Show Me the Money

Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourses it harbours and causes to function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

(Foucault, 'The political function of the intellectual', Radical Philosophy, Summer 1977, p. 13)

Cheating

In 1898 Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, proprietors of the 'American Vitagraph Company' set out to deliberately 'fake' a piece of actuality film. Having just shot footage of the Spanish American War in Cuba the two young former vaudeville entertainers returned to New York to discover that they had missed the crucial event, the Battle of Santiago Bay. In an interesting comment on the construction of a news agenda, even in 1898, Smith recalled:

'Did you get the other shots?' a reporter asked.

'What do you mean?'

'The sea battle – the American fleet pasting Admiral Cervera.'

At this moment, flushed with triumph, I think we would have taken credit for any phase of the Cuban campaign.

'Certainly, certainly,' I said and Blackton nodded solemnly as if I had spoken a simple irrefutable truth ...

Once in our office I knew we were in trouble. Word had spread through New York that Vitagraph had taken pictures of the Battle of Santiago Bay! To caller after caller we said we had not developed the film, that we were not sure what we had, that it would be some time yet inasmuch as the film has to be processed in order. We sat down and looked at each other. How to get out of this one? Vitagraph, not too well off as things were, could ill afford to reverse itself.

Blackton said we could fake a sea battle and I said he was insane ...

Nevertheless this is precisely what they managed to do, with a delightful arrangement of cardboard cut-out boats floating on an inch-deep ocean, with tiny gunpowder charges and an office boy blowing cigar smoke over the tabletop set. Despite this unpromising mise-en-scène the results surpassed the producer's expectations,

It would be less than truth to say we were not wildly excited at what we saw on screen ... Pastor's and both Proctor houses [theatres] played to capacity audiences for several weeks. Jim and I felt less and less remorse of conscience when we saw how much excitement and enthusiasm were aroused by The Battle of Santiago Bay ...

This is an eloqent episode. It speaks to me as a producer about the often absurd lengths we go to in order to make the film that we see in our mind's eye. One of the most commonly used terms on any film set is 'cheating' – directors and camera operators constantly speak of 'cheating' a shot, as in 'We can cheat it to the left a little', or 'Could you just cheat it forward a bit'; meaning can you move the camera or the action a little to fit into the frame's mise-en-scène in a way that will feel uncomfortable or 'unreal' to the participants but will 'read' as physically acceptable to the camera lens. There is a spectrum of manipulation involved at every stage of film or TV production.

However, Smith's story also speaks to me as a critic for the way in which it short circuits, from the maker's point of view, the long-running debate about documentary's referential status, that is to say the precise relationship of the documentary image to reality. For Smith and Blackton any remorse they may have felt (they knew what they were doing was 'faking') was erased by the reception the piece received. If it plays then it is real enough. In the words of Brian Winston, 'It is audiences who can tell the difference between a fictional narrative and a documentary argument. In other words it is a question of reception. The difference is to be found in the mind of the audience.'

We can never know if audiences for The Battle of Santiago Bay found their pleasure in the apparent referential truth of the piece or whether in fact the desktop battle represented a narrativisation of knowledge, 'a structure of feeling', that they already possessed. The point is not whether the film was 'real' or not; it is that a particular form of realist representation emerged from a particular production context. Production occurred within a febrile market in which rapidly growing numbers of film-makers chased a rapidly developing exhibition circuit. The economic relationship between audience and producer was direct in cinema's first years – prints were sold to the theatre owners for cents per foot or rented out at a negotiated rate per week. Production was subject not only to the economics of the early cinema market-place but also a political framework of imperialist ambition, a context of developing mass media intertextuality of newspapers, photography, engravings and early cinema, and also a context of exhibition as part of vaudeville entertainment. What audiences took to be true was generated through this matrix. Writing about the start of the Spanish-American War, Smith says, 'With nationalistic feeling at fever pitch we set out to photograph what the people wanted to see.'

Although some contemporary commentators on early cinema stressed its extraordinary reproductive relation to the real world there are just as many who, like Smith and Blackton, acknowledge that production of cinematic 'truth' in this period was likely to involve fakery, manipulation and distortion. The worthy intention to celebrate 'truth telling' in cinema was undertaken by the purveyors of popular street entertainment, the showmen and the lanternists, the very experts in the arts of illusion. This is a tradition of practice that has been written out of documentary history in its insistence on revisiting the precise textual relations between 'the creative' and 'the actual' in Grierson's by now exhausted formula of documentary as 'the creative treatment of actuality'.

My argument is that we have come full circle: the 'regime of truth' at the end of the century has some qualities surprisingly in common with the vaudeville, fairground and peepshow context of a hundred years ago. Modernist debates about documentary moving image media which have centred on the form's indexical relationship to the real now need to be displaced by a clear-eyed consideration of the position that they occupy within a postmodern cultural ecology. Pleasure, and therefore desire, is a major characteristic of such an ecology. Desire finds its satisfactions in illusion. Tidal waves of entertainment have flooded into discursive zones previously reserved for education, information and enlightenment. This collision between historical tradition and contemporary culture has produced in factual moving image media a crisis of epistemology that, in Europe at least, has centred on the issue of 'faking'. As I have indicated above, 'fakery', distortion and fictionalisation have always been part of documentary practice, however they have been compressed into the margins of the form's history by the dominance of the Griersonian anti-Hollywood position. These essential problems of documentary form are now produced as the central subject of intense media debate and doubt by the contradictions of contemporary culture.

Through 1998 and early 1999 the UK media press was dominated by a series of revelations and investigations into allegations of faking in factual TV. The first story in the sequence concerned the Channel Four documentary Rogue Males transmitted in February 1998 as part of their flagship documentary strand Cutting Edge. Allegations surfaced in the press immediately after transmission that a number of sequences in which the subjects of the film were shown engaging in illegal activities, particularly a theft, were in fact reconstructions which were, crucially, unlabelled as such. These stories were the signal for open season by print journalists on their TV colleagues. The South London Press ran stories alleging that the lead character in the BBC docu-soap The Clampers was not in fact a 'beat' traffic warden but an office worker drafted back onto the streets for his dramatic potential. In May 1998 the Guardian ran a major exposé of a Carlton TV documentary, The Connection, that had been transmitted two years previously on 15 October 1996. This was followed by similar stories about the Channel Four documentaries Too Much Too Young: Chickens, about Glasgow rent boys, transmitted 1 September 1997, and Guns on the Street about the underworld gun trade in Manchester, transmitted in March 1996. In February 1999 an even higher profile story was brought to public attention by the UK tabloid press who alleged that the daytime talk programme The Vanessa Show had featured 'real life' guests who were in fact actors.

This concern for the status of public knowledge was not confined to the UK. In France TFI's Reportages series was the subject of two faking accusations, including a case where a policeman allegedly posed as drug dealer. France 3 was accused of setting up a supposedly 'real' Alpine rescue sequence. The Sunday magazine programme Arrêt sur images ran a number of stories attacking the excesses and distortions of factual television. German factual programme production was severely damaged in 1996 by the discovery that producer Michael Born had sold more than 20 faked factual programmes to German and Swiss TV stations over a five-year period. In Australia current affairs programmes have been exposed as faked; in one case a journalist pretended to pursue a failed businessman all over Mallorca using staged set ups and unsubstantiated stories.

Despite the very small proportion of factual television output that such cases represent, the consequences for the perpetrators have been serious. Carlton Television in the UK was fined £2 million by the commercial TV regulator the Independent Television Commission after admitting ten breaches of the ITC programme code – needless to say, heads rolled and the factual management team was substantially replaced. Channel Four was fined £150,000 by the ITC for its Too Much Too Young rent boys film for the 'crime' of setting up three sequences in which the boys appeared to be picked up by 'punters' who were in fact crew members or associates. In Germany Michael Born was jailed for four years after his hoaxing scams were revealed. In France the chairman of the French regulatory body the Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel threatened a crackdown on faked events in documentaries which would include compulsory transmission of CSA rulings and heavy fines. In the UK the BBC issued new guidelines to factual producers in the wake of the controversies of 1998 which attempted to minimise the potential for damaging crises of confidence in factual ouput. The new guidelines stressed the necessity to label reconstructions which are 'significant to the development of the narrative' or which would not have taken place at all without the intervention of the filmmakers. Intriguingly the BBC guidelines also attempt to rewrite the grammar of film editing by insisting that 'shots and sequences should never be intercut to suggest that they were happening at the same time, if the resulting juxtaposition of material leads to a distorted and misleading impression of events'.

It is clear that by the end of the 1990s Smith and Blackton would have found themselves in serious trouble. I want to turn to a more detailed account of one of the above cases in order to ascertain what such scandals have to tell us about the state of the documentary and factual TV now.

The UK newspaper the Guardian of 6 May 1998 carried a major story called The Fake Connection. Running a front page splash with three broadsheet pages inside (double page headline 'HOW CARLTON'S FILM-MAKERS DECEIVED 3.7M ITV VIEWERS'), the paper ran the investigation for three days. The story 'revealed' how a documentary produced by regional broadcaster Carlton for the commercial UK network audience and screened in October 1996 was a 'fake'. Called The Connection the programme purported to tell the story of how the Medellin coca barons were now growing heroin and were intent on opening up a new supply route to the UK. The film centred on filmed evidence of interviews with supposed drug barons and sequences in which a drug smuggling 'mule' is seen swallowing packets of heroin before setting off on an airline trip to London. The film was well reviewed, had strong ratings, and won a number of international documentary awards.

The Guardian investigation claims that there never was any new heroin supply route, that crucial scenes such as the interview with a senior member of the Cali cartel, the drugs mule swallowing heroin and the journey to London were all 'fake'. None of the subjects were drug smugglers: they included a car park attendant, a retired bank manager and a character who claimed to the Guardian that he only turned to drug smuggling after the Carlton film was made. In addition the investigation argued that interviews were edited for drama rather than accuracy and that the director wrote answers for some of the respondents. At the time of filming the Cali cartel, the supposed subjects of the film, were either under arrest or under intense police scrutiny; the cartel had in fact all but collapsed at the same time as the programme idea was being developed.

The relationship between The Connection and its newspaper exposé reveals the deep-seated and institutionalised blurring of boundaries between performance, mediation, narrative and fact in contemporary factual TV practice. The producers recruited small-time dealers or men who knew the drug scene in Colombia. These actors also knew the images that were required for the film crew, they understood TV too and were all too willing to play their part like everyone else. The lived 'reality' for the film's participants is as 'intertextual' as the reality produced by the film – existing film and TV narratives of the Colombian drugs trade were just as important a part of the programme's construction for producers and participants as the 'real' events which the film claimed to portray. It is no longer a simple question of what is and is not 'real' – the documentary has become a performance. One of the surprising aspects of this scandal was that the Guardian should make such a big story out of practices that are absolutely standard, in essence if not in degree, for every one of the hundreds of young factual TV researchers and directors hustling their ideas in an oversubscribed market place.

As in the case of the Battle of Santiago Bay we have to look to the production context to establish just what kind of 'regime of truth' is in process here. Significantly Carlton were under pressure to produce high quality, high ratings factual programming since coming under attack from the ITC for 'superficial' performance in the first two years of their franchise to broadcast. As we will go on to see, the pressure on factual TV to deliver both audiences and prestige is changing the form of documentary programming itself.

Here this relationship between context and the production of truth is at its most pointed. Roger James, the head of Carlton documentaries at the time of the production, admits in the Guardian feature that at the time he 'pitched' the idea to the network there was no research in place to support the assertion that the Cali cartel were planning to unload cheap high grade heroin onto British streets. The story simply did not exist other than as a surmise, a hunch, in the director's imagination. The idea was formulated on the basis of what network controllers would find exciting, in this case a story combining heroin, Colombia, drug trafficking and a 'new threat'. The entire 'scandal' derives from the inevitable practice of second-guessing what the network controllers might like to fund, then, having won the commission, the hapless film-makers have to go out and create the story. Adriana Quintana, the researcher on this film, recruited from a Colombian bar in London, did exactly what the production economy required her to do. When it became clear that the director had no contacts and no story she fulfilled the terms of her contract by finding him bodies to film, characters who would perform the lines he had sold to the commissioning editors who could keep the film (and his career) on line.