What's in a genre?
If you're reading this, then you know what a documentary is. Of course you do. One of the main things that was hammered into my head over a variety of cinema studies courses is this - every human being in the modern world has some sort of notion of what a film is, or what a certain film genre is.
This, as French film theorist Christian Metz writes, is the paradox of cinema: "A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand." And there's perhaps no genre that is so easily understood as the documentary. The difficulties come when you ask someone to explain what exactly a film, or a genre, is.
In common parlance, you don't really hear talk of "classic documentaries", the way you do of "classic films", which of course are always fictional. Since the beginning of the medium, narrative and story-driven films have dominated the industry.
Since the dawn of cinema, the documentary has popularly been used to espouse the Western imperialist worldview. Movements such as direct cinema, which I will write about below, attempted to challenge this. The re-emergence of a conventional style of documentary came soon after in the late 20th century, heralded by figures such as Ken Burns.
This, to me, is the very tragedy of the modern documentary.
Fairy tales
A fairy tale of cinema studies; when audiences first watched the films of the early filmmakers, such as the Lumière's, what they were most taken with was not the reproductions of human figures and movement, but the motion of leaves blowing in the wind.
What sets film apart is the fact it can capture actual reality, in motion, using light and a glass plate or sensor. So why does a medium with this ability set itself aside to fiction and fantasy?
I argue it's because of the banality of the documentary.
Happiness machines
Ever since the establishment of the first news agencies in the Western hemisphere, especially those in the United States, these outlets have been used to present the Western, imperialist view of the world, to affirm the beliefs and values that the majority of the population already had and not to question them.
This leaked into the medium by way of newsreels, which were popular all throughout the 20th century in North American and European movie theaters. These were often, of course, the most blatant propaganda you can imagine.
Another form of proto-documentary were the early travelogues, films that depicted "exotic" locations and tourist attractions. The first prominent example of this was Nanook of the North. Combining fact and fiction, the film grew controversy for its bending of reality. More importantly, the film seemed much more concerned with depicting the Inuit as curiosities for Western consumption than full human beings.
Yet another major leap in the genre were the Nazi propaganda films of the Third Reich. The most influential of these was Olympia (1938), directed by Leni Riefenstahl. The editing and cinematographic techniques Riefenstahl used mark it as one of the most, if not the most, influential documentaries in history.
I want to break free, I guess
I suppose for the majority of this post I’ve been really wholly negative about the history of the documentary as a tool for imperialism. But of course, there was always exceptions to the rule. I’d like to skip to the 1960s and 70s to discuss the works of the directors of Cinema vérité (French for ‘truthful cinema’) and/or direct cinema (there are some contentions as to the distinctions between these concepts).
The term was really invented for the 1961 French film, Chronicle of a Summer. The film displays a cast of ‘real-life individuals’ who are directed by the filmmakers to discuss aspects of French society among other things, and at the end they are played back the footage and questioned as to how much they have captured ‘reality’, if at all. Of course, there are always limits to this line of thinking, which is even addressed in the beginning of the film - namely, whether it’s possible at all to simply ‘be yourself’ in front of a camera.
Lamentably to me, the cinematic language of direct cinema has often been used to comedic effect on fictional television shows such as The Office. In my eyes, that’s neutralized it, castrated it almost. Sort of like a Seinfield effect.
The Wretched of Cinema
I’ll use to space to talk a bit extensively of a film I love, and a movement I love, Third Cinema, or Tercer Cine.
In very simple terms, this was a movement beginning in the 1960s and 70s (so, around the time of direct cinema), emerging in Latin America and spreading throughout the Global South, that sought to combat imperialism and capitalism through cinema.
Of course, Third Cinema was not always documentary. But one of the pivotal works of this time was the 1968 Argentinian documentary film, entitled La Hora de Los Hornos, or The Hour of the Furnaces. Produced and released during the military dictatorship of Juan Carlos Ongania, the film clearly delineates the long, torrid history of colonialism and neo-colonialism throughout Latin America, and the lies we’ve been fed about the apparent freedom and sovereignty of these nations.
Perhaps limiting to only discuss one film of this movement, but - I truly see this as the turning point for the modern documentary. Maybe, cinema as a whole. The de-construction of the Hollywood system’s dream machine by movements such as Tercer Cine is for me, maybe the closest we’ve gotten to truly unlocking cinema’s true potential, for destroying our carefully constructed realities.
What ever happened?
I suppose this is why the existence of filmmakers such as Ken Burns and films like My Octopus Teacher are so infuriating to me.
I’m quite hesitant to give a linear history of anything, especially cinema, even though I’ve leaned into this for convenience reasons in this post. I’m more of the Foucault-ish school of people who sees history as several bubbles expanding and exploding, often independent of each other, often not. For example, as much as I’ve written about the history of documentary essentially being a history of western propaganda for the first century or so, the rudimentary ideas of direct cinema were established by the Kino-Pravda series by Dziga Vertov in the 1920s.
I claim Ken Burns as responsible for the absolute slop you see in the documentary section of Netflix today. The simple stories of good and evil, the exploitation of victims for the brief moment of profit, all of it. Also a bit extreme of me.
But I despise the reduction of documentary cinema as essentially an over-glorified New York Post article, or worse. Perhaps it just infuriates me that after seeing two decades with such amazing experimentation in form and style in the genre, the Neo-conversatism of the 1980s degraded its mainstream form back into simple fairy tales.
A new hope
There are still contemporary documentaries that I believe are truly innovative in their form and content. One of these is one of my favorite films of all time - the 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. By blending the lines between fact and fiction, Oppenheimer gives a truly unnerving psychological portrait of former members of Indonesian death squads who brought about the Indonesian genocide of 1965 to 1966.
I believe there was some moral opposition of this film, mainly due to the relationships formed between the filmmakers and the murderers. But the emotional truths derived from the staged scenes put on by these men, and their most intimate moments, are truly something remarkable.
What’s the point of it all?
Perhaps this post has felt circular, or too devoid of my own voice. All I can say is that I have a genuine love and hope for the potential of documentary as an art form. I suppose I never really felt this love until the past year. In my body of work, the ones that I have been most proud of are the one that capture reality the closest to my own perception of it, whatever that means.
One of my current classes is an elective on the blurring of fact and fiction in film, a sort of “third film”. It’s an interesting paradox to consider - documentaries are full of lies and fiction, and yet narrative films still reflect truth, in the simple fact that a camera captures real things in the real world.
In a weird way, it makes me view cinema as my God.
In our current fascist regime, the least we can do as those who claim to capture life, here in the United States, is to use it for some purpose against this.
That's all.