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Aufderheide Documentary Film Since 1999 Ssrn Keywords: Documentary; public affairs; personal documentary; theatrical documentary; investigative documentary; cinema verite; auteur Mainstream Documentary Film since 1999 By Patricia Aufderheide To be published in Blackwell’s History of American Film (Cynthia Lucia, ed), New York: Blackwell's, 2012 From the 1930s to the 1990s, documentary was a rather dowdy cinematic category; to many, it even represented a subordinate cinematic form. “Is it a movie or a documentary?” was an entirely expectable question. That all changed by the end of the 1990s. The first decade of the 21st century was one of unprecedented burgeoning of documentary production and consumption that entailed a great increase in output and some qualitative advances. While televisual documentary came to be associated with certain factory values that reflected the TV industry’s vast need for programming, theatrical documentary came in this period to be seen as a much more individually crafted, courageous, human-scale response against social injustice and the abuse of power. Hence, the era also raised questions about the social role of documentary, including the responsibility of filmmakers to serve the public's informational needs and to honor traditional journalistic goals, such as accuracy. 1 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2120158 Documentary, a term that the dour Scottish documentary entrepreneur John Grierson crafted, has at its core a promise to say something about real life truthfully. There was the Griersonian legacy, for one. If cinema were food, for Grierson documentary was the spinach. He recommended it as a tool of education and persuasion for governments and businesses alike; documentary was supposed to do the business of managing the social peace (Aitken 1990). What followed were decades of educational films, a business born in the wake of governments’ use of 16mm film in World War Two. After that war, businesses and filmmakers found ready clients in schools that expected and would receive fare that was laced with paternalism. Then there was television, which, before the advent of the cable era, tended to favor a radio-influenced, portentous format of “white paper” style public-affairs documentary—important stuff but rarely, well, fun (Barnouw 1993). Through the combined impact of these factors, documentary became associated with the grim authority of teachers, bureaucrats and portentous journalists. All too often, documentaries were first deployed in disciplinary scenarios—in schools, workplaces and religious institutions. Viewers probably encountered the least aesthetically adventurous work first, films hewing to conventions such as the voice-of-God narrator, the authoritative expert host, and mutually reinforcing words and images. When a documentary actually succeeded in both stimulating and pleasing viewers, a common response was, “It was a good film, not like a regular documentary.” However, viewers did not merely carry away a sense that documentaries were boring. They also implicitly expected documentaries to be uncontroversially accurate and authoritative about their subject matter. This widespread impression of documentary, of course, contradicted a rich aesthetic and social history. Documentarians, as historian Erik Barnouw noted, have seen themselves as poets, buglers for causes, chroniclers, and reporters among other roles. Documentary had begun, with 2 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2120158 Robert Flaherty, in films that poetically imposed a man-vs.-nature drama on reality; Nanook of the North (1922) for instance, employed masterfully suspenseful storytelling in both image and editing. Documentary had challenged the viewer to re-examine his or her own notions of truth, as Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes did. It even aspired to induce synaesthesia, as Joris Ivens' filmic poem Rain did in combining the representation of natural events with musical composition. But most viewers at the end of the 20th century had likely never seen these films. It took the advent of home video, the emergence of satellite-fed cable channels, the development of mini-majors among distributors, and the expansion of theaters into multiplexes to create the conditions to make documentary into a consumer-friendly kind of cinema. The lowered cost of digital production and distribution affected all aspects of the supply chain. It made documentary a cheap source of programming on proliferating channels and screens that demanded, 24 hours a day, to be fed with new material. It also made possible the development of theaters specifically designated for documentaries and other niche audience fare within cineplexes, a tactic pioneered by the Landmark Theaters in the early twenty-first century. By that time, there had already been generations of independent U.S. filmmakers armed with video cameras (the Sony PortaPak was introduced in 1967). Documentary had become an important feature of the civil rights movement and of anti-nuclear and peace activism since the late 1960s. Such documentarians, whether they worked as advocates or as chroniclers, often resistted or directly opposed the voice-of-authority image of documentary, rather styling themselves dissidents, activists, and truth-tellers against the grain of reigning ideologies. They cultivated a range of styles that were as unlike televisual conventions of the time as possible: cinéma vérité (Salesman [1968, Maysles brothers], Harlan County, USA [1976], Barbara Kopple), oral histories (With Babies and Banners [1979. Lorraine Gray], The Good Fight [1984, 3 Noel Buckner and Mary Dore]), unnarrated compilation films (Atomic Café [1982, Jayne Loader and Kevin Rafferty]), reflexive essays (The Thin Blue Line [1988, Errol Morris]) (Aufderheide 2007). Many of these filmmakers were nurtured—sometimes with forbearance, sometimes reluctantly--by public service television. Indeed, they mobilized in the late 1970s to force public television to provide more space to social documentary, an effort that succeeded by 1988, when the Independent Television Service was created as a production arm for “underrepresented” voices and viewers, as part of public broadcasting (Aufderheide, 1999, 99-120). Documentary was finally positioned for popularity. Cable TV channels that were devoted to documentary multiplied and went global in the 1990s. Box-office success, however, had to wait for the twenty-first century. In 2008, twenty-five of the widely-used website box-office calculator Box Office Mojo’s thirty top-grossing theatrical documentaries of all time in the U.S. (excluding performance films, reality TV and IMAX) had been produced since 2002. The business trend may well be short-lived. By 2006, theatrical box office was already declining. However, the transformation of the image of documentary from being earnest and education- oriented to constituting entertainment with a purpose was definitive. The vast proliferation of screens in people’s lives, ranging from home-based HD to iPods on the go, has been met with a vast expansion of non-fiction production, much of it in television. The evolution of documentary form in this period hailed from two different sources: corporate and individual. Corporate cable documentaries, driven by bottom-line values and typefied by formulas that promised both dependability and novelty, contrasted with documentaries made out of an individual creator’s passion. These two strands interacted creatively, both to feed high-quality talent into the corporate sector and to introduce market opportunities into the non-market-driven field. 4 Already in the 1990s, a business emerged for for-profit television documentaries. Documentaries produced for the new cable and satellite channels took on a factory look (for instance, a Discovery Health channel’s Birth Day the BBC’s Big Cats, the National Geographic series Seconds from Disaster). In these series, personality was methodically expunged in favor of brand identity. Indeed, Discovery Channels pioneered the notion that all credits for the film—the recognition of individual authorship—should be relegated to websites in order to maximize brand identity and minimize the time span in which viewers might decide to switch channels. (The move was stopped by vigorous protest from filmmakers' organizations, especially the International Documentary Association.) Sentiment and the drama around violence and reproduction typically propelled story. Cinematography and editing styles were drawn both from fiction and from news television. Designed for the small screen, they were graphics-heavy and typically featured headline-style narration. They provided unsubtle musical and special-effects cueing for emotional response. Lighting clichés developed, such as fog, mist, and haze over re- enactments and shocking blasts of light for transitions. Documentaries borrowed narrative drama from reality television, leading to “factual television” hybrids such as Discovery’s Junkyard Wars series and Spike TV’s Manswers. Formulaic, commercial documentary technique in this period was designed to capture and keep viewer attention, with techniques ranging from shock to titillation to innuedo. The formulaic choices also effectively allayed questions about the accuracy, ideology, or significance of the real life material being portrayed. Omniscient and authoritative narrators, portentous music, and tautly constructed narratives left little room for ambiguity, reflection, or participation. These formulaic documentaries reinforced viewers' stereotypes about documentary's
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