The documentary film form has a long tradition that dates back to the beginnings of motion pictures, when Thomas Edison first started shooting moving pictures of workers leaving the factories, and people getting off trains. While at first these little slices of life captured for eternity were marvels of modern technology, the quickly became boring on commonplace, as audiences clamored for something newer, better, and more interesting. Then along came a guy named Robert Flaherty and a film entitled, Nanook of the North.
Nanook became the first film classified as a documentary to have success as a theatrical release. It was popular because it showed people a way of life they had never seen before, an Inuit and his family trying to survive in the brutal conditions of the extreme climate of North America. It was a film about the daily struggle of life and death and featured a theme of man against nature. And while it was later criticized as being somewhat fabricated (Nanook and his family didn’t actually live that way anymore, many of the shots were staged or recreated for the benefit of the film) it did start a trend. Filmmakers fanned out across the globe to find exotic locations, and film strange people living their lives in ways the West was completely unfamiliar with. That is until the late 30’s when a group of British filmmakers got together under the director of a guy name John Grierson.
Grierson was a friend of Flaherty’s who had a different philosophy of filmmaking. He believed that instead of romanticizing old ways of life and primitive cultures, documentaries had a higher purpose in society. He thought film was unique in its ability to communicate with and educate the masses about ideas and issues, and that it was a crucial component in the functioning of a democratic society. So, he put forward the theory that if you show people what’s really going on in, they are better educated and can make better decisions about the course of the country. Grierson, then founded a group of filmmakers who turned their cameras on aspects of British society that he felt needed to be examined. This began the tradition of documentary film as an impetuous for social change.
Then during the second World War, the power of documentaries to shape image and persuade the masses went a step further, when filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl was hired by Adolph Hitler. In the film, Triumph of the Will, Reifenstahl crafted a dramatic piece of Nazi propaganda that featured Hitler as an almost God-like figure. Reifenstahl was a master of film grammar and technique. Throughout the film she chose to shoot Hitler from a low angle, producing an image that made him seem bigger, more imposing and above the masses. She opens the film from the air, with scenes of clouds and a descending to the earth, which reveals to Hitler himself departing a plane to the adulation of the masses throwing flowers and cheering his glory. Later scenes showed a very organized, staunch, and imposing looking Nazi army, looking up at their leader ready to carry out his every command. The effect of the film was immediate. The rest of the world was both alarmed, scared and on notice as to the power of image and film.
This led to what has been called the Golden Age of documentaries. During World War II, Hollywood filmmakers were enlisted by the United States government to produce propaganda films of our own. Most notably, the “why we fight” series was produced to get Americans on board with the idea of sending troops overseas to fight the Nazi regime in Europe. In Britain, filmmakers produced documentaries of their own showing scenes from the front lines, and producing films like, “London Can Take It” a documentary which featured the grit and resilience of a population under the constant siege of nightly bombing raids trying to go about their business. The films kept moral up and shored up British resolve. And then the war ended, and documentaries took a back seat to Hollywood as people looked for an escape from reality and everyday life in the post-war era.
In the 50’s television was the new kid on the block, and newscaster Edward R. Murrow brought the documentary as a form of news, into the homes of America. Murrow’s weekly television show “See it Now” featured long-format news stories on social issues such as the plight of Florida’s migrant workers and was most notable responsible for exposing the communist hysteria that had permeated the country and it’s politics with the formation of the Warren Commission. As television grew in importance, newscasters worked on technology that changed the way film and news crews operated. Over subsequent years they developed new cameras with synchronized sound that allowed photographers to be more mobile than ever before. They could now shoot film in all sorts of places that had not been feasible in the past. This lead to a new trend in documentary filmmaking, called Cinema Verite or Direct Cinema.
With Direct Cinema the idea was that filmmakers were recording reality, exactly as it happened and then showing it to audiences without the interference and imposition of the filmmaker. The idea was that the filmmaker was a fly on the wall, not imposing their perspective or will with any sort of questioning or interviewing of subjects. Life just unfolded on the screen exactly as it was.
The only problem with this theory is that life never unfolds on the screen exactly as it does in reality. A filmmaker always exerts some interference and control simply in the selection of what to shoot, and what not to shoot, and additionally in the editing phase by selecting what to show and what not to show. However, the trend did give rise to a new style of shooting, termed “observational” which is still seen today, and is the preferred shooting style of all reality television shows. Some notable filmmakers at this time included D.A. Pennebaker, who produced Don’t Look Back, a film that follows musician Bob Dylan on the road, and the Maysles brother’s Salesman, which went door-to-door with a bible salesman.
In the post 60’s era documentaries began to become synonymous with social activism. Documentaries became the preferred format for shooting films which exposed society’s ills, and shed light on problems such as gang violence, the Aids epidemic and drug abuse. Filmmakers like Barbara Kopple made documentaries like Harlan County, USA which documented a workers strike in Kentucky and the violence that erupted as the little guy fought against a big corporation for benefits and higher wages. Then in the late 1980’s historical documentaries became all the rage when filmmaker Ken Burns, became the darling of Public Broadcasting with his epic series the Civil War. Burns historical style was the complete opposite of observational film. Dealing with a 100-year-old subject that couldn’t be filmed as a fly on the wall, he relied on old photographs, formal sit-down interview with historians, and experts and multimillion-dollar budgets used to produce re-enactments, shoot high-end helicopter shots of landscapes and hire actors to read prepare scripts and excerpts from old letters.
Burns style was so pervasive throughout his documentary series that it even led to the coining of the phrase, “the Burns effect”. The Burns effect refers to the application of computer-generated motion to a photograph through a digital editing program, which zooms in, out or pans the picture. And while Burns style was effective in breathing new life into historical subjects which before had been hard to get across through the visual media of television, it was also later criticized for being to high-brow, distant and boring.
Enter the advent of the personal documentary. Also in contrast to the direct cinema style of taking the filmmaker out of the equation, personal documentaries embrace the filmmaker as the central character in the film. In films such as Ross McEllwee’s Sherman’s March, Nina Davenport’s Always a Bridesmaid and most recently the works of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, the personal documentary takes the audience on a journey along with the filmmaker. With McElwee and Davenport the issues were strictly personal, their search for love and commitment in the modern world. In contrast Moore and Spurlock chose to tackle more public issues, in Moore’s case political and for Spurolock’s social.
Moore and Spurlock are also to be noted for their effect on the place of documentary film in modern society. While over the previous few decades, documentaries were viewed as films that were to be admired for their importance, but not necessarily for their box office potential, these docs have held their own at the box office and have proved that an important film can be an interesting and commercially successful one as well. Putting this together with the recent technological advancements in relatively cheap broadcast quality video cameras, digital editing systems, and streaming web-based video the road has been paved for a new breed of documentary filmmakers to make the mark and tell their own stories however they want to tell them.