camera and aim it, you’re distorting the “truth.” Again, the epistemological definition of “truth” becomes important in this discussion.
On February 4, 2009, Alex C said:

To build on Bill’s point: The single-camera shot is inferior in other ways, too.

* It’s boring — if the viewer’s attention wanders then he gets less truth out of it
* It’s less educational — a documentary can add context or gloss that provide depth (e.g., “his use of this phrase echoes the famous speech by Otto von Bismarck in 1882″) thus conveying more truth
* It’s limited — a documentary can convey truth (or “truth”) in many ways, like say, using Hitler’s audio underneath a Charlie Chaplin schtick, conveying that he was a master performer, or a clown…

What you’re describing is not “truth” but what in visual arts has been called “naturalism” or “realism”, which should not be (but, inevitably, often is) confused with “reality.” A security camera can’t show what’s in a suspect’s heart.

A documentarian has many ways of communicating concepts that transcend mere literal pixels and sound waves. And yes, these often make an audience feel manipulated and resentful when they’re made aware of them, but as Bill says, all films are subjective, and it’s your own fault if you thought you were watching the Lord’s revealed truth.
On February 4, 2009, billsimmon said:

Excellent distinction between objectivity and realism! Yay Alex!
On February 4, 2009, DanZ said:

Alex, good comment. But help me out with something: In the ‘naturalist film’ scenario of pointing an unmoving camera at some scene (e.g., a Hitler speech), you say it’s ‘boring’, ‘less educational’. You also explicitly say that a ‘documentary’ conveys ‘depth’ and ‘more truth’. I don’t understand what you mean by ‘more truth’. Certainly if I had been present in the crowd I would have had access to information that might not have been captured in the ‘naturalist’ footage, such as the context of current events, the weather, the mood conveyed by being surrounded by a huge crowd and so forth. But the same deficit might be suffered by a well-chosen observer from the crowd. The documentarian might add facts, context and other information (including artistic license, prejudice, etc.) but those ‘truths’ might not be available to everyone (or anyone) in the crowd at the time.

While I understand that ‘more truth’ is out there to be had (allowing us to be monday-morning quarterbacks), documentaries don’t strike me as being better except at entertainment or education. But the true world isn’t like that except in retrospect. Watching a crime take place as a witness isn’t as informative as the sum of all the forensic information gathered afterwards. The former is true to life, the latter is not really ‘true’, it’s more like an hypothesis.

So how is a documentary more true?
On February 4, 2009, arthur said:

Well the reason I “Godwined” the first comment was coz LR was the first propaganda filmmaker I could think of, I guess I could have used Eisenstein, but it didn’t come as fast…

Okay, I will concede a lot of your points, but I still feel like you’re giving a false equivalency. Are you saying that the placement of a camera (or other subjective technical details) takes away ALL objectivity from a film in the same way someone who edits together footage into a complete falsehood does? Yes, neither is “objective” because “objectivity doesn’t exist” but are you saying we can’t make value judgments? Are you saying that we can’t say that one is more objective than the other just because neither is 100% objective? Because that gets too relativist for me. I think we can say as objectively as we can that certain forms of documentary filmmaking or journalism tell or show us a more objective version of events than others.

Do you disagree? Have you found that Errol Morris intentionally edits footage in his movies to be misleading or outright lies? Coz I haven’t, and I haven’t read anything about him being accused of that. I have however observed Michael Moore doing this in almost every one of his movies (so much so that I can’t STAND him anymore) and read a lot of criticism from IMHO reliable sources that have noticed the same thing.

So do you not believe that in filmmaking it’s possible to be disingenuous, misleading or just completely untruthful in the documentary form? And that there are also filmmakers that strive not to do that? Don’t you think that makes their films more…something? I won’t use the term “objective” coz you all seem not to like it…but whatever…rant over.
On February 5, 2009, billsimmon said:

Of course one can be intentionally disingenuous and misleading, but a lot of that is in the eye of the beholder. Here are a couple of examples…

I had an argument once with a friend who was upset to learn that the sound effects that accompanied the macro nature cinematography in Microcosmos and the migration footage in Winged Migration was canned. That is, foley artists and sound effects were used to create a lifelike soundscape to accompany the photography. My friend thought *that* was intentionally misleading and disingenuous. But of course, every film does this to one extent or another. The intent of the filmmaker was to make a point about how these creatures behave and in order to make the point effectively, the filmmaker had to make the footage sound “real.” To have left the footage silent would have been less “real” than adding the “fake” sound.

Likewise, many people complained after Bowling for Columbine came out (a deeply flawed films for reasons other than disingenuousness, IMO), that the scene where Moore opens a bank account and gets a gun in return, was cheating, filmicly — that he was, in effect, lying to the audience by willfully misrepresenting the facts. The “truth,” these detractors argued, was that if you opened an account at that bank, you got a coupon for a gun, which you brought to a licensed gun dealership, waited through the Brady Bill 6-day background check, and THEN you got a gun. The way Moore showed it, he walked into a bank, opened an account and ta da! He left the bank with a rifle!

But this is no different that the animal sound effects in Micrcosmos. The “truth” that Moore was trying to illustrate is that in some parts of our fucked-up-relationship-with-firearms country, when you open a bank account, they give you a GUN! That is true and an astonishingly scandalous fact given the amount of gun violence in our society. That Moore used visual shortcuts to illustrate the truth of that fact is no less honest than the sound effects being faked in a studio for the migrating birds or the aphid-farming ants. Little “lies” reveal a larger “truth.” In this case, the truth that was the whole point of Moore’s film. He wasn’t making a film about the process you literally go through to redeem your bank account gun, he was making a film about the cavalier attitude toward gun ownership in America.

So in these examples, the filmmakers were technically “disingenuous, misleading or just completely untruthful in the documentary form,” but they were doing so in pursuit of the “truth.” I don’t fault either of them one bit for these examples.

But to take the kernel of your question to heart, let’s assume some filmmaker makes a “documentary” that looks, smells, sounds and feels like a doc about some mind-blowing thing. Let’s say the guy who made Tarnation, the award-winning memoir/doc about the crazy fucked up life the filmmaker led — let’s say that turned out to have been utterly made up. I believe it was all genuine, but let’s pretend he made it all up and then sold it as being real. Then the crime isn’t so much about the way the film was made, but the way the film was *marketed.* Then we’re really just talking about a film version the James Frey Million Little Pieces story. As with non fiction books, there’s no adjudicating body overseeing the relative ethics of doc filmmaking. The audience gets pissed because they were lied to — told something was “non fiction” when it was largely otherwise. But both A Million Little Pieces and the alternate-reality Tarnation have merit and “truth” as texts in and of themselves, regardless of how they were marketed.

I’m not saying “objectivity doesn’t exist,” I’m saying all filmmaking is subjective, period.

Jeezus, my fingers hurt from all this typing.
On February 8, 2009, Alex C said:

> Yes, neither is “objective” because “objectivity doesn’t exist” but are you saying we can’t make value judgments? Are you saying that we can’t say that one is more objective than the other just because neither is 100% objective? Because that gets too relativist for me.

Me too, but Bill and I are semantic sticklers, so we had to make you jump through some definitional hoops first.

I think maybe I’m a little on the Arthur side of Bill here — yes, it’s probably possible to rate movies on their objectivity, but there’s no bright line — but maybe that’s just because Bill is actually a filmmaker and thus constitutionally less capable of suppressing what he knows of the subjectivity of the craft.

Assuming you indeed felt cheated by Moore’s gun prank, but Bill did not (since it served a higher purpose, much like editing out the long moments of silence between air traffic contacts in the Sully tower tapes), that shows that it’ll never be possible to have a rule about what is and is not objective in any given case, since different people have different “pants on fire” buttons.

As a further example, I recently encouraged Bill to take a few liberties in his in-progress doc about The Pants, in order to make their story more dramatically compelling than he personally remembers it (but still consistent with accepted facts). My point is that in spinning together a compelling story that may be a bit biased, he will be spreading the myth — including the parts that are indisputably true — further, and committing no greater sin than any writer of history.

DanZ, what I mean by “more truth” is… MORE TRUTH!!!
On February 8, 2009, billsimmon said:

I think its probably important for me to make clear that I absolutely do believe that an objective reality exists, despite our limited and faulty methods of perceiving it and conveying information about it to others. I’ll go a step further and say that there are some ways of determining what that objective reality is that are superior to others (e.g. the scientific method), and a step further still by admitting that there are probably some ways of conveying information about objective reality that are superior to others (e.g. peer-review journals).

My main point here is that documentary filmmaking, per se, is not, in my estimation, any better at conveying information about objective “truth” than narrative filmmaking is. As story-telling media go, they are about equal in their ability to accurately convey “truth.”

Until scientific, peer-reviewed filmmaking takes hold, film is a strictly subjective story-telling medium, IMHO.
On February 8, 2009, billsimmon said:

oh dear, that Dean yelp was in Iowa, not Indiana. I just realized that goof.