MOVIE MOVEMENTS: FILMS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD OF CINEMA

A book extract by Warwick alumnus James Clarke

James Clarke's Movie Movements (Kamera Books, 2011) is a guide to the major movements which have shaped our idea of what cinema is and can be. It deals with some of the major tenets of film studies such as authorship and genre, technological impacts and the rise of digital cinema. Focusing on the documentary form, this extract investigates whether documentaries really can claim to be more truthful than fiction.

Documentary scholar Bill Nichols has made the claim that all films are documentaries and he may well be on to something. This book can only hint at the vast range of documentary filmmakers who have produced such fascinating material.

Let’s start with some fundamental ways in which the documentary form can be distinguished from the ‘fiction’ form. In the book An Introduction to Film Studies we see the documentary defined as follows: ‘It is in the aesthetic concerns of documentary that there is considerable debate, because it is largely in creating an aesthetic approach that documentaries and other non-fiction films begin to challenge, distort, and subvert notions of “documentary” truth and “authenticity”.'¹

It seems right to suggest that the films of the Lumière Brothers, as well as many other titles from Britain’s cinema-of-attractions output during the very earliest years of the twentieth century, could be regarded as documentary. Stella Bruzzi has suggested that the history of documentaries is misunderstood, depicting as it often does the idea that one kind of documentary exists and flourishes until another comes along to replace it. For Bruzzi, however, this is too neat a scheme of things.²

The world of documentary has a long tradition and inevitably has its auteurs and major players. Names such as Robert Flaherty, Albert Maysles, Maya Deren, Errol Morris, Molly Dineen, Chris Marker, Nick Broomfield, Godfrey Reggio and Frederick Wiseman all offer potent stories of ‘real’ life. Indeed, we might want to cite the Lumière brothers in late-nineteenth-century Paris as the instigators of the form with films such as their micro-movie Workers leaving the Lumière Factory (1895). The Lumière films can be described as a 'cinema of attractions' where narrative traditions and characterisation have yet to play their part. ‘Unplayed’ is the term a Soviet filmmaker might have used at one time.

For the culturally embedded, broadly understood use of the word ‘documentary’ we have to thank the British filmmaker John Grierson. He minted the word when reviewing the film Moana (1925), directed by Robert Flaherty, observing that the job of the documentary was ‘the creative treatment of reality’.

Adding critical, theoretic ballast to the idea of the documentary mode (and underscoring the importance of theory and practice sitting side by side), filmmaker Dziga Vertov observed that, ‘The cameraman uses many specific devices to “attack” reality with his camera and to put the facts together in a new structure; these devices help him to strive for a better world with more perceptive people.’³

Like the ‘fiction’ film, the ‘documentary’ has its own language which has established itself as a set of conventions. Certainly, Robert Flaherty’s use of the long lens allowed him to maintain some physical distance from his subjects so that they could go about their business without being conscious of the camera in their immediate vicinity. However, Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North (1922) also re-staged events that Flaherty recalled from earlier journeys north to Hudson Bay in 1910 and 1916. Whereas the Eskimos had hunted using guns, Flaherty replaced them with traditional, outmoded weapons. The authenticity of the documentary is therefore thrown perilously into question very early in its life. Where Flaherty offered humanist, people-specific films, John Grierson favoured a more overtly political approach and subject matter, and this came to underpin the cinema vérité style that the Maysles Brothers always referred to as ‘direct cinema’; that is to say, cinema of minimal artifice in its construction, therefore implying immediacy and, by extension, accuracy and honesty. These words are easy to write but, given a moment’s thought, prove contentious and open the portal to a ravenous philosophical dimension surrounding truth and art.

In their landmark book Film Art: An Introduction (arguably the place to start any serious film study), David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson write of documentary that: ‘Like fiction films, documentaries also have their own genres.’⁴ They also make the point that documentary’s claim to some kind of absolute truth is questionable, saying that even a fiction film has some kind of connection to the actual world.

Another variation on the idea of the documentary is the movement that has come to be called Third Cinema. This is a form of guerilla cinema based around group production, with the emphasis on distribution and screening rather than aesthetic choices. Third Cinema has been couched in the following context: ‘The anti-imperialist struggle of the people of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution.’⁵

Documentary is regarded as more truthful than fiction, but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

Typically, documentary is regarded as more truthful than fiction, but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise: it’s just as much of a construct. Thomas Austin talks about the limiting cliché of the window on the world.

Bill Nichols wrote that ‘documentary is a fiction (un)like any other’.⁶ There’s a wrong-headed sense that a documentary is more virtuous than something ‘made up’ but, having worked on a number of documentaries and information films whilst in my twenties, I can testify to just how much the material is organised, selected and manipulated. With a fiction film, the majority of these choices are perhaps made during the screenwriting stage, whilst in documentary this tends to happen during post-production.

In recent years, films such as Roger and Me (Michael Moore, 1989), Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005), Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning, 2005), Tell Them Who You Are (Mark Wexler, 2004), Being and Doing (Ken McMullen, 1984) and March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, 2005) have all been theatrical releases which have reconfirmed documentary’s status as ‘cinema’, distinguished by an arresting diversity of subject matter and treatment. Critically, in terms of the very small number of films referenced here as documentary, they all take a viewpoint, revelling in their subjectivity. There is not an ambition to somehow tell both sides of a given story. As such the films are arguably as intensively rendered and authored as films such as The Seventh Seal, Seven Samurai or Rome, Open City.

Read James Clarke's Times Higher review of Film As Film by his former lecturer in film studies at Warwick, VF Perkins »

1. Jill Nelmes (ed), An Introduction to Film Studies, Routledge, Second Edition, 1999, p.214
2. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, 2000, p.68
3. Dziga Vertov, quoted by Jill Nelmes, An Introduction to Film Studies, op cit, p.191
4. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, McGraw-Hill, 2003, p.130
5. Solinas and Gettino, 'Toward a Third Cinema' in Movies and Methods, Bill Nichols (ed), Vol 1, University of California Press, 1985, p.47
6. Bill Nichols, quoted by Thomas Austin, Watching the World: Screen Documentary and Audience, Manchester University Press, 2007, p.180

James Clarke specialises in producing written content for media education and moving image projects. He has also worked as a lecturer in Higher Education, and as an external examiner. He studied a BA (Hons) in Film and Literature at the University of Warwick from 1990 to 1993. Follow him on Twitter for the latest news and information.