EVERYONE'S GOT A STORY TO TELL
Anthony Bourdain deepfake sheds light on documentaries that favour plot lines over straight-up truths, Anne Hornaday writes.
Have documentaries evolved to the point where the very term “documentary” has lost all meaning? Filmmaker Morgan Neville has found himself at the centre of controversy after admitting he had used artificial intelligence to simulate the voice of Anthony Bourdain in his latest documentary, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, about the beloved cook, author and television personality who died three years ago.
The film, a conventional assemblage of archival footage, clips from Bourdain's TV shows and present-day talking heads, primarily uses Bourdain as his own narrator by way of past interviews and audio books. In three instances, Neville said, he wanted to use material that Bourdain had written but not spoken. Using several hours of recordings, he contracted with a software company to generate a Bourdain-sounding voice “reading” those lines.
The idea that what we thought was Bourdain's voice was, in fact, a deepfake elicited gasps among purists, as well as some of Bourdain's passionate fans, who expressed feelings of betrayal and even trauma at having their idol posthumously exploited. Although Neville insists he had the permission of Bourdain's former wife and literary executor to make the AI recordings, Ottavia Bourdain issued a tart statement disavowing her co-operation: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would be cool with that,” she tweeted Friday.
Documentaries are in the midst of a new Golden Age, as streaming services scoop up compulsively watchable feature films and series that satiate the audience's voracious appetite for true stories — especially those involving lurid crime, quirky human nature or wild animals. But the deluge of non-fiction filmmaking and its seemingly endless permutations — from the cosmeticized pseudo-verité of “reality TV” to the increasing use of fictional techniques such as special effects, animation, lush musical scores and even actors — has rendered the term almost meaningless. Technically, a documentary is called as such because it documents events as they unfold. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, documentaries are never mere recordings of reality. On some level, they always lie, or at least bend the truth — which doesn't always mean they're dishonest.
The outcry over Bourdain's synthesized voice in Roadrunner is but the latest iteration of an argument that has attended the non-fiction genre throughout its evolution. That debate goes as far back as 1922, when Robert Flaherty released the silent film Nanook of the North, a portrait of an Inuk family in the Canadian Arctic that contained staged scenes of the protagonist hunting and interacting with a white fur trader. In 1988, Errol Morris revolutionized the form with
The Thin Blue Line, a riveting true-crime procedural in which he used stylized, slow-motion inserts and re-creations to heighten dramatic tension.
Today's glut of investigatory films has led some observers to consider documentaries
“the new journalism.” But, as the Roadrunner episode demonstrates, documentaries aren't journalism. They're art. Although non-fiction filmmakers use journalistic tools such as interviews, research and acute observation, they aren't reporters but storytellers, who will go to any lengths necessary to engage their audience not just through information, but emotion.
That distinction is often lost on viewers who are all too happy to go along with a filmmaker creating a compelling and convincing world on screen. And it's blurred by filmmakers themselves, who often consider transparency about their methods to be at odds with the immersive emotional experience they're trying to create. Most of Neville's toughest critics agree he could have avoided controversy simply by disclosing the fact that a few lines in Roadrunner were produced in a computer rather than spoken by Bourdain.
One of the best examples of this kind of transparency can be found in Stories We Tell, Toronto-born director Sarah Polley's exquisite 2012 documentary about a family mystery in which she artfully braids together straightforward interviews and documentary footage with re-enactments and speculative material, delicately disentangling them at the end of the film to reveal her creative process and the liberties she took. It's a gesture that simultaneously reflects Polley's confidence as a director and a deep respect for her tacit contract with viewers for whom the word “documentary” entails the expectation that, even if what they're seeing isn't the whole “truth,” at least they won't be tricked or purposefully deceived.
Neville seems to have asked the question only to glibly dismiss it. Speaking with New Yorker staff writer Helen Rosner, who noticed one line of Bourdain's dialogue that turned out to be computer-generated, he said, “You probably don't know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you're not going to know. We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
It looks like we're having that documentary-ethics panel now. And it looks like the term “documentary” is here to stay. It's not that it doesn't mean anything.
It's that it never meant what we thought it did in the first place.
As the Roadrunner episode demonstrates, documentaries aren't journalism. They're art. Non-fiction filmmakers ... aren't reporters but storytellers.