Is it essential?

Now you might say, does this really matter? The reports coming out from current affairs are satisfactory; the vast extra effort that would be required to produce really detailed documentaries is just too expensive, But look what we are missing. The true documentary handles interaction between people, not just talking heads. The director is, so to speak, the anthropologist on the stage of reality.

The urban anthropologist should work in the same way as the jungle anthropologist who goes and lives with a tribe, looks at the minutiae of their lives, the way they eat, the way they greet each other, the way they wash, the kind of work they do from day to day, who takes part in their work, what happens on special feast days, and so on. Similarly, the urban anthropologist builds up a pattern of urban lives. If he then wants to make a film, he decides which of these countless behavioural permutations have to be filmed and the order in which they will appear in the final film.

And it’s exactly the same if you want to make a documentary film about science or the arts. You don’t just take a few shots of a laboratory, put some commentary over it and hear the scientist speak; you look at the minutiae of the life in a laboratory - what happens when the staff arrive in the morning. When the experiment doesn’t work, does he leave the laboratory and go for a walk? Does he go and talk with his boss? Does he sit there troubled? What happens when he gets over the problem? Does he get excited and go back immediately to the laboratory? In other words, what are the details of interaction in the laboratory?

Really to know what goes on in the theatre is not just a matter of filming any old rehearsal. What are the important parts of the rehearsal? How does the director get the enthusiasm of the actors? How does he tide them over times when they are despondent? It is only by watching many rehearsals that you see what to film.

In this way we are beginning to see a sort impact spectrum that we could guess the viewer will have. At one end we have the didactic Educational programme, giving objective statements of the facts. In the Current Affairs programme, there are also statements of the facts but there might be some attempt to get at the excitement of political disagreement interspersed with some understanding of the problem for the people who are involved. But with the Documentary you are really involving the audience with a situation more akin to drama - the director dealing with real people rather than actors and a ‘script’ not performed on the stage but on the streets. Isn’t it important that we should do this? That we should give a feeling for reality as well as facts of reality?