Because I have had a complete change of plan with my short film, I thought it fitting to do some research into documentaries so that I have a better understanding of them when it comes to filming and editing my short documentary. I started off by looking at the history of the documentary:
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| The Lumiere Brothers |
‘Un Train Arrivée’ (1895) Their most famous film simply
shows a train pulling into a station, however audiences were fascinated by
these first moving photographs as they were able to see the detail of movement
captured by a film camera for the first time.
Documentary, as we know it today, began with ‘Nanook of The
North’, made by Robert Flaherty in 1922. In fact the word ‘documentary’ was
invented by John Grierson to describe this film. ‘Nanook’ was the first feature
length factual film and the first to use what Grierson described as ‘the
creative interpretation of reality’ . This meant that Flaherty had staged most
of the scenes for the camera in order to make the film more dramatic and
exciting for the audience.
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| John Grierson |
Grierson went on to head the GPO film unit in England in the
1930s and he became a major exponent of this poetic-realist approach to
documentary. ‘Nightmail’ (1936) began as an informational film about the mail
train from London to Edinburgh but the filming and editing emphasised the
poetic elements of film form: movement, rhythm, light and sound. Critics of
Grierson accused him of neglecting the social and political issues in his films
in favour of a modernist approach that celebrated machinery more than human
beings.
It was this backlash that led to the next major development
of documentaries in the 1950s and 1960s. Direct Cinema, a movement that began
in the United States, aimed to present social and political issues in a direct,
unmediated way giving the impression that events are recorded exactly as they
happened without the involvement of the film-maker. The development of smaller
lighter film cameras using smaller film stock (16mm as opposed to 35mm film
which is used in feature films and in documentaries up to that time) pioneered
by news camera men allowed the camera to be held on the shoulder (hand-held)
and to film in a more spontaneous manner.
Key names in this movement are D.A. Pennebaker, The Mayles
Brothers and Fred Wiseman . The modern social issue documentary such as
Supersize Me has its origins in Direct Cinema. The filmmaker usually has a
political and/or social agenda and seeks to present the events as ‘real’ even
though they are in full control of the editing process.
At the same time as Direct Cinema was being developed in
America, a similar movement was happening in France called Cinema Vérité
(‘cinema truth’). Cinema Vérité is a minimalist style of film
making that conveys the sense that the viewer is given a direct view of what
was actually happening in front of the camera without the artifice usually
incorporated in the film-making process. Cinema Vérité favours hand-held camera,
natural lighting, location filming, and direct sound.
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| Jean Rouch |
Jean Rouch was an important documentarian working in this
style in the 1960s. However Cinema Vérité techniques have also been used
by drama film-makers such as Ken Loach leading to the term ‘drama-documentary’
being used to describe films like ‘Cathy Come Home’.
The use of cinema vérité techniques can make a film
seems more ‘real’ and truthful to an audience and in recent time film-makers
have used the codes and conventions of the documentary to fool audiences into
thinking a programme or film is factual when it isn’t. This form of film-making
is called mockumentary.
Because mockumentaries demonstrate how easily the codes and
conventions of documentary can be faked, they can often cause us as viewers to
consider why we place so much faith in documentary itself.
Examples of mockumentaries: 'The Majestic Plastic Bag' and my favourite mockumentary, 'This is Spinal Tap'
Examples of mockumentaries: 'The Majestic Plastic Bag' and my favourite mockumentary, 'This is Spinal Tap'
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