Documentary film: Faking it so real
The man who only watches documentaries tells me it isn’t because he has anything against feature films or TV shows or any of the other entertainment options we might access through any number of screens we keep around ourselves these days.
He is not, like those business moguls you sometimes see profiled in society sections or in-flight magazines, one who claims to have no time for anything so frivolous as fiction, trying to enforce some point about his brand. His only watching documentaries has nothing to do with his styling a character for himself, it is not an affectation. He does not expect to impress you with this quirk. He watches documentaries because he likes them, because he has developed a taste for the refracted experience of others.
He asks me for recommendations, and sometimes I successfully direct him to something he has not seen but rarely to something he has not heard or read about. He is a connoisseur of non-fiction film, and so I know such people exist.
I have spent a good deal of time over the past couple of weeks watching documentaries in preparation for this year’s Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (which kicked off Saturday and has the best schedule of films in memory), but I’m not sure I have a good working definition of the term. I don’t have an instinct for taxonomy, so I’ve never thought much about what makes a documentary a documentary. Other people can try to enforce whatever rules they will; I tend to grant artists license to call their art whatever they want, or nothing at all if it suits their purpose. While a certain amount of categorization is inevitable—how else do we find it on Amazon.com?— to the extent that labels tend to ghettoize a work, I am against them.
Earlier this year at the Little Rock Film Festival, I was on a panel led by an interesting filmmaker ( Kati With an I, Fake It So Real) and writer named Robert Greene called “Cinematic Nonfiction: The New Documentary.” Apparently the idea for this panel came from a provocative piece Greene published on the website Hammer to Nail in January, in which he talked about what he considered the “best rule-breaking, genre-busting or otherwise important/brilliant/moving nonfiction of the year” and lamented the apparent inability of movie critics to receive these films on their own terms. In the piece he wrote, “[i]t’s not hard to be disappointed by most film critics if you’re a fan of groundbreaking nonfiction … Two worlds have emerged: On one side we have an explosion of films, filmmakers and micro-movements that are pushing nonfiction cinematic form, creating immersive, expressive, genre-bending films that bristle with ideas and energy. On the other side, we have a film critic culture, well-versed in fictional narrative art cinema, completely missing the boat.”
I believe my role on the panel— which included Lauren Wissot of Filmmaker Magazine and directors Rick Rowley ( Dirty Wars) and Omar Mullick ( These Birds Walk)— was to represent the critical establishment (or maybe to be the local yokel critic who didn’t get it), and to push back against filmmakers arguing against the rules. If that’s what they expected, I may have disappointed.
I pretty much agree with Greene and other artists determined to push out the limits of documentary filmmaking. Some critics don’t write about documentary film particularly well. (Some critics don’t practice criticism very well, or at all.) I am willing to allow any film the chance to make its case. Not every poem has to rhyme or scan (though I’m predisposed toward those that at least acknowledge conventions do exist). I take every movie on a case-by-case basis; I try to allow it the chance to throw its hex.
And so I have no problem with the inherent artifice of some of Werner Herzog’s nonfiction work or with The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer disingenuously allowing murderers to believe he was making a movie celebrating their history. The period recreations in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell didn’t bother me at all (though I was dismayed by her apparent belief the audience ultimately needed to be clued in to the fact they weren’t actual home movies). I have room in my heart for Albert Maysles and Leviathan and Waltz With Bashir. My criteria for documentary film isn’t any different than my criteria for narrative film—I want transport, revelation, escape and engagement. I want to be surprised and delighted or gut-punched by beauty; I want to be affected by the concert of light and sound.
People who dismiss documentaries as dull and programmatic don’t see enough of them. Or they see the wrong ones. And maybe that’s the fault of this country’s lapdog entertainment press, but mostly it’s the fault of our increasingly restive culture, our constant desire to press the easy-pleasure pedal and our reluctance to consider things for ourselves.
The man who watches only documentaries is onto something.
I know a documentary is no more “true” than any other human attempt to get at what is real. Truth cannot be carved from marble or revealed by thrusting microphones; it can only be glimpsed sidelong, briefly apprehended in a serendipitous moment. Documentarians constrain themselves in ways that other artists do not—they mightn’t intrude on their frame, they might keep their voices still, they might not interfere with or abet the progress of their subject— but they are susceptible to the same errors of perception and translation as the novelist and the poet.
They have a greater, graver responsibility than other filmmakers. Their subjects are not actors paid to simulate some drama, but people whose lives are being recorded for display, perhaps to divert and thrill an audience, perhaps for some higher purpose. There is a greater moral dimension to documentaries. They are purported to reflect genuine human experience; they are not the private fantasies of some creator mind but engagements with the actual. We are supposed to believe in them.
By observing, by introducing a camera, a witness, into the laboratory of reality, they alter the trajectory of that reality. Whether it is their aim or not, they change the world.