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Cross-Cultural Filmmaking

University of California Press

Figure 1
Longole filming the filmmakers in  A Wife among Wives  (1981) by David and Judith MacDougall.

Documentary is evolving constantly. As you take up a camera you're coming in on the heels of over a century of documentary experimentation. What are the styles that have been spawned and spent over the years? Which will inspire you and which infuriate you? Which will you want to draw on and which to reject, which to use and which to abuse? You have an almost infinite variety of stylistic options to choose among. All of them are revealing about their filmmakers and their times, and all of them are interesting, in different ways, about their subjects. This chapter will give a brief (and inevitably selective) outline of documentary styles from Lumihre to our day.

The Birth of Documentary

Though the camera obscura extends back to the mid-sixteenth century, it wasn't until 1816 that the first paper negative was produced, and 1839 that the first positive image appeared on a silver plate (the "daguerreotype"). As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a Frenchman, Louis Lumihre, conceived of a way to project one image after another. For the next few years, from 1895 on, Louis and his brother Auguste, along with their camera operators, churned out film after film about apparently inconsequential moments of daily life: workers leaving their factories; a train arriving at a station; gondolas going down Venetian canals; a baby learning to walk; and blacksmiths, firemen, and lumberjacks all going about their work. Incredulous audiences from all over the world flocked spellbound to the public screenings of these first films, in some cases astounded to see themselves on the screen, filmed in the streets only a few days earlier. Cinema was born, and it was born with the documentary.

The early Lumihre films were only a minute longthat was all the reels could hold. Louis Lumihre thought that cinema should draw back from the dramatic conventions of theater. Motivated by "scientific curiosity," he was convinced that cinema should seek to capture real life sur le vif on the fly. He wanted spectators to witness "nature caught

in the act" and enjoy such simple pleasures as seeing "the ripple of leaves stirred by the wind."1

But even the early films reveal ambiguities about the camera's relationship to what it records. Once people on the streets recognized a camera for what it was, they began to wonder how they should react to it. Should they acknowledge it, or should they ignore it? Soon enough, people affecting to ignore it were doing so with a concentration of the mind that rivaled that of the people who were approaching and gesticulating self-consciously, or posing as if for a still photograph. Hidden within these various responses to the camera lies an important question, one that you'll also have to address yourself: should documentary depict life as it would have been had the camera not been noticed, or life as it actually goes on before and as affected by the camera? Different documentary styles implicitly answer this question in different ways.

As the Lumihre cameras were catching life on the fly, they were also beginning to tell stories, and some of these stories were told either for or by the camera. The comic L'arroseur arrosi (Waterer Watered, 1895) depicts a mischievous boy stepping on the hose of a gardener while he's watering his flowers. As the gardener turns the nozzle to his face to see what's wrong, the little boy takes his foot off and leaves the poor man drenched. The boy runs away, but the gardener catches up and spanks him. Some people think this film was the first to tell a "found story," that is, a story that exists in nature or real life, outside of the film.2 But it's difficult not to see it also as a specifically filmic story, one equally narrated by the filmmaker who recorded the images. Not surprisingly, other people feel it's the first fiction film. Here, too, there is a tension that has stayed with the documentary form ever since: if we are storytellers, are we telling our own stories or those of our subjects? Can documentary stories ever be completely "discovered"; are they not also always at least partly "contrived"? The Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson defined documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality," but what liberties are we allowed to take as long as we remain tied to documentary as something other than pure fiction? Again, different styles have their own answers.

There's a third way in which the early Lumihre films prefigure debates that are still raging among documentary filmmakers today. Their cam-

eras were hand-cranked, which meant that the operators could create special effects by speeding them up or slowing them down. Equipment operators also sometimes projected film in reverse, so that spectators would watch people walking forward and then all of a sudden retracing their steps. Playing with space and time in this way can reveal detail that goes unnoticed when film is projected forward at the "real time" speed. In fact, as soon as you, the filmmaker, make a cut, you're changing time, and as soon as you adjoin one shot to another, you're re-creating space. As the French anthropologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch has said, "Cinema allowed intervention into time , for the first time ever, permitting the construction of a wholly different object. It is this that has always appealed to me most about film."3 But other filmmakers have felt that documentary should not reassemble the fragments of recorded reality in a mixture of its own making. In order not to distort or synthesize, they shoot long, uninterrupted sequences. This tension around manipulating space and time has also been with documentary since its conception.

Documentary styles since the time of the Lumihre films can be categorized in umpteen different ways. For the sake of simplicity, this chapter distinguishes between four main styles. This framework is meant more as a rough guide to certain labels that filmmakers and critics use (labels that reappear in the following chapters) than as a hard-and-fast historical or theoretical taxonomy. The four basic divisions are expository, impressionistic, observational, and reflexive.4

Expository

Expository documentaries typically address the spectators directly, through either an on-screen commentator or a voice-over track (a narration by someone we don't see that's laid over the images). Neither the voice-over nor the on-screen commentator necessarily speak in the second person, literally to the spectators, but they both implicitly address an audience, and they both tend to be somewhat set apart from the rest of the film. They seem to comment on the action or the scene, rather than to constitute it or be part of it.

The meaning and point of view of expository films is thus elaborated more through the sound track than the images. Whereas the images in

fiction films tend to articulate a continuous time and space with the help of conventions of continuity cutting (see chapter 3), images in expository documentaries are edited as a complement or counterpoint to an argument being articulated in voice-over. The visuals are thus structured in accordance with a sound track which has a certain priority.

Expository...