Documentary or ‘talking head’

There is little real understanding of what is meant by the ‘documentary film’. The so-called documentary on television conveys little that is different from the average current affairs programme.

Panorama, This Week and World in Action make excellent film reports on poverty, race, international affairs - almost any subject you can think of - but these are not documentaries. Documentary films should be different - the difference, as we say in the trade, being between a talking-head show and a genuine documentary film. What do we mean by these vague terms?

Take a well reported topic - poverty and we see how a Current Affairs report, however excellent, differs from a film documentary on the same subject. It can be set out as shown below:

1. The film might well start with the usual appalling pictures of poverty, houses with cracks in the walls, cockroaches crawling across the floor, toilets that leak, staircases that are dangerous for the children to climb up. As we see the pictures, we hear the commentator’s voice saying that still in Britain in 1971 there are thousands of families living in houses like these.

2. Then appears the first talking head. The prime minister saying that, due to his party’s dynamic housing policy, atrocious housing such as this would disappear over the next five to ten years.

3. Immediately we cut to another talking head: the man who lives in the house describing the misery he has been living in and the fact that, although ‘he’s been two years on the council’s list for a new flat, no new flat is about to be given to him nor is he being given any help in getting his house redecorated.

4. This is followed by some other shots, perhaps a long tracking shot in a car past house after house that is ‘derelict and in need of repair. The commentator then gives the facts of just how typical this man is and that two years after the election there are still so many people like him. The commentator poses the classic question: even allowing for the fact that it must take time for people to be re-housed, are we doing sufficient?

5. We then cut to the third talking head, an opposition MP who says why the present prime minister’s housing policy is no use.

6. Finally we come back to the prime minister explaining just why his policy is of use.