Tricks of the Trade

TRICKS OF THE TRADE An examination of the confluences between documentary and deception, inspired by the symbiotic relationship between filmmaker and con artist in Forbidden Lie$ Anna Broinowski B.A. (Sydney University) Diploma Dramatic Arts (NIDA) Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University This thesis is submitted as a partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Statement of Candidate 4 Acknowledgments 5 INTRODUCTION 7 PART ONE Documentary Deception from 1895 to 1988: a (secret) history Chapter 1. Defining the Documentary “Truth Claim” 15 Chapter 2. Early Cinema: Illusion and Spectacle 25 Chapter 3. “Honest” manipulaters: Flaherty to Vertov 36 Chapter 4. Deceptive “truth-tellers”: The Padillas to Riefenstahl 48 Chapter 5. Revealers and Concealers: Jean Rouch to Spinal Tap 66 PART TWO Documentary Deception from 1988 to 2015: an (honest) account Chapter 6. Persuasion, Subversion and Fakery in the Modern Documentary 86 Chapter 7. The Déjà Vu effect: Spectator, Subject, and the Filmmaker-Deceiver 105 Chapter 8. Forbidden Lie$ and the post-9/11 Truth Claim 125 CONCLUSION 146 REFERENCES 156 FILMOGRAPHY 173 2 Abstract This doctoral thesis combines Anna Broinowski’s dramatised documentary feature, Forbidden Lie$ (2007), with a scholarly exegesis examining the confluences between documentary filmmaking and deception. This critical writing has been inspired by the symbiotic relationship between “honest” filmmaker, and “dishonest” subject, in Broinowski’s film. The written component, Tricks of the Trade, presents a detailed examination of the ways in which the nonfiction “real” has been constructed and consumed over cinema’s one hundred and twenty year history. In the process, parallels are revealed between the techniques used by documentary filmmakers, and the techniques used by magicians, forgers, propagandists, con artists and other professional dissemblers, to deceive, seduce, entertain, persuade, and “trick” their audiences, or “marks”. Tricks of the Trade advances two propositions: 1, that deception is as necessary to documentary is to fiction; and 2, despite this, documentary remains a valid and important art form. Documentary’s ability to successfully engage audiences in the future, it is suggested, depends in part upon the acknowledgment (rather than concealment) of its deceptive techniques. 3 Statement of Candidate I certify that the work in this thesis, Tricks of the Trade, has not previously been submitted for a degree, nor has it been submitted as part of the requirements for a degree to any other university or institution other than Macquarie University. I also certify that this thesis is an original piece of research and that it has been written by me. Any help and assistance I received in my research work and in the preparation of this thesis has been appropriately acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all the information sources and literature that have been used and referred to are indicated and acknowledged in this thesis. __________________________________________ A. Broinowski Student Number: 40906590 Date: February 5, 2015 4 Acknowledgments A huge debt of gratitude goes to my inspiring supervisor, Professor John Potts, and to Dr Andrew Alter, for his invaluable support. Thanks are also due to Professor Kathryn Millard and Dr Maree Delofski, for their timely advice and encouragement; and to Maryanne Hozijan and the administrative staff at Macquarie University. For their insights, I thank Dr Gregory Dolgopolov, Professor Edward Scheer, Dr Alison Broinowski, Bob Connolly, and Dr John Scannell. I am also indebted to the people whose work on Forbidden Lie$ helped inspire this thesis: producer Sally Regan, cinematographer Kathryn Milliss, journalists Malcolm Knox, David Leser and Carolyn Overington, editor Vanessa Milton, Jordanian interviewees Rana Husseini, Dr. Amal Al Sabbagh, Linda Mutawi, Dr. Hadidi and Dr. Jashan, and Abbas Arnaout of the Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival. Finally, love and thanks to my daughter, who tolerated it with good cheer, and to the woman without whom nothing could have been written: Norma Khouri. Forbidden Lie$ was made with the assistance of the Adelaide International Film Festival, Palace Films, Screen New South Wales, the South Australian Film Corporation and the Australian Film Finance Corporation (now Screen Australia) 5 Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world Jean-Luc Godard 6 INTRODUCTION Who told the first lie? To the public? I did, didn’t I? Norma Khouri Forbidden Lie$ When Forbidden Lie$ (2007), my feature documentary about fraudster-turned-hoax author Norma Khouri was in the cinemas, I used to sneak in to observe the audience. I was bored with the film, but watching the viewers was refreshing. People would heckle the screen, laugh and yell. Sometimes they would be so annoyed by Khouri’s relentless fabrications they would leave; others would shout out encouragement or abuse. One love-struck man in Sydney called out, “Marry me, Norma!” A tetchy woman in San Francisco growled, to no one in particular, “Oh, this is too much.” The consistent impression (in my admittedly biased eyes) was that the film had so disrupted people’s perceptions of reality, they needed to debrief before they could resume their normal interactions with the world. In question and answer sessions in the Middle East, Europe and America, people would interrogate me – confused, bemused, or furious – and cling to my answers like life-rafts. I had intended to make a film in which the audience was forced to question not only the veracity of its main character, but the veracity of the filmmaker, and indeed the nature of “truth” itself – at least in those public modalities which depend upon our acceptance that what is presented as “fact” is indeed true: current affairs and news programs, the print and digital media, literary non-fiction, and documentary. In doing so, I hoped to reawaken peoples’ independent critical faculties, and reflect the film’s deceptions squarely back at them. If they walked out questioning not only the trust-worthiness of the media, but the credibility of non-fiction texts such as Khouri’s hoax memoir Forbidden Love, and my hybrid-documentary Forbidden Lie$, then I had succeeded. When a woman in Washington asked, without irony, “Who was the actress you got to play Norma?” I realised I had exceeded my goal. 7 The fact is, the slug line on the film’s poster, “con or artist? you decide,” does not just refer to Norma. It refers to the filmmaker. Unlike Norma however, the filmmaker is only fleetingly judged in Forbidden Lie$. The written component of this thesis, Tricks of the Trade, seeks, in part, to address that imbalance. It is also, more broadly, a scholarly examination of the range of deceptive techniques used throughout the (predominantly western) history of documentary film: from its inception with the first nonfiction “actualités” of the Lumières in 1895; to 2015, when documentary’s status as fiction’s “superior” truth-telling other, remains tenuous at best (Roscoe & Hight 2001, Juhasz & Lerner 2006). Inspired by the symbiotic relationship between “honest” filmmaker and “dishonest” subject in Forbidden Lie$, Tricks of the Trade uses German filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s proposition that a documentary film is shot with “three cameras” – “1) the camera in the technical sense; 2) the filmmaker’s mind; and 3) the generic patterns of the documentary film, which are founded on the expectations of the audience that patronizes it” (Kluge 1988: 4) – as a conceptual framework within which to examine three categories of documentary deception. Firstly, fictive deception: which employs the cinematographic, technical and narrative techniques of fiction film (from scripting, performance, dramatisation, computer simulation and editing, to music, art and sound design), to construct an authentic “real”. Secondly, ethical deception: which involves the manipulation of information, both within the film (to the documentary’s subjects and audience), and during its making (to the subjects, financiers and other participants), to construct a “real” that resembles the documentary “in the filmmaker’s mind”. The third category is public deception: in which the filmmaker (and/or exhibitor and distributor) makes false statements about the documentary’s “truth claim”, both during and following its release. These three categories of deception provide an over-arching structure within which to analyse the shifting ways in which the documentary “real” has historically been depicted on screen. Examining the deceptive techniques operating in a range of documentaries, from films on the “factual” end of the fact/fiction “continuum” (Rosco & Hight 2001), to those operating in the generically murky fissures within it, Tricks of the Trade advances two propositions: 8 1. Deception is, and always has been, as necessary to documentary as it is to fiction; and 2. Despite this, documentary remains both a valid, and an important, art form. Aligning the filmmaker with the con artist, magician, forger and propagandist as the technically (if not ethically) conjoined partners in the same manipulative dance, Tricks of the Trade shows how fakery, illusion, manipulation, persuasion, ellision and sleight-of-hand have been the indispensable (but largely unacknowledged) tools of nonfiction film practice, since cinema’s inception. Rather than using this exploration to mount a postmodern critique of documentary’s

Load more