Documentary Screens: Non-Fiction Film and Television
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Documentary Screens Non-Fiction Film and Television Keith Beattie 0333_74117X_01_preiv.qxd 2/19/04 8:59 PM Page i Documentary Screens This page intentionally left blank 0333_74117X_01_preiv.qxd 2/19/04 8:59 PM Page iii Documentary Screens Non-Fiction Film and Television Keith Beattie 0333_74117X_01_preiv.qxd 2/19/04 8:59 PM Page iv © Keith Beattie 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–74116–1 hardback ISBN 0–333–74117–X paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987 654321 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Printed in China 0333_74117X_02_prevviii.qxd 2/19/04 8:59 PM Page v For my mother, and to the memory of my father, Reginald Joseph Beattie (1922–1998) This page intentionally left blank 0333_74117X_02_prevviii.qxd 2/21/04 2:41 PM Page vii Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 ‘Believe Me, I’m of the World’: Documentary Representation 10 2 Men with Movie Cameras: Flaherty and Grierson 26 3 Constructing and Contesting Otherness: Ethnographic Film 44 4 Decolonizing the Image: Aboriginal Documentary Productions 63 5 The Truth of the Matter: Cinéma Vérité and Direct Cinema 83 6 The Camera I: Autobiographical Documentary 105 7 Finding and Keeping: Compilation Documentary 125 8 The Fact/Fiction Divide: Drama-Documentary and Documentary Drama 146 9 The Evening Report: Television Documentary Journalism 161 10 Up Close and Personal: Popular Factual Entertainment 182 11 The Burning Question: The Future of Documentary 204 Conclusion 217 Appendix: Screenings and Additional Resources 219 Notes 237 Bibliography 250 Index 269 vii 0333_74117X_02_prevviii.qxd 2/19/04 8:59 PM Page viii Acknowledgements This book began as a series of questions raised in the course ‘Documentary Film and History’, coordinated by Professor Roger Bell at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Multiple thanks are due to Roger for involving me in the course during its incep- tion and to the students in the course whose insights and enthusi- asm provided a stimulus for the writing of this book. For their generous and long-standing support of my endeavours in the areas of film and media I’d like to thank Dr Geoff Mayer, Head, Cinema Studies Department, La Trobe University, Melbourne; Dr Richard Pascal, School of Humanities, at the Australian National University, Canberra; and Associate Professor Roy Shuker, Head, Media Studies Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, allowed me to screen many of the works examined here. I would like to thank Fiona Villella of ACMI for her assistance. Aysen Mustafa of the Australian Film Institute also helped locate film titles. My thanks to Dennis O’Rourke for agreeing to speak with me. At Palgrave Press I am particularly grateful to Catherine Gray for her patience and support. Also at Palgrave, Sheree Keep, Beverley Tarquini and Kate Wallis provided timely and efficient assistance. Comments by Palgrave’s two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript were productive and welcome. Louise and Michael Thake were, as ever, supportive and encour- aging in the best possible way. Dr Julie Ann Smith offered an ines- timable degree of support and extremely helpful comments on the manuscript. The English language cannot do justice to such a con- tribution, and so: Grazie, molte grazie, brava dottoressa … adesso è ora di passare ad altro. Any errors in this book remain, of course, my own. viii 0333_74117X_03_int.qxd 2/19/04 9:00 PM Page 1 Introduction A 72-year-old director takes up a digital video camera and travels the highways and back roads of France to shoot a series of startling real life vignettes which turn an unlikely topic, scavenging, into a story of loneliness, loss, ageing, and human fortitude at the begin- ning of the twenty-first century (Agnès Varda’s Les Glâneurs et la Glâneuse, 2002). Subjects appearing in their homes and other loca- tions testify in verse and song to the part alcohol plays in their lives (in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s [BBC] Drinking for England, 1998). A self-described explorer and adventurer with little experience of filmmaking journeys to the far north of Québec and directs a group of Inuit people in a reconstruction of their past way of life (Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, 1922, the first ‘docu- mentary’ film). Documentary productions encompass remarkable representations of surprising realities. How do documentaries achieve their ends? What types of documentary are there? What factors are implicated in their production? Such questions – which constantly return us to the representations themselves – animate this study. Documentary Screens critically examines formal features, eviden- tiary capacities, patterns of argumentation, and histories of selected central documentary films and television programmes. This study situates these features, and the documentaries them- selves, within varying contexts which inform and impact on the documentary texts in multiple direct and indirect ways. The con- texts identified and examined here are, first, subgeneric forma- tions and, second, broader and more significant material settings. By gathering together selected works into nominated subgenres I am not suggesting that documentaries have necessarily fallen into discrete categories. Constructed as a genre within the field of non- fictional representation, documentary has, since its inception, been composed of multiple, frequently linked representational strands. In a related way, the various subgenres of documentary referred to here are not textual codifications, but general cate- gories composed of works sharing orientations and conventions 1 0333_74117X_03_int.qxd 2/19/04 9:00 PM Page 2 2 DOCUMENTARY SCREENS recognized by both the producer and the viewer (Neale, 1980: 11). The existence of these categories is manifest in everyday refer- ences to documentary such as those found in television program- ming guides, which routinely classify non-fictional work as historical documentaries, science documentaries, autobiographical work, works ‘based on a true story’ and so on. Similarly, academic studies commonly construct or allude to subgenres of documentary, among them, direct cinema, ethnographic film or compilation film. The particular subgenres confronted in this study are by no means exhaustive of the possible range of documentary categories, though they do include works prominent within the documentary tradition. The subgenres returned to and reassessed here are: ethno- graphic film, direct cinema and cinéma vérité, autobiographical documentary, drama-documentary and documentary drama, indigenous documentary productions, compilation films and tele- vision documentary journalism. This book also examines recent so-called popular factual entertainment, a category which, in its multiple forms and revisions of documentary representation, over- flows and refuses subgeneric positioning. The reassessment of doc- umentary subgenres undertaken here is timely – perhaps even overdue. It is virtually impossible to pick up any of the growing number of books on documentary without reading of the ‘blur- ring’ of documentary forms and generic hybridity. Focused almost exclusively on contemporary works, such analyses usefully outline emergent processes of overlap and intersection between various forms of documentary representation. However, recognition of what is being blurred, an identification of the formal boundaries that are being crossed, is assisted by an understanding of pre-existing forms and subgenres of documentary film and television. We need to know where we have come from to know where we are going. This study assists such an endeavour. Just as documentary is predicated on a series of refusals (it is not fiction; it is not the item-based presentation of the evening news1) so, too, this book is not concerned with practical aspects of documentary production, or detailed study of viewing patterns or audience reception of documentary on film or television (though viewing habits are implicated here in the theory of documentary and in the ‘readings’ or interpretations of documentary television programmes and films). This