Documentaries: A New (Trans) genre

It has not really come to a surprise to learn – with the figures to support it – that westerns, war films, musical comedies and even crime films no longer make money. That the up-and-coming genres are horror films and thrillers. And… documentaries. Heck. Westerns, SF, biopics, I know what these are about; as for your run-of-the-mill “problem” films, they have this hardwearing label: “comedy drama”. But “documentaries”? Who would have thought that would become a genre?

When I was little, a long time ago, the matter was simple: documentaries were the wretched part of the cinematographic show. It was that fifteen-minute-long thing, generally boring but brilliant at times, that you were forced to watch before the long film.Then came television, offering documentaries a natural outlet, in a form lacking even more charm, if possible. So more were made, and longer ones, too. And through some ironic comeback, here they are being shown in cinemas, where they have replaced westerns.

TELLING THE TRUTH

I see at least three lessons to be learned. First off, this comeback is not as ironic as it seems. After all, the cinématographe Lumière started out by recording documents. It then quickly moved on to directing and the technical division of labour, but never once, even in fantasy or burlesque films, had cinema abandoned that spontaneous anchoring to reality.The tendency to “tell the truth” has persisted beyond cinema’s first century – if not in scripts, then at least in images. For example, if it is shot on location (which is usually the case), watching a film is seeing an actual place, not just a dramatic space. Before telling their story, the films of Lucrecia Martel, Asghar Farhadi, Hirokazu Kore-eda or Serguéï Loznitsa first reveal a piece of Argentina, Iran, Japan, Russia (those are good filmmakers, but even a mediocre film has this valuable virtue).

In the 1930s, Warner Bros. crafted itself an image of “social films”: today, the vast majority of films give a concrete image of society. This tendency, oddly exacerbated by the possibility of digital fakes, is limited by the claim of absolute authenticity. A black person must be played by a black person, a gay person by a gay person, a disabled person by a disabled person, as certain “activists” have very loudly expressed, finding offensive (to whom?) that Bryan Cranston, an able-bodied actor, should play a man in a wheelchair in the American remake of Intouchables. Will we start demanding, as Serge Daney feared, thirty years ago, that a Scorpio, Gemini rising be imperatively played by a Scorpio, Gemini rising? Cinema does document, but that would be a bit too much.

Second lesson, regarding the future – not of the art of film but of its institution. The tone has long ago been set by a few specialized (and renowned) festivals, such as Lussas in France or Nyon in Switzerland. They are aimed at a fervent audience however, whereas two major organizations have given much more decisive signs, in my opinion. First and albeit discreetly, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, through its database, Gallica. One now has free access to documentary holdings (approximately two thousand), almost exclusively French if I am not mistaken, and dating back to pre1980, for the most part. Suffice it to say that many of these tapes pertain to information or education – though some are signed Éric Rohmer or Nestor Almendros. Then, and above all, the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information du Centre Pompidou, which created in January 2018 a “documentary film library”, whose almost-daily programme is organized by cycles, monographs or themes. By the time you read these lines, the cycle entitled Filmer le Sport will have taken place; fascinating full retrospectives of Alain Cavalier, Ross McElwee and the Maysles Brothers have been shown before the summer at the Centre itself and in forty-or-so cinemas associated to the programmes. Documentaries are definitely recognized today – perhaps less, in fact, as a genre than as a form of expression of its own. On the one hand, the BnF’s cataloguing and archival undertaking, a bit undifferentiated, valuable for historical research. On the other hand, the rise of major filmmakers, long confined by the industry to its margins, and even to its utter outside, and whose inventiveness, personality and creativity is publicly recognized: the BPI’s splendid collection is not secretive about honouring authors. If you will excuse this rather abrupt comparison, there would be, on one hand, the equivalent of the French Film Archives (where everything, no matter what it is, is kept and preserved), and on the other hand, the equivalent of the Cinémathèque française (that shows whatever is deemed worthy of celebration). The third conclusion of this profound change thus stands to reason: while fifty or sixty years ago, making a documentary was often done purely to make a living, in response to a commission by the Institut National Pédagogique, the ORTF or the Office National du Film Canadien, which made so many beautiful things, it has now become a full-fledged creative field. Thus must I end where I could have just as well started: what has emerged and has become visible to all in the last ten or twenty years, is an idea that is adequately summed up – despite its ambivalence– in the notion of “creative documentaries”. It is no accident that so many artists, when they go into filmmaking, make films that more or less touch on the treatment of documents. Zidane, un Portrait du XXIe Siècle (Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parenno), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel), Behemoth (Zhao Lyang), and many others: ever such formal pieces, but all based in nature on purely documentary filming. I’m terribly sorry for this column in the form of a lesson. Here is my excuse: it’s back-to-school season. Here is another one: there is still a lot to say on that subject. For example, what has the extralong-take trend brought on in the 2000s by the invention of digital film – slow films and other onetake films – done to the idea of documentaries and to cinema in general? We will get back to it sometime. For now, I will just point out this wonderful loop in history that has finally let Lumière’s descendants become artists too.