14 Chapter 14: Documentary

In an interview, filmmaker Jill Godmilow expresses her discomfort with the term “documentary film” because she says that it is predicated on “the conceit of  ‘the real,’ which substantiates the truth claims made by these films.” Godmilow explains that films typically labeled documentaries make a “deliberate attempt to alter their viewers’ relationship to a subject by recontextualizing it in the proffered time, space, and intellectual field of the film.” Godmilow’s description underscores how filmmakers, whether working in a fictional or nonfictional vein, are fundamentally storytellers.

Although we bracket documentary film from narrative film, both are equally invested in storytelling.^[1] When a film identifies itself as a documentary, however, we assume that what we will watch is not a fiction or a fictional recreation of a historical event. Instead, we expect to see actual people as they exist and events as they happen in the world. While most narrative film relies heavily on actors, screenplays, sets, costumes, and makeup, documentary largely avoids anything that might be perceived by the viewer as violating the promise of real objects, people, and events.

Documentary as a mode of film is dedicated to opening up a truth about the world in which we live, generally something that the viewer did not know before watching the movie. Notice that we said “a truth” rather than “the Truth.”^[2]

A fundamental error in discussing documentaries involves the assumption that such films capture reality in an undiluted, objective way. To see how false this view is, we turn to a scene in a fictionalized version of Steven Spielberg’s life, Meet the Fabelmans (2022):

Meet the Fabelmans

In the clip, we see Sammy, Spielberg’s avatar, wow his audience with a film of his senior ditch day. All of the footage is “real” and the film is a “documentary,” but Sammy edited it in such a way as to make some of his classmates look heroic and others seem idiotic. Were there moments that day when Logan was less than heroic and Chad was not so foolish? Of course.  In other words, Sammy’s selective cuts offered a version of the truth but not the Truth. When analyzing documentaries, it’s important to keep in mind that no matter how powerful a film may be, it is only a partial representation of a broader reality. In the video below, we see how the type of editing Sammy uses above can appear in documentaries as well. Indeed, the impossibility of knowing the “whole truth” is the very subject of Stories We Tell (2012), the documentary film under discussion in the following video.

Like Maria on Stories We Tell

All documentary filmmakers employ a point of view, and they all “tell stories.”

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007) tells the story of a modest underdog who manages to defeat the arrogant reigning world-record holder for high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong.^[3] In putting together this documentary, the filmmakers combined interviews, video game history, and events that were unfolding as the filming was underway.

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

How to Survive a Plague (2012) tells the story of the AIDS activists who fought local and national officials and a largely indifferent public for support and research necessary to combat the epidemic. Here the events have happened in the past, and much of the film is made up of historical footage from news and home video, combined with present-day interviews with survivors who had been on the front lines at the time.

How to Survive a Plague

Looking at these two films, we see somewhat different goals. King of Kong tells a story of an unlikely drama (complete with “hero” and “villain”) unfolding in a space most in the audience do not know. In How to Survive a Plague, on the other hand, the filmmakers are motivated by a pedagogical and political desire to pass on to a younger generation the hard-earned lessons of the AIDS era.  Both of these films are documentaries, but How to Survive a Plague has a clearer educational mission; King of Kong, meanwhile, explores how something as mundane as competitive arcade video game playing can make for a drama every bit as captivating as a work of fiction.

Documentaries can have strong positions on the subjects they address on the screen. The documentaries of Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine [2002], Sicko [2007]) foreground the director and his outspoken political opinions throughout. Other documentaries, by contrast, strive for a kind of objective neutrality, often removing the filmmakers as much as possible from the screen and allowing the subjects to speak for themselves. A good example of this would be Hoop Dreams (1994), which follows two Chicago teens recruited to play for an elite suburban high school with the hopes of ultimately being accepted to a college program that might lead to an NBA career. The filmmakers had little sense of what to expect when they started filming their subjects, leading to an honest and at times heartbreaking portrait of the sacrifices young athletes endure in the hopes of being able to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. The film studiously maintains a neutrality with regards to the story that is being told, letting the young men and their families speak for themselves.

Hoop Dreams

Another example is Machines (2016):

Machines

Of course, no film can be wholly objective or neutral. Any time we tell a story, we are organizing it in ways designed to emphasize certain ideas or issues. We are always omitting some elements in order to foreground the issues we believe carry more importance. This is all the more the case in film, where every decision of where to point the camera involves infinite other choices discarded, where every cut involves leaving something on the cutting room floor. Nonetheless, we can imagine a continuum in documentary film which runs from those that strive for as much objectivity as possible on one end of the scale, to those that seek to manipulate the audience towards very specific beliefs and actions on the other:

The level of purple in the circle represents (with absurd vagueness) the lack of neutrality

These distinctions are porous. Even the most neutral documentary likely has a point of view that seeks to educate or persuade, for example. The scale does help us identify something roughly equivalent to the genres in narrative film we discussed in Chapter Twelve. For educational (or instructional) documentaries we might think of some of the films we watched in high school classes—for example, a video on the digestive system or a documentary on photosynthesis. It could also be a documentary about a historical figure such as Martin Luther King, Jr. or Florence Nightingale.

Of course, such films will likely have persuasive goals as well, but an instructional documentary strives for more objectivity than a persuasive documentary that seeks to combine education with a call to action. Here we can think of a film such as Inconvenient Truth (2006), which focuses on Al Gore’s efforts to educate people about climate change. Much of the film is made up of the former Vice President giving lectures on the subject, aligning it with the educational documentary. The film, however, also seeks to motivate action on the part of its audience, asking viewers to make personal changes in behavior and to agitate for policies that address climate change. It makes few pretenses to neutrality on the subject, identifying climate change as a crisis that must be addressed immediately.^[4]

Types of Documentaries

As we have seen, documentaries can range widely in purpose, ideology, and technique. Among many other possibilities, documentarians might be vigorously pleading for social justice, for instance, or they may simply want to introduce a niche topic to a wider public. Documentary theorist Bill Nichols has identified six broad modes of documentary that help to bring this wide array of approaches into focus, although he cautions that many films will combine strategies. Before we look briefly look at each type and provide some examples, it would be helpful to examine Nichol’s three criteria for what constitutes a documentary in the first place:

• They are nonfiction films about something that has happened, is happening, or is about to happen
• They are nonfiction films about real people and places
• They nonfiction films that tell stories about what happens in the real world (5-7)

Expository

Such documentaries treat knowledge and truth as discrete and discoverable. They often use an omniscient voice or in some way establish an authoritative ethos. Frequently, such films use a fragmented timeline in order to marshal evidence in favor of their thesis and points. They underscore “objective” research, verifiability, accuracy, and didacticism. Nichols observes that this is the dominant mode in documentary film. He also points out that despite the premium placed on objectivity, expository documentaries may not always conform to such standards.

March of the Penguins (2007)

13th (2016)

Poetic

The poetic documentary is less interested in empirical evidence and more devoted to establishing a mood. This type of film will often defamiliarize the mundane or expected and may divorce its images and sound from a strictly didactic purpose. Preferring expressive strategies over informational ones, the poetic documentary is affective and impressionistic. Its temporal structure is discontinuous, as visuals and audio sacrifice form for rhythm. Nichols notes that the resultant film may lose touch with the concrete in favor of subjective abstractions.

Danube Express (1998)

Sans Soleil (1983)

Observational

Observational documentaries attempt to submerge the authorial voice by letting the camera capture the action and sound in real time. This type of “fly on the wall” documentary tries to provide a sense of temporal continuity, and it forces the audience to draw inferences about the meaning of what is appearing on the screen. Nichols notes that this approach can raise ethical concerns about passivity in the face of illegal, dangerous, or other harmful activities.

Babies (2010)

Grey Gardens (1975)

Participatory

In contrast to the observational documentary, a film in the participatory style highlights the interaction between filmmaker and subject. Such films tend to use a dialectic (give and take) structure, and they tend to use a continuous time frame. While a strong point of view often underlies the filmmaker’s approach, participatory documentaries can cede some control to other perspectives. Ethical concerns sometimes arise due to perceived “guerilla” tactics on the part of the filmmaker.

Roger and Me (1989)

Born into Brothels (2004)

Reflexive

This class of documentaries offer a meta-commentary on the limitations of documentary truth. They often expose the construction of the narrative and editing processes and cast doubt on their ability to convey complex situations with enough nuance. Such films tend to investigate power dynamics, context, and positionality.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

F for Fake (1973)

Close-Up (1990)

Performative

Performative documentaries heavily incorporate not only the filmmaker’s point of view but their emotional reactions as well. They subvert notions of objectivity and place the director’s personal reflections, social commentary, and reactions at the core of the film. Information is not presented as discrete and impersonal but as embodied and and subjective.

The Gleaners and I (2000)

Tongues Untied (1989)

(Nichols 108-109)