Docs are all fun and games until someone tries to lie
As another year of Hot Docs proves, documentary filmmaking can be a shell game.
Tugging at our sympathies in a doc is a natural strategy to make something real; fictional films do it all the time
Ipromise that everything you read in this article is true.
I write that to put you at ease, to assure you that you don’t need to engage your hair-trigger capacity for skepticism, to emphasize that the text below is trustworthy.
But maybe now all I’ve done is arouse your suspicion: this is a newspaper, after all, so perhaps you assume that everything we write is the truth. You come here because you think our writers have a professional, ethical, moral and maybe even market imperative to tell the truth, and have editors that will check that work, and have corporate structures that will eliminate anyone who gets in the habit of failing to tell the truth. We are trustworthy, in other words, and perhaps emphasizing that fact makes it seem like I’m trying to hide something.
Actually, if we’re going to be honest here, I should say that I didn’t make that promise to reassure you, or not just to reassure you. I made it because it seemed like a good way to get you thinking about what it is about the things you read that makes you so sure that they are truthful. Not just truthful, but truthful in a meaningful way: that they come across as authentic, as a story that is not just factually accurate but that reflects what you understand the world to be. I wanted to prime you to consider how a person like me uses phrases and structures and styles to convince you that I can be trusted to convey the way the world is — so I can show you how a documentary filmmaker does the same thing.
Non-fiction of any kind can be a shell game: truth isn’t the issue here, and not, strictly, even possible. More important than conveying a part of the world accurately is convincing you that that
is what’s happening: hooking you with certain strategies and tactics that let you verify the world that’s being created, so you can feel confident it’s real enough to be believed. Documentaries are interpretations first, and then persuasions. With that off my chest, I can say with confidence:
starting now, everything in this article is true.
Prior to screening at Toronto’s Hot Docs Film Festival, The Wolfpack won the Grand Jury Prize for a documentary at Sundance. That doesn’t affect any of its techniques or qualities, but suggests that authorities beyond my own think it’s worthwhile, and that I’m not off in the wilderness with my subsequent analysis.
The film is about the Angulos, a unique family by any definition. The seven children (six boys, one girl) of the family have spent 17 years (less, if they’re younger) in a four-bedroom New York City apartment that they hardly ever leave. They’re home-schooled, and their father — a Hare Krishna who’s philosophically opposed to working — keeps the only key to the door. Baghavan, the eldest, tells us they’d be let out of the apartment a handful of times; some years, he says, once, or not at all.
Their reality is not one that you or I would recognize; real as it is to them, for us it’s as beyond understanding as any fantasy world. This isn’t helped by the fact that the Angulos’ lone window into the world is the movies their father brings home for them: and not even documentaries, but blockbuster fare, from the paranoid conspiracies of Oliver Stone’s JFK to the crime drama of The
Godfather to the stylized (though appropriately film-referential) violence of Quentin Tarantino (black suits straight out of Reservoir Dogs are the children’s favourite outfit). Their world is entirely shaped by these movies: Halloween is a rumpus in the style of Nightmare on Elm Street, but with horror movie characters singing along; their only creative outlet is careful recreations of these films, transcribed thanks to heavy use of the pause button and styled by the repurposed yoga mats and cereal boxes the Angulos turn into guns, masks and set dressing.
Windows, though, go both ways. These movies give the boys a chance to live something like a “real” life. Crystal Moselle, director of
The Wolfpack, describes it as an escape: under the guise of pirates and gangsters, the children found a way to live out the autonomy and independence we take for granted, but that they had no connection to.
“They liked to do things that brought them out of their world; they did a lot of characters where they could feel empowered ... when you don’t have a lot of power in your normal life, you want to live out these characters that have some,” says Moselle.
But the clan’s film collection also gives us insight into their life — it makes them real to us. If it’s fair to say most of us cannot relate to the experience of growing up sequestered in a small New York apartment — but we have at least seen the clan’s movies, and can relate to the thrill they gave us when we first watched them, maybe even the feeling of power or escape. It’s the first tendrils of a sympathetic connection, a direct understanding that can be built out and bonded to more esoteric ones. With a baseline established, we can relate as the children cycle through the intimate bond they have with their parents, but also the thrill as they make furtive steps into the world. That one universal experience between the audience and the boys is a building block, and from it a whole world can be shaped.
There’s another film at Hot Docs that does this exact same thing. Raiders! is about a group of men trying to finish the shot-for-shot remake of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark that they began as film-obsessed teenagers. You probably don’t know what it’s like to actually fulfil a childhood dream — even one as low-stakes as making a home video version of a favourite movie — but you probably do remember the experience of sitting in a theatre and wishing you could be that character. And if you remember that, you can also understand why someone might be willing to lose their job and put their family’s welfare at risk to get a shot of their friend running away from an exploding plane.
Tugging at our sympathies is a natural strategy to make something real for a person. It is, after all, what fictional films do to earn our attention — to be “believable” — too: we need a character who responds in recognizable ways to latch on. But documentaries also aspire to a higher level of authenticity; the whole point is they’re not just a series of imaginary tricks, but an accurate portrayal of a real thing. It doesn’t matter that the process of interpretation and construction makes them another narrative with its own blind spots: it has to make us believe in it anyway.
This is where people speaking in their own words comes in handy: for instance, Baghavan explaining his situation in The Wolfpack. In the documentary, Moselle’s voice is hardly ever heard; her presence is only implied by the camera — and even there, she gives the pack plenty of opportunity to film themselves, either through the cinematic recreations or through documenting moments when she wasn’t around, like a phone call between their mother and grandmother. Unmediated by another voice, some-
You don’t have to watch many docs to witness the confessional power of training a camera on someone
own words are the closest we get to seeing the world through their eyes.
The children of The Wolfpack might be better suited to explaining themselves on camera than others — their view of the world, after all, is through a lens — but you don’t have to watch many documentaries to witness the confessional power of training a camera on someone. It can get people talking even when they shouldn’t.
Dan Ariely, a psychologist who has done extensive research into dishonesty and people’s justifications for it, might have an explanation for that. His work is the subject of the Hot Docs film Dishonesty: The Truth About Lies, which explores how and why people lie, cheat and steal, both with data and by talking to people who have been caught in everything from af- fairs to multimillion-dollar frauds. It turns out, according to Ariely, that one of the biggest factors in keeping people more honest, more forthright, more moral, is simply being aware: both of society’s standards, but also of yourself — that it’s you who is going to be committing this dishonest act. Simply having people look into a mirror makes them behave more honestly. “Put people in front of a camera, and they take a more objective view of themselves,” Ariely says during our phone conversation. “They become more honest about everything.” Make them focus on the fact that they’re talking, in other words, and they’ll offer a more authentic reflection of their personality.
This effect is heightened in Dishonesty by the use of the Interrotron, documentarian Errol Morris’s tool for conducting on-camera interviews, which features a set-up that allows interviewees to look directly into the camera and still see their interviewer. Admitted liars open up directly to the audience, a filmed confession of their sins; they bare their souls, conveniently illustrating Ariely’s points as they do. They convince us both of his research and their deep regret at the same time.
The neat thing is that this access to the authentic human can work even when they’re lying through their teeth. Look no further than two of Morris’s most famous uses of the Interrotron: his interviews with U.S. Defense secretaries Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, respectively in The Fog of War and The Unknown Known. The former is a soul-searching interview in which the architect of the Vietnam War admits to behaving as a war criminal, and attempts to reconcile with that fact; the latter is a snow job of legendary proportions, in which it seems the politician would refuse to admit water was wet if it contradicted his preferred narrative. But the true characters of both men emerge: the camera, looking them dead in the eyes, shows their souls — one tortured, one from which no light will ever escape.
If there is a drawback to any form of direct address, though, it can be that it’s an explicit reminder that we are watching something that’s constructed, that’s beholden to artifice and craft. Even if we’re seemingly being spoken to, somewhere we know it’s not to us they’re answering; even if it’s their own words, we know those words have been chosen from dozens or hundreds of exchanges. These reminders can get our guards up again — and can force us to confront the fact that everything is just an interpretation.
Sometimes, the best way around this inherent artifice is to lean in, to explicitly remind people that “true” just means “as true as I can make it, under the circumstances.”
The Visit, for instance, is a Hot Docs documentary about an alien who comes to Earth, albeit handicapped by the fact that the event hasn’t happened yet. Instead, the film tracks all the first-contact scenarios of organizations from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence institute to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, taking us through a simulation of an alien’s landing, placing the viewer explicitly in the role of alien: being contacted, quarantined, questioned. It never lets us stop being aware of its constructs, and makes the artificiality of the encounter its subject.
The Wolfpack is not interested in this kind of distance, and instead responds to the challenge by trying to get as close as possible to its subjects, to live in and among them like a voyeur. The story of the documentary becomes the story of making the documentary, of discovering the depths and dreams of the family in the same way Moselle did, as though we, like the camera, were sitting on her shoulder the entire time. We follow them from a remake of Reservoir Dogs to running across the beach in those same black suits, feeling their hurt and tentative steps into the world the same way the director found them.
Moselle claims to have just happened to run into on of the Angulos on the streets of New York, and followed them home. It was one of their first excursions outside their apartment, and her way in to this otherwise hidden family. “I didn’t shoot anything for four months. I often didn’t shoot anything. It was just us getting to know each other,” she tells me. “We really bonded over film.
“Between me and this family, there became a point where we really felt comfortable with each other, and there was a really, really beautiful thing happening between us,” she continues. “It was like the arch of the film: we came through this experience of them going out into the world together, and got through the other side.”
If audiences want to feel like this is something that simply unfurled in front of us, that we are being pointed toward a corner of the world we weren’t looking at before, it’s best to just let that happen. That is, after all, how the creator of the story experienced it; what better way to make it seem real to an audience than let them discover it the same way you did?
I promised at the beginning that everything here would be true, and while there’s an argument to be made for omission not being a lie, there are certain exclusions that do hurt that sense of authenticity I also mentioned. In this case, it would seem damning to ignore that, when you’re talking about a genre as loaded as “non-fiction,” there are going to be many ways to convince you that what’s taken place on the screen, or on the page, is true.
It needs to be said that, in the best of these cases, the non-fiction in question will never give you any reason to doubt its truth, and will have mastered its tactics so thoroughly that it can slip right by your skeptical defences, never triggering a thought that it might be anything other than a real account. The Wolfpack, for instance, builds its story from the children’s isolation to their freedom, culminating with a big, cathartic trip out into the world, the boys’ dreams come true. It feels like a new beginning at the end of the film, but Moselle herself only met them because they had begun sneaking out months before she started shooting, and years before she decided how to frame their story. The event is real, their emotions are real, they’re just not actually perfect analogs for the journey the audience has just taken.
That is all the more reason, though, to be mindful of these kinds of things. Surely none of us are so foolish as to believe that something is true just because it claims to be.