Studies in Film Documentary

22/09/2026

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While the notion of what constitutes a documentary has been contested since John Grierson coined the term in the 1920s, it may have become even more pressing in the 21st century with the advent of Reality Television. Yet at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, quite a few cinema documentaries did relatively well at the box office: Bowling for Columbine, March of the Penguins, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Touching the Void all made large sums of money with very little outlay. An unassuming work about a teacher in a small French village, To Be and to Have,  took $16m worldwide. Documentaries might usually have box-office takings that are modest next to dramatic works, but a fiction film in the early 2000s could cost over a hundred million, and would be lucky to recoup double its outlay. Even the biggest hit of 2000, Mission Impossible II, only made four to five times its budget. It cost $125m, and Box Office Mojo says it took in  $546,000,000. Fahrenheit 9/11’s budget was high for a documentary, $6m, yet the film returned $220m. Why risk fiction when facts can make you money? Many TV producers have taken note. Why deal with stars and complex mise en scene, when you can have people falling in love on an island, baking cakes, or locked up in a Big Brother house for weeks?

Documentary allows for big bucks on low budgets, and some might see that the non-fiction film became a debased form, with those filmed opportunities for profit, instead of figures demanding scrutinising focus. When, in the late 1950s, filmmakers in France, Britain and the US wished to film the people, it wasn’t to find exploitable talent, but to show the lives of ordinary folk living ordinary lives. One might snort at such a claim, but this was long before post-modern reflexes insisted that words like ordinary ought to be put in inverted commas, and where the question of analysis was replaced by ready assumptions. It is such cynicism that allows reality TV to thrive, to assume that the ordinary lacks money-making potential, even if there was something ordinary in the first place. Instead, the extraordinary became paramount, and a remark like documentarist David Munro’s in 1994 can seem almost quaint now. “I personally don’t think the ambulance chasing, crime reconstruction programmes have any place at all on television; they are voyeuristic and don’t achieve anything.” He reckoned “every documentary film-maker in this country, every filmmaker, every current affairs person, should stand up and say the public deserves better than this.”(‘Death of the Documentary’) Munro worked frequently with John Pilger on documentaries that were far from neutral, but always serious, as they often examined injustices in trouble spots: East Timor, Palestine, Cambodia, and elsewhere. This was advocacy journalism: it took a stance and demanded a response,  often getting one from politicians and fellow journalists who felt the bias was too strong or the attacks on them too wounding.  One about Israel led to “scathing condemnation from the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies and the Conservative Friends of Israel. All said they would be complaining to ITV and would seek a programme to redress the balance.” (Guardian) Munro and Pilger’s work may have had little to do with documentary form at its most impressive, but it was very far removed from seeing the form as simply a means of entertainment. It was crusading journalism with a point, whether one agreed with the stance or not.

But what is the documentary form at its most elevated, integral and valuable? Perhaps best to start with some examples of it, and then examine the specifics of the four instances we offer. Many would agree the following are fine examples. Chronicle of a Summer, Night and Fog, Welfare, Grey Gardens, Shoah, Sans Soleil, The Thin Blue Line, When We Were Kings, Harlan County USA, Don’t Look Back, A Portrait of Jason, Crumb, The Naked Emperor Marches On, Gimme Shelter, Nostalgia for the Light, The Sorrow and the Pity. This can seem like a long list, but one that still leaves many important titles out. Yet we offer it to show that documentary is a broad form, and if one excludes reality TV, this isn’t for lack of catholic taste. Some are observational (Welfare, and Grey Gardens), others are excavations into history (Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Naked Emperor’s Army Marches on, Nostalgia for the Light), others could almost be deemed celebrity docs (Don’t Look Back, Gimme Shelter, When We Were Kings), and others are character portraits (A Portrait of Jason, Crumb), while others still institutionally focused and socially inquiring (Welfare, Harlan County USA). The closest to true crime TV would be The Thin Blue Line, as it unavoidably influenced the genre, with Kim Munro noting that “it helped catalyse a genre of non-fiction content, other true crime film, television and audio projects have similarly heralded shifting audience trends. The seemingly insatiable appetite for such productions can be seen in the popularity of one of Netflix’s earliest series, Making a Murderer.” (ACMI) But that is hardly the film’s fault, and as Charles Musser insisted, “What is perhaps most remarkable about The Thin Blue Line is this double achievement, this double renewal: first, a serious critique of the established aesthetic of documentary that freed filmmakers to choose from a far richer array of representational methods; second, reestablishing the viability and even centrality of truth value to documentary in a way that impacted the public sphere and society at large.” (Criterion)

Looking at our four examples (Welfare, Grey Gardens, Shoah, and Sans Soleil), perhaps what the films above have in common isn’t a claim about reality, but they are all investigations into truth and representation. Even a documentarist as ostensibly pure as Frederick (Welfare) Wiseman, who insists on going into a project with few advanced assumptions, no non-diegetic music, and avoids direct-to-camera interviews, can say, “you can never have enough cutaways.” (Imagining Reality) This is Wiseman acknowledging the difference between shooting without too many preconceptions, and editing with great concision. “My shooting ratio is usually 60 to 1. But this is not comparable because the same scene was shot many times, in different ways, so I would have material from which I could edit the sequences.” (Film Comment) Usually, he films without much planning as he often examines various institutions: juvenile courts, asylums, galleries, unemployment offices, hospitals and factories. He follows his hunches while filming, and then tightens the sequences up in the editing, hence the importance of cutaways, or rather their possibility. In Welfare, for example, Wiseman allows an exchange between a client and a security guard to continue for many minutes with minimal cutting. Usually, the film holds to the one angle, as the security guard is behind a counter and the army veteran in front of it, and the camera zooms in and out, creating medium shots and close-ups within the camera itself. Wiseman no doubt shot numerous cutaways, creating options in moments that he might have believed lacked the necessary dramatic tension, but then found it did, and left well alone. If Wiseman needs so many options in the editing suite, it rests on risking relying on raw reality. When a fiction filmmaker shoots a film, the narrative is already there in the script, and if they have a ratio of often 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, it is to tighten up plot points, give variety to the action, cover continuity errors, or create a bit of diversity to the form.

But Wiseman is working in what was called observational documentary, starting with life, and shaping it into drama, as opposed to a drama filming actors and locations, and inserting life into a preconceived form. To make sure he didn’t arrive at long, flaccid sequences, he sometimes needed those cutaways. Though the white combat veteran might be going on a bit in the scene in Welfare, with the black guard clearly bored, this isn’t quite the same thing as saying the sequence is boring. That is part of its fascination: you have a bore boring someone else, and yet it is itself not dull. This is partly because, while an extended scene and deviating a little from the film’s central theme, it is also, as Alan Price noticed, “one of the most powerful moments of racist behaviour that I’ve witnessed in any documentary.” (LondonGrip) Wiseman’s purpose is to capture the moment with all the alertness of a journalistic cameraman, but then insists on the power of retrospection to shape the film into a broader statement about the subject he is focusing upon. This scene in Welfare may seem extraneous, and while Price is correct that it earns its keep as a vivid moment of racism, it also fits more broadly into Wiseman’s examination of life at the lower rung, which pits people against each other, though they are really on the same side. When the combat veteran says he once fought for the US, but wouldn’t do so now, the security guard says he fought as well – in a different war, but this makes him no less a combat veteran. Instead of finding common cause, the combat veteran sees double resentment: the black man is in a position of relative authority, and is of course black. The implication is that the vet would have no interest in fighting for a country that he no longer sees as a white nation, and no doubt part of this assumption is that no black person should be in a position of power over a white one.

This isn’t so much divide and rule, but a structural divisiveness that leaves those who have little arguing with those who are responsible for handing out the money. There are no wealthy people in Welfare, but Wiseman has managed to make a film that isn’t short of tension because the unemployed are looking for cash, and the employees are trying to distribute it as fairly as possible. While there is the odd Welfare officer who seems punitive in their approach, most of the time, the officers are trying to get people the help they need, and the poor aren’t always helping themselves in getting irate or telling small fibs along the way. Wiseman doesn’t judge this. Why wouldn’t someone get a bit hot under the collar and have ploys up their sleeve when in dire straits? Whatever Wiseman’s personal view, the film conveys well that the system is as complicated as people’s lives, and yet this doesn’t mean they complement each other; rather it creates endless, small anxieties and petty frustrations. The film doesn’t propose that welfare is a good or bad thing (a loosely left/right dichotomy), but that there must be a better way of administering it. In the film, made in 1974, while it might get money to people who need it, it also seems to generate resentments that occasionally segue into the racism evident in the scene with the combat veteran and the security guard.

A central aspect of documentary shouldn’t be how to tell a story, but how to convey the complications involved in a moment that is being filmed. This was an important component of observational documentary under the labels Direct Cinema and Cinema Verite, and Wiseman admitted that, whatever his personal prejudices, usually the reality of situations he was filming dispelled them, or made them knottier. In Law and Order, about the police in Kansas City, Missouri, Wiseman assumed his film would be an opportunity to “show what bastards they are.” Instead, according to Clyde Jeavons, “his experience was entirely different, and for every scene of fascistic violence…there are numerous others showing the helplessness of the police in dealing constructively with domestic quarrels, lost children and drunkenness.” (Movies of the Seventies) David Maysles reckoned, “narration is only a leg that you use for support if you need it. It picks up something that isn’t in the picture that you missed. I want to make a film that doesn’t need narration, that stands together as a film.” (Imagining Reality) If the narration intrudes on the reality, it isn’t the reality that must be compromised. It is the narration that must go. This can leave observational cinema stranded in its own ambiguities, but that might be a good way to describe life also. It doesn’t have a point of view; we impose it on life. But then the question is what stops a work from becoming random? Fellow Direct Cinema filmmaker Richard Leacock reckons what he needs to make a film is that it is “about a person who is interesting, who is involved in a situation which he cares about deeply, which comes to a conclusion within a limited period of time, where we have access to what goes on – we can be there in other words.” (Imagining Reality) This is a lot broader and vaguer than a hero with a clear goal, and others who are trying to stop the hero from achieving it. But then reality is much closer to the former than the latter. 1960s and 1970s documentary practice often wished to shatter narrative modes all the better to reveal the shards of existence that make up people’s lives.

How does this play out in Grey Gardens, a Maysles Brothers film about wealthy relatives of Jackie Onassis Kennedy: Edith Beale and her daughter Little Edie? It seems they have shattered their reality themselves, figures from a socialite family now living reclusively in both luxury and squalor. The house is in East Hampton, near the end of Long Island, and during the era when the film was made (the mid-1970s) Paul Newman, Ralph Lauren, Andy Warhol, and Paul McCartney had houses or visited the area. But the house is a mess, crumbling a little like the minds of Beale and Little Edie. In the film’s closing moments, Beale is partly asleep, partly talking to herself, and partly singing to herself in bed, all the while surrounded by an indistinguishable mix of rubbish, waste and key items of her past. The Maysles zoom out from Beale to show us the room’s mess, before zooming in again and focusing on a painting of Beale from many years earlier, looking elegant, assured and showing signs of wealth rather than poverty. The film then cuts to a large piece of paper on a board, where Little Edie has written about her mother turning 78. The contrast between the professional oil painting of a young woman in her prime and this hand-written piece with pasted on paper flowers is touching and tragic, moving and mortifying.

At a stretch, one might say that this is a rags-to-riches story in reverse, a tale of how the moneyed can also fall into ruin, but that would be to impose a far stronger narrative on the film than the Maysles offer. Their purpose is the scrutinising present over narrativising a past that led to the unhappy situation, one that was semi-resolved by Jackie Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill in the early 1970s. The house was in such a state of disrepair that the health department came round. Yet while the tale behind the Beales’ fall is fascinating, and includes stories about Edie when she was young, dating Howard Hughes, and being involved with the Kennedys, and a father who left Edith by telegram while in Mexico, such an account of their lives wouldn’t be Direct Cinema. It would, if you like, be ‘in-direct cinema’, a documentary mode that has become ever more popular as filmmakers insist that the story is the thing, and not the observation.

The Maysles’ purpose, however, is to propose questions by the directness of the form rather than offering answers with an indirect narrative. We watch Beale and Little Edie in the present as we can’t help but muse over how they got there. But in a strict sense, this is closer to activating curiosity than a film that would plod its way through the Beales’ family history, because we have a sense of inquiry, one that can never quite be met by the immediacy of an answer.

Yet the film does open on a backstory of sorts – on a series of clippings from papers announcing that the Beales need to clean up or get out, and with Jackie Onassis helping. It then shows us monochrome photographs of the work done to improve the place, more clippings showing the house has been given the ok, and an image of the Maysles pointing their camera, before the film moves into colour as we first witness Edie. She is happy to see them and explains the choice of costume for the day, an eccentric mix of a headscarf and a safety- pinned skirt, as she tells them she and her mother fought because Beale wanted Little Edie to wear a kimono. Is she telling the truth or playing to the crowd, we don’t really know, but she is keen to generate a complicit relationship with the brothers, as she whispers to them. Unlike Wiseman’s presence in Welfare (which is entirely invisible), the Maysles accept their place within the documented diegesis, without quite going so far as Cinema Verite filmmakers who very actively include themselves in the story told, and make the work self-conscious. In Chronicle of a Summer, the filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin are involved and even discuss the film itself with the subjects in it, as the film concludes with a screening of what came before. Later, such an approach would be exacerbated by Nick Broomfield, who would become a central character in his own work as he would seek, and not always get, difficult interviews with Thatcher, Eugene Terrablanche, Suge Knight and Courtney Love. Part of the tension in Broomfield films was in the suspense: whether he would get the interview, and even if he did, whether the violent people he would sometimes confront wouldn’t get aggressive with him. Broomfield wanted his presence to be part of the tension, but this was still usually consistent with an approach that recognised the importance of observation: he had just become part of what was being observed, as he carried the boom mic and someone else was in charge of the camera.

The Maysles aren’t interested in that degree of presence, and the viewer can decide whether this adds to the voyeurism or alleviates it. It is clear that Little Edie is happy to have people around the house, but commentators have wondered whether, while the Maysles might have been welcome guests, they were also exploitative ones. As John Patterson noted while defending the film, “The Maysles were accused of exploiting their subjects and betraying the tenets of the ‘direct cinema’  movement to which they were deemed to belong.” (Guardian) If the camera supposedly never lies, does it inevitably exploit? There seems to be an enormous difference between Grey Gardens and a reality TV show, but what they have in common is using real people and focusing on an aspect of their existence. While in fiction you have both an actor paying someone else (and signing a contract and being paid), in documentary, in the broadest sense, and that would include the Maysles and Big Brother) the relationship is quite different, no matter that some contestants on reality TV are being paid, and there are variations of these shows, like Celebrity Big Brother, with stars.

Yet whatever the subtle and sometimes broad differences between Welfare and Grey Gardens, they both are examples of documentary as an ethical form. David Maysles says, “there is no such thing as being strictly objective in anything that is at all artistic. The objectivity is just personal integrity: being essentially true to the subject and capturing it essentially.” (Imagining Reality) This can seem, once again, very vague, but one would be unlikely to hear such a claim coming from a reality TV producer, which might be closer to saying everything is subjective and the notion of the essential is nonsense. What matters is superficial entertainment; not the fundamentals of the situation. Part of this difference would rest on how often reality TV takes ordinary people out of their ordinary lives and puts them on an island, in a compound, or in a jungle. Most of the films in the Cinema Verite or Direct Cinema tradition try to bring out their daily reality, or at least a central aspect of it. This might be salesmen on the road in the Maysles’ Salesman, the daily Parisian lives of the subjects in Chronicle of a Summer, the workers in a meat factory in Wiseman’s Meat. If reality TV is usually an overstated form that plays up the exception, the 1960s and 1970s documentaries were usually understated accounts of habit. One may see in Grey Gardens exploitation, but the Maysles haven’t at all asked Beale and Little Edie to do anything exceptional to turn the film into entertainment. In this sense, to call the film voyeuristic might seem apt, but to call it exploitative would not. It reveals the characters’ lives rather than manipulating them, and it is as though the Maysles have filmed the Beales without a broader alibi to justify their presence there. As the opening suggests, Beale and Little Edie weren’t happy about the district council getting involved, but that isn’t the subject of the film. It is only the premise to show how they managed to get themselves in such a state. The directors seem much more fascinated by the loneliness, messiness, and mutterings of the Beales than they are in seeing them as put-upon and needing to be protected from state interference. The latter might be a more ‘appropriate’ subject for a documentary, and give it binary tension as we would witness the hard-hearted state against these loving solitaries. It might be a film the audience would be happy to see, instead of one that is uncomfortable to watch. When we see in the closing few minutes Beale in a bed that makes unmade sound like the ultimate in understatement, and makes Tracy Emin’s My Bed seem very tidy indeed, we are watching a person’s deterioration in front of our eyes. It is often what the toughest of works insist upon, and these would include Wiseman’s Near Death, Michael Roemer’s Dying, Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Shirley Clarke’s A Portrait of Jason, all works that look at the dying, the dead and the self-destructive.

Shoah shares elements of this unflinching insistence to expose its subjects, with its purpose not just to detail the Holocaust, but also to insist on the human cost in being willing to do so. As director Claude Lanzmann interviews chiefly survivors, but also locals in Poland, Nazi officers and various officials, he accepts that asking people to open up about events that many, for various reasons, would wish never to confront again comes at a price the filmmaker is willing to inflict on his subjects. Some who are exposed needn’t cause us much moral anxiety, including a Nazi official Lanzmann secretly films. With others, it is their personal feelings of guilt, meeting objectively no reason for such feelings, that can create far greater discomfort. While the Nazi shows no remorse for his deeds, a barber who prepared people for the gas chambers is overcome by guilt and despair. Another, a former Polish envoy, Jan Karski, breaks down when Lanzmann first gets him to talk. There are many important moments in this 9hr film (brilliantly cut down from hundreds of hours of footage by editor Ziva Postec), but Karski’s testimony is as harrowing and moving as any.

After Karski recovers from the initial attempt to describe what he saw, when he managed to see what was taking place in the Warsaw ghettos, his face and his voice convey the inexplicable. As he speaks, he, like a number of the other commentators, is caught between two worlds and tries to reach back into an earlier one, to explain it all in the present. Shoah might not see itself as observational cinema, but it contains a central element evident in the work of Wiseman and Maysles. This is that people don’t only offer information, but that the filmmaker knows that surrounding the testaments they offer is a body language that cannot be ignored. The film isn’t only about excavating the Holocaust and offering numerous perspectives on the events that took place during those years, but also about the nervous systems of those who have had to tame an overactive fight-or-flight response that may never have gone away. Karski might have ‘merely’ been the Polish Envoy, but that is perhaps why he carries so strongly in his gaunt face, his wiry frame, and his abrupt movements, the feeling that he ought to have done more. He wasn’t a helpless victim, but an historical bystander, one keen to intervene, but caught in a position of authority, yet without proper control. He could tell the British and American government what he had seen, but couldn’t himself do very much about it. As he says, quoting the Jewish people with whom he was speaking. “The Allies cannot treat this war only from a purely military strategic standpoint. They will win the war if they take this attitude, but what good will it do to us?” All Karski could do was convey the message, a message that didn’t have the impact he might have wished, and where a sense of failure is evident on this most wracked of faces.

In contrast, Filip Muller is fuller-faced, calm in his delivery, almost as if at peace with the atrocities. He did what he could. This included working in the gas chambers, and afterwards poking people into ash. The alternative was death, and he knew he needed to survive because one day he could tell the world about what had taken place. Lanzmann gives him this opportunity, and seizes it with sorrow more than remorse, while Karski’s body language suggests he is still caught in the failure of governments to act sooner. In Muller, there appears to be acceptance. The worst has happened. In Karski, it is that the worst could have been avoided. Yet this isn’t only in what they say; it is revealed in their different demeanours, and Lanzmann’s film focuses as much on their presence in the frame as the information they offer.

Though Chris Marker has made documentaries that share verite aspects, like Le Jolie Mai, he is famous more for how he turns footage that he shoots, or archival footage that he finds, into subjective rumination. In Le Jolie mai, Marker shot over fifty hours of footage interviewing Parisians, relying on the voices of the people he spoke to over his own. In Sans Soleil, it is the opposite: the footage serves thought, as Marker wants to invert the Direct Cinema claim that the filmmaker observes what is in front of their eyes all the better so that the viewer can do likewise. This might later include important editing interventions but, as Wiseman made clear, this isn’t usually to make a point. It is to insist on sequence concision. Marker is more interested in generating juxtaposition and commenting on the linkage. He pulls together images from Vertigo and footage that he shot in San Francisco, as Marker comments through an interlocutor (the film takes the form of letters) while chasing the locations used in the film. We see the forest the central characters were in as Scottie and Madeline look at the rings of a tree; the Golden Gate Bridge, where Madeline attempts to take her life, and the arches at the mission where Madeline dies. Marker tells us Hitchcock invented nothing; it is all there to see, perhaps all the more fascinating because Hitchcock was no realist, just as Marker only ever had a passing relationship with Direct Cinema. But there he is pointing out that one of the most oneiric of Hollywood films is also location-specific. We might say Hitchcock invents nothing and transforms everything, turning it into a narrational account of San Francisco, just as Marker turns the locations he uses (San Francisco, Cape Verde, Iceland and elsewhere) into complex musings he imposes on the images.

His films are synonymous with the essay film, and in Paul Arthur’s excellent article on the form, Marker may be no more prominently mentioned than others (including Varda, Godard, Farucki, Herzog and Kluge), but he is viewed as one of the seminal figures and a crucial milestone. “Marker’s oeuvre by itself is an adequate syllabus for ‘Essay 101.’” (Film Comment) Sans Soleil is about as far away from Welfare as possible, but only from a certain perspective. While Wiseman insists that he must invisibly create a narrative out of the footage he shoots, Marker insistently muses over his images as he tells us about the nature of their visibility. This can create a gap between the verbal and the visual, as Wiseman’s do not. Marker shows us images of a ritual on Okinawa, as he goes on to tell us in voice-over that 200 Japanese girls killed themselves with grenades rather than surrender to American soldiers. The area now sells grenade-shaped lighters as souvenirs. Direct cinema would have to show those grenade-shaped lighters to us, and leave us musing over the oddness of this as a tourist purchase. Marker is often more interested in the explicit ironies and anomalies of history over the image left alone as a source of inexplicit enquiry.

Yet while Wiseman and Marker can seem very far away from each other in form, they would appear very close to each other in ethos. They are both interested in exploring history: the difference rests on Wiseman living it in the present tense, as we can look back on his work and see an enormous tapestry of institutions, public and private, from welfare departments (Welfare) to meat factories (Meat), from public parks (Central Park) to universities (At Berkeley). He has produced a tremendous archive. Marker was someone often more interested in the past tense, in the way history intermingles as the tragic past of Okinawa interacts with the gaudy tourism of the present. But what they both share, and the Maysles and Claude Lanzmann too, is seeing documentary as an interrogatory form: one suggesting that the epistemological and the ethical conjoin, and produce an inquiry over an assumption. They want to see how people live, love and die without shaping lives into narrative formats that produce the performative. It was as though the success of various documentaries in the late 1990s and the early 2000s allowed TV producers to see a bottom line over a first principle, to see that lives could be exploited as easily as they could be explored, and reality TV could replace the principles of Direct Cinema, Cinema Verite and the essay film. Obviously, great documentaries are still being made in the new millennium: Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Waltz with Bashir, The Look of Silence, Stories We Tell, Grizzly Man, for example, and often borrowing aspects of narrative earlier documentaries eschewed, but without destroying the principles behind the form. However, this is because they contain aspects of the documentary tradition without feeling obliged to pander to audiences’ televisual expectations and minimal concentration. Looking at films like Welfare and Shoah, the works themselves aren’t only long; more importantly, they require lengthy attention spans.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in Film Documentary

While the notion of what constitutes a documentary has been contested since John Grierson coined the term in the 1920s, it may have become even more pressing in the 21st century with the advent of Reality Television. Yet at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, quite a few cinema documentaries did relatively well at the box office: Bowling for Columbine, March of the Penguins, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Touching the Void all made large sums of money with very little outlay. An unassuming work about a teacher in a small French village, To Be and to Have,  took $16m worldwide. Documentaries might usually have box-office takings that are modest next to dramatic works, but a fiction film in the early 2000s could cost over a hundred million, and would be lucky to recoup double its outlay. Even the biggest hit of 2000, Mission Impossible II, only made four to five times its budget. It cost $125m, and Box Office Mojo says it took in  $546,000,000. Fahrenheit 9/11’s budget was high for a documentary, $6m, yet the film returned $220m. Why risk fiction when facts can make you money? Many TV producers have taken note. Why deal with stars and complex mise en scene, when you can have people falling in love on an island, baking cakes, or locked up in a Big Brother house for weeks?

Documentary allows for big bucks on low budgets, and some might see that the non-fiction film became a debased form, with those filmed opportunities for profit, instead of figures demanding scrutinising focus. When, in the late 1950s, filmmakers in France, Britain and the US wished to film the people, it wasn’t to find exploitable talent, but to show the lives of ordinary folk living ordinary lives. One might snort at such a claim, but this was long before post-modern reflexes insisted that words like ordinary ought to be put in inverted commas, and where the question of analysis was replaced by ready assumptions. It is such cynicism that allows reality TV to thrive, to assume that the ordinary lacks money-making potential, even if there was something ordinary in the first place. Instead, the extraordinary became paramount, and a remark like documentarist David Munro’s in 1994 can seem almost quaint now. “I personally don’t think the ambulance chasing, crime reconstruction programmes have any place at all on television; they are voyeuristic and don’t achieve anything.” He reckoned “every documentary film-maker in this country, every filmmaker, every current affairs person, should stand up and say the public deserves better than this.”(‘Death of the Documentary’) Munro worked frequently with John Pilger on documentaries that were far from neutral, but always serious, as they often examined injustices in trouble spots: East Timor, Palestine, Cambodia, and elsewhere. This was advocacy journalism: it took a stance and demanded a response,  often getting one from politicians and fellow journalists who felt the bias was too strong or the attacks on them too wounding.  One about Israel led to “scathing condemnation from the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies and the Conservative Friends of Israel. All said they would be complaining to ITV and would seek a programme to redress the balance.” (Guardian) Munro and Pilger’s work may have had little to do with documentary form at its most impressive, but it was very far removed from seeing the form as simply a means of entertainment. It was crusading journalism with a point, whether one agreed with the stance or not.

But what is the documentary form at its most elevated, integral and valuable? Perhaps best to start with some examples of it, and then examine the specifics of the four instances we offer. Many would agree the following are fine examples. Chronicle of a Summer, Night and Fog, Welfare, Grey Gardens, Shoah, Sans Soleil, The Thin Blue Line, When We Were Kings, Harlan County USA, Don’t Look Back, A Portrait of Jason, Crumb, The Naked Emperor Marches On, Gimme Shelter, Nostalgia for the Light, The Sorrow and the Pity. This can seem like a long list, but one that still leaves many important titles out. Yet we offer it to show that documentary is a broad form, and if one excludes reality TV, this isn’t for lack of catholic taste. Some are observational (Welfare, and Grey Gardens), others are excavations into history (Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Naked Emperor’s Army Marches on, Nostalgia for the Light), others could almost be deemed celebrity docs (Don’t Look Back, Gimme Shelter, When We Were Kings), and others are character portraits (A Portrait of Jason, Crumb), while others still institutionally focused and socially inquiring (Welfare, Harlan County USA). The closest to true crime TV would be The Thin Blue Line, as it unavoidably influenced the genre, with Kim Munro noting that “it helped catalyse a genre of non-fiction content, other true crime film, television and audio projects have similarly heralded shifting audience trends. The seemingly insatiable appetite for such productions can be seen in the popularity of one of Netflix’s earliest series, Making a Murderer.” (ACMI) But that is hardly the film’s fault, and as Charles Musser insisted, “What is perhaps most remarkable about The Thin Blue Line is this double achievement, this double renewal: first, a serious critique of the established aesthetic of documentary that freed filmmakers to choose from a far richer array of representational methods; second, reestablishing the viability and even centrality of truth value to documentary in a way that impacted the public sphere and society at large.” (Criterion)

Looking at our four examples (Welfare, Grey Gardens, Shoah, and Sans Soleil), perhaps what the films above have in common isn’t a claim about reality, but they are all investigations into truth and representation. Even a documentarist as ostensibly pure as Frederick (Welfare) Wiseman, who insists on going into a project with few advanced assumptions, no non-diegetic music, and avoids direct-to-camera interviews, can say, “you can never have enough cutaways.” (Imagining Reality) This is Wiseman acknowledging the difference between shooting without too many preconceptions, and editing with great concision. “My shooting ratio is usually 60 to 1. But this is not comparable because the same scene was shot many times, in different ways, so I would have material from which I could edit the sequences.” (Film Comment) Usually, he films without much planning as he often examines various institutions: juvenile courts, asylums, galleries, unemployment offices, hospitals and factories. He follows his hunches while filming, and then tightens the sequences up in the editing, hence the importance of cutaways, or rather their possibility. In Welfare, for example, Wiseman allows an exchange between a client and a security guard to continue for many minutes with minimal cutting. Usually, the film holds to the one angle, as the security guard is behind a counter and the army veteran in front of it, and the camera zooms in and out, creating medium shots and close-ups within the camera itself. Wiseman no doubt shot numerous cutaways, creating options in moments that he might have believed lacked the necessary dramatic tension, but then found it did, and left well alone. If Wiseman needs so many options in the editing suite, it rests on risking relying on raw reality. When a fiction filmmaker shoots a film, the narrative is already there in the script, and if they have a ratio of often 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, it is to tighten up plot points, give variety to the action, cover continuity errors, or create a bit of diversity to the form.

But Wiseman is working in what was called observational documentary, starting with life, and shaping it into drama, as opposed to a drama filming actors and locations, and inserting life into a preconceived form. To make sure he didn’t arrive at long, flaccid sequences, he sometimes needed those cutaways. Though the white combat veteran might be going on a bit in the scene in Welfare, with the black guard clearly bored, this isn’t quite the same thing as saying the sequence is boring. That is part of its fascination: you have a bore boring someone else, and yet it is itself not dull. This is partly because, while an extended scene and deviating a little from the film’s central theme, it is also, as Alan Price noticed, “one of the most powerful moments of racist behaviour that I’ve witnessed in any documentary.” (LondonGrip) Wiseman’s purpose is to capture the moment with all the alertness of a journalistic cameraman, but then insists on the power of retrospection to shape the film into a broader statement about the subject he is focusing upon. This scene in Welfare may seem extraneous, and while Price is correct that it earns its keep as a vivid moment of racism, it also fits more broadly into Wiseman’s examination of life at the lower rung, which pits people against each other, though they are really on the same side. When the combat veteran says he once fought for the US, but wouldn’t do so now, the security guard says he fought as well – in a different war, but this makes him no less a combat veteran. Instead of finding common cause, the combat veteran sees double resentment: the black man is in a position of relative authority, and is of course black. The implication is that the vet would have no interest in fighting for a country that he no longer sees as a white nation, and no doubt part of this assumption is that no black person should be in a position of power over a white one.

This isn’t so much divide and rule, but a structural divisiveness that leaves those who have little arguing with those who are responsible for handing out the money. There are no wealthy people in Welfare, but Wiseman has managed to make a film that isn’t short of tension because the unemployed are looking for cash, and the employees are trying to distribute it as fairly as possible. While there is the odd Welfare officer who seems punitive in their approach, most of the time, the officers are trying to get people the help they need, and the poor aren’t always helping themselves in getting irate or telling small fibs along the way. Wiseman doesn’t judge this. Why wouldn’t someone get a bit hot under the collar and have ploys up their sleeve when in dire straits? Whatever Wiseman’s personal view, the film conveys well that the system is as complicated as people’s lives, and yet this doesn’t mean they complement each other; rather it creates endless, small anxieties and petty frustrations. The film doesn’t propose that welfare is a good or bad thing (a loosely left/right dichotomy), but that there must be a better way of administering it. In the film, made in 1974, while it might get money to people who need it, it also seems to generate resentments that occasionally segue into the racism evident in the scene with the combat veteran and the security guard.

A central aspect of documentary shouldn’t be how to tell a story, but how to convey the complications involved in a moment that is being filmed. This was an important component of observational documentary under the labels Direct Cinema and Cinema Verite, and Wiseman admitted that, whatever his personal prejudices, usually the reality of situations he was filming dispelled them, or made them knottier. In Law and Order, about the police in Kansas City, Missouri, Wiseman assumed his film would be an opportunity to “show what bastards they are.” Instead, according to Clyde Jeavons, “his experience was entirely different, and for every scene of fascistic violence…there are numerous others showing the helplessness of the police in dealing constructively with domestic quarrels, lost children and drunkenness.” (Movies of the Seventies) David Maysles reckoned, “narration is only a leg that you use for support if you need it. It picks up something that isn’t in the picture that you missed. I want to make a film that doesn’t need narration, that stands together as a film.” (Imagining Reality) If the narration intrudes on the reality, it isn’t the reality that must be compromised. It is the narration that must go. This can leave observational cinema stranded in its own ambiguities, but that might be a good way to describe life also. It doesn’t have a point of view; we impose it on life. But then the question is what stops a work from becoming random? Fellow Direct Cinema filmmaker Richard Leacock reckons what he needs to make a film is that it is “about a person who is interesting, who is involved in a situation which he cares about deeply, which comes to a conclusion within a limited period of time, where we have access to what goes on – we can be there in other words.” (Imagining Reality) This is a lot broader and vaguer than a hero with a clear goal, and others who are trying to stop the hero from achieving it. But then reality is much closer to the former than the latter. 1960s and 1970s documentary practice often wished to shatter narrative modes all the better to reveal the shards of existence that make up people’s lives.

How does this play out in Grey Gardens, a Maysles Brothers film about wealthy relatives of Jackie Onassis Kennedy: Edith Beale and her daughter Little Edie? It seems they have shattered their reality themselves, figures from a socialite family now living reclusively in both luxury and squalor. The house is in East Hampton, near the end of Long Island, and during the era when the film was made (the mid-1970s) Paul Newman, Ralph Lauren, Andy Warhol, and Paul McCartney had houses or visited the area. But the house is a mess, crumbling a little like the minds of Beale and Little Edie. In the film’s closing moments, Beale is partly asleep, partly talking to herself, and partly singing to herself in bed, all the while surrounded by an indistinguishable mix of rubbish, waste and key items of her past. The Maysles zoom out from Beale to show us the room’s mess, before zooming in again and focusing on a painting of Beale from many years earlier, looking elegant, assured and showing signs of wealth rather than poverty. The film then cuts to a large piece of paper on a board, where Little Edie has written about her mother turning 78. The contrast between the professional oil painting of a young woman in her prime and this hand-written piece with pasted on paper flowers is touching and tragic, moving and mortifying.

At a stretch, one might say that this is a rags-to-riches story in reverse, a tale of how the moneyed can also fall into ruin, but that would be to impose a far stronger narrative on the film than the Maysles offer. Their purpose is the scrutinising present over narrativising a past that led to the unhappy situation, one that was semi-resolved by Jackie Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill in the early 1970s. The house was in such a state of disrepair that the health department came round. Yet while the tale behind the Beales’ fall is fascinating, and includes stories about Edie when she was young, dating Howard Hughes, and being involved with the Kennedys, and a father who left Edith by telegram while in Mexico, such an account of their lives wouldn’t be Direct Cinema. It would, if you like, be ‘in-direct cinema’, a documentary mode that has become ever more popular as filmmakers insist that the story is the thing, and not the observation.

The Maysles’ purpose, however, is to propose questions by the directness of the form rather than offering answers with an indirect narrative. We watch Beale and Little Edie in the present as we can’t help but muse over how they got there. But in a strict sense, this is closer to activating curiosity than a film that would plod its way through the Beales’ family history, because we have a sense of inquiry, one that can never quite be met by the immediacy of an answer.

Yet the film does open on a backstory of sorts – on a series of clippings from papers announcing that the Beales need to clean up or get out, and with Jackie Onassis helping. It then shows us monochrome photographs of the work done to improve the place, more clippings showing the house has been given the ok, and an image of the Maysles pointing their camera, before the film moves into colour as we first witness Edie. She is happy to see them and explains the choice of costume for the day, an eccentric mix of a headscarf and a safety- pinned skirt, as she tells them she and her mother fought because Beale wanted Little Edie to wear a kimono. Is she telling the truth or playing to the crowd, we don’t really know, but she is keen to generate a complicit relationship with the brothers, as she whispers to them. Unlike Wiseman’s presence in Welfare (which is entirely invisible), the Maysles accept their place within the documented diegesis, without quite going so far as Cinema Verite filmmakers who very actively include themselves in the story told, and make the work self-conscious. In Chronicle of a Summer, the filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin are involved and even discuss the film itself with the subjects in it, as the film concludes with a screening of what came before. Later, such an approach would be exacerbated by Nick Broomfield, who would become a central character in his own work as he would seek, and not always get, difficult interviews with Thatcher, Eugene Terrablanche, Suge Knight and Courtney Love. Part of the tension in Broomfield films was in the suspense: whether he would get the interview, and even if he did, whether the violent people he would sometimes confront wouldn’t get aggressive with him. Broomfield wanted his presence to be part of the tension, but this was still usually consistent with an approach that recognised the importance of observation: he had just become part of what was being observed, as he carried the boom mic and someone else was in charge of the camera.

The Maysles aren’t interested in that degree of presence, and the viewer can decide whether this adds to the voyeurism or alleviates it. It is clear that Little Edie is happy to have people around the house, but commentators have wondered whether, while the Maysles might have been welcome guests, they were also exploitative ones. As John Patterson noted while defending the film, “The Maysles were accused of exploiting their subjects and betraying the tenets of the ‘direct cinema’  movement to which they were deemed to belong.” (Guardian) If the camera supposedly never lies, does it inevitably exploit? There seems to be an enormous difference between Grey Gardens and a reality TV show, but what they have in common is using real people and focusing on an aspect of their existence. While in fiction you have both an actor paying someone else (and signing a contract and being paid), in documentary, in the broadest sense, and that would include the Maysles and Big Brother) the relationship is quite different, no matter that some contestants on reality TV are being paid, and there are variations of these shows, like Celebrity Big Brother, with stars.

Yet whatever the subtle and sometimes broad differences between Welfare and Grey Gardens, they both are examples of documentary as an ethical form. David Maysles says, “there is no such thing as being strictly objective in anything that is at all artistic. The objectivity is just personal integrity: being essentially true to the subject and capturing it essentially.” (Imagining Reality) This can seem, once again, very vague, but one would be unlikely to hear such a claim coming from a reality TV producer, which might be closer to saying everything is subjective and the notion of the essential is nonsense. What matters is superficial entertainment; not the fundamentals of the situation. Part of this difference would rest on how often reality TV takes ordinary people out of their ordinary lives and puts them on an island, in a compound, or in a jungle. Most of the films in the Cinema Verite or Direct Cinema tradition try to bring out their daily reality, or at least a central aspect of it. This might be salesmen on the road in the Maysles’ Salesman, the daily Parisian lives of the subjects in Chronicle of a Summer, the workers in a meat factory in Wiseman’s Meat. If reality TV is usually an overstated form that plays up the exception, the 1960s and 1970s documentaries were usually understated accounts of habit. One may see in Grey Gardens exploitation, but the Maysles haven’t at all asked Beale and Little Edie to do anything exceptional to turn the film into entertainment. In this sense, to call the film voyeuristic might seem apt, but to call it exploitative would not. It reveals the characters’ lives rather than manipulating them, and it is as though the Maysles have filmed the Beales without a broader alibi to justify their presence there. As the opening suggests, Beale and Little Edie weren’t happy about the district council getting involved, but that isn’t the subject of the film. It is only the premise to show how they managed to get themselves in such a state. The directors seem much more fascinated by the loneliness, messiness, and mutterings of the Beales than they are in seeing them as put-upon and needing to be protected from state interference. The latter might be a more ‘appropriate’ subject for a documentary, and give it binary tension as we would witness the hard-hearted state against these loving solitaries. It might be a film the audience would be happy to see, instead of one that is uncomfortable to watch. When we see in the closing few minutes Beale in a bed that makes unmade sound like the ultimate in understatement, and makes Tracy Emin’s My Bed seem very tidy indeed, we are watching a person’s deterioration in front of our eyes. It is often what the toughest of works insist upon, and these would include Wiseman’s Near Death, Michael Roemer’s Dying, Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Shirley Clarke’s A Portrait of Jason, all works that look at the dying, the dead and the self-destructive.

Shoah shares elements of this unflinching insistence to expose its subjects, with its purpose not just to detail the Holocaust, but also to insist on the human cost in being willing to do so. As director Claude Lanzmann interviews chiefly survivors, but also locals in Poland, Nazi officers and various officials, he accepts that asking people to open up about events that many, for various reasons, would wish never to confront again comes at a price the filmmaker is willing to inflict on his subjects. Some who are exposed needn’t cause us much moral anxiety, including a Nazi official Lanzmann secretly films. With others, it is their personal feelings of guilt, meeting objectively no reason for such feelings, that can create far greater discomfort. While the Nazi shows no remorse for his deeds, a barber who prepared people for the gas chambers is overcome by guilt and despair. Another, a former Polish envoy, Jan Karski, breaks down when Lanzmann first gets him to talk. There are many important moments in this 9hr film (brilliantly cut down from hundreds of hours of footage by editor Ziva Postec), but Karski’s testimony is as harrowing and moving as any.

After Karski recovers from the initial attempt to describe what he saw, when he managed to see what was taking place in the Warsaw ghettos, his face and his voice convey the inexplicable. As he speaks, he, like a number of the other commentators, is caught between two worlds and tries to reach back into an earlier one, to explain it all in the present. Shoah might not see itself as observational cinema, but it contains a central element evident in the work of Wiseman and Maysles. This is that people don’t only offer information, but that the filmmaker knows that surrounding the testaments they offer is a body language that cannot be ignored. The film isn’t only about excavating the Holocaust and offering numerous perspectives on the events that took place during those years, but also about the nervous systems of those who have had to tame an overactive fight-or-flight response that may never have gone away. Karski might have ‘merely’ been the Polish Envoy, but that is perhaps why he carries so strongly in his gaunt face, his wiry frame, and his abrupt movements, the feeling that he ought to have done more. He wasn’t a helpless victim, but an historical bystander, one keen to intervene, but caught in a position of authority, yet without proper control. He could tell the British and American government what he had seen, but couldn’t himself do very much about it. As he says, quoting the Jewish people with whom he was speaking. “The Allies cannot treat this war only from a purely military strategic standpoint. They will win the war if they take this attitude, but what good will it do to us?” All Karski could do was convey the message, a message that didn’t have the impact he might have wished, and where a sense of failure is evident on this most wracked of faces.

In contrast, Filip Muller is fuller-faced, calm in his delivery, almost as if at peace with the atrocities. He did what he could. This included working in the gas chambers, and afterwards poking people into ash. The alternative was death, and he knew he needed to survive because one day he could tell the world about what had taken place. Lanzmann gives him this opportunity, and seizes it with sorrow more than remorse, while Karski’s body language suggests he is still caught in the failure of governments to act sooner. In Muller, there appears to be acceptance. The worst has happened. In Karski, it is that the worst could have been avoided. Yet this isn’t only in what they say; it is revealed in their different demeanours, and Lanzmann’s film focuses as much on their presence in the frame as the information they offer.

Though Chris Marker has made documentaries that share verite aspects, like Le Jolie Mai, he is famous more for how he turns footage that he shoots, or archival footage that he finds, into subjective rumination. In Le Jolie mai, Marker shot over fifty hours of footage interviewing Parisians, relying on the voices of the people he spoke to over his own. In Sans Soleil, it is the opposite: the footage serves thought, as Marker wants to invert the Direct Cinema claim that the filmmaker observes what is in front of their eyes all the better so that the viewer can do likewise. This might later include important editing interventions but, as Wiseman made clear, this isn’t usually to make a point. It is to insist on sequence concision. Marker is more interested in generating juxtaposition and commenting on the linkage. He pulls together images from Vertigo and footage that he shot in San Francisco, as Marker comments through an interlocutor (the film takes the form of letters) while chasing the locations used in the film. We see the forest the central characters were in as Scottie and Madeline look at the rings of a tree; the Golden Gate Bridge, where Madeline attempts to take her life, and the arches at the mission where Madeline dies. Marker tells us Hitchcock invented nothing; it is all there to see, perhaps all the more fascinating because Hitchcock was no realist, just as Marker only ever had a passing relationship with Direct Cinema. But there he is pointing out that one of the most oneiric of Hollywood films is also location-specific. We might say Hitchcock invents nothing and transforms everything, turning it into a narrational account of San Francisco, just as Marker turns the locations he uses (San Francisco, Cape Verde, Iceland and elsewhere) into complex musings he imposes on the images.

His films are synonymous with the essay film, and in Paul Arthur’s excellent article on the form, Marker may be no more prominently mentioned than others (including Varda, Godard, Farucki, Herzog and Kluge), but he is viewed as one of the seminal figures and a crucial milestone. “Marker’s oeuvre by itself is an adequate syllabus for ‘Essay 101.’” (Film Comment) Sans Soleil is about as far away from Welfare as possible, but only from a certain perspective. While Wiseman insists that he must invisibly create a narrative out of the footage he shoots, Marker insistently muses over his images as he tells us about the nature of their visibility. This can create a gap between the verbal and the visual, as Wiseman’s do not. Marker shows us images of a ritual on Okinawa, as he goes on to tell us in voice-over that 200 Japanese girls killed themselves with grenades rather than surrender to American soldiers. The area now sells grenade-shaped lighters as souvenirs. Direct cinema would have to show those grenade-shaped lighters to us, and leave us musing over the oddness of this as a tourist purchase. Marker is often more interested in the explicit ironies and anomalies of history over the image left alone as a source of inexplicit enquiry.

Yet while Wiseman and Marker can seem very far away from each other in form, they would appear very close to each other in ethos. They are both interested in exploring history: the difference rests on Wiseman living it in the present tense, as we can look back on his work and see an enormous tapestry of institutions, public and private, from welfare departments (Welfare) to meat factories (Meat), from public parks (Central Park) to universities (At Berkeley). He has produced a tremendous archive. Marker was someone often more interested in the past tense, in the way history intermingles as the tragic past of Okinawa interacts with the gaudy tourism of the present. But what they both share, and the Maysles and Claude Lanzmann too, is seeing documentary as an interrogatory form: one suggesting that the epistemological and the ethical conjoin, and produce an inquiry over an assumption. They want to see how people live, love and die without shaping lives into narrative formats that produce the performative. It was as though the success of various documentaries in the late 1990s and the early 2000s allowed TV producers to see a bottom line over a first principle, to see that lives could be exploited as easily as they could be explored, and reality TV could replace the principles of Direct Cinema, Cinema Verite and the essay film. Obviously, great documentaries are still being made in the new millennium: Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Waltz with Bashir, The Look of Silence, Stories We Tell, Grizzly Man, for example, and often borrowing aspects of narrative earlier documentaries eschewed, but without destroying the principles behind the form. However, this is because they contain aspects of the documentary tradition without feeling obliged to pander to audiences’ televisual expectations and minimal concentration. Looking at films like Welfare and Shoah, the works themselves aren’t only long; more importantly, they require lengthy attention spans.


© Tony McKibbin