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.
If we look at this cartoon strip of how the film is made up, we see that it is basically constructed out of human heads giving facts and opinions, sometimes with great feeling and emotion, interspersed by photographic shots, with the appropriate commentary linking one point to the other.
Such a film can be made very rapidly. The people to be interviewed are set up by a researcher and the entire report could be shot in one day. in the morning, the two members of parliament could be filmed at their offices, either at the House of Commons or elsewhere in London, and in the afternoon the team could go off to the East End of London where the housing problem is to be investigated - general shots could be taken in the house, on the streets, and the person who lives there interviewed. The total film report might easily be 15 to 20 minutes long.
I am not knocking this technique; it could be an excellent report. If the questions to be raised and the shots to illustrate these points have been very carefully worked out, then this report will give a very clear picture of the present state of poverty in Britain: what the two major parties expect to do about it and also, to some extent, the feeling of what it’s like to live in these buildings. But that’s the crucial point; only to a limited extent do we get a true idea of what it is like to be poverty stricken.
Now I would hope that a documentary on this subject would go much deeper. We wouldn’t just get opinions; we would actually get a feeling of what it is like to live in such poverty and what effect this has on the family. If such families are to be helped, it is not just a question of money but a question of understanding; the ability to sympathise with those less privileged than oneself and help them because you understand their feelings of the miseries inflicted -on them through no fault of their own.
This film would take a very different shape. The documentary film gives much more scope to the cameraman and the director. It might run something like this if we look at a cartoon strip:
We see a well-dressed woman and a child in a pram shopping in a supermarket - we could use some imagination here. We want to get across the point that this sort of family isn’t able to buy all the rich goods that other people can buy - perhaps a trivial point but the film can emphasise what it feels like to walk past these piles of food. The camera can dwell on tins of salmon, tins of tongue, expensive fruit, expensive biscuits. As she walks past these rows of tins, we see her face and the child’s, and then we see the small amount of food - the few potatoes, cheese and eggs - which she has in her basket. It is not just a question of shooting tins of rich food. Here is where the cameraman can use his skill, given time. Tins of food and fresh fruit shot with a wide-angled lens from a low position, are over-emphasized and look particularly attractive if shot in this way. This all adds to the feeling we are trying to get
across.
As they leave the shop we see the long row of derelict houses that we saw in the previous film and, as she walks with the child past these houses, we hear her voice over the picture telling us how she feels about shopping with less money than that of most of her friends. She enters her home and begins to cook the potatoes. The child screams, she takes it to the toilet - it is leaking - she returns to her cooking. The husband returns from getting his unemployment benefit - flashback - where he sat for a soul-destroying hour in the dole queue.
They have their insubstantial meal and then sit down to watch television. The first thought that will come to some viewers’ minds is ‘Television! How can they afford it? Perhaps it is their own fault that they are in such poverty they’re lazy’. But then we hear their voices coming over the pictures explaining how the television set is the only thing that in a sense keeps them together. We hear her depression about the toilet, the damp, the food problems, We hear his depression about the lack of skilled jobs in his trade, the indignity of being on the dole, evenings spent in such a miserable, smelly, damp house.
At this point we want facts. How many families are like this, poor through no fault of their own? How many have emotional and physical problems such that they cannot work and how many people, even if they do work and have decent incomes, cannot get good housing because there just isn’t enough around. After a short piece of commentary, we cut to a Greater London Council planning discussion about how many people, and which people, need to be rehoused and how they are going to do it?
Now constructing a film in this way doesn’t give us just the facts about poverty and what people think ought to be done. Combined with facts, it leaves us with a feeling of what it’s like to be a family living in poverty. Out of this film comes really much more than a current affairs report. Above all we get an insight from both sides of the fence of privilege.
Unfortunately, this second sort of film takes much longer to make. Like the current affairs film, there must be research on what are the essential problems of poverty. To illustrate these in a documentary treatment, you need the confidence of this family. We need actually to live with them, see what their daily life is like in the home, at work, in the supermarket, at the employment exchange. Out of this vast panorama of daily life we have to select just those bits, such as selected in the above clip, that show the kind of food they eat, the kind of home environment they have, and so on. Similarly, rather than just ask a politician what he hopes to do, we must get the confidence of the planners, Sit in on their meetings, decide which meetings to film, get permission to film them, and decide which bits of the meeting will fairly illustrate the difficulties they have in deciding how to deal with poverty, their sympathies with the problem, and their efficiency in finding solutions. To set up this filming requires much more time.
We also need more time to film, to get lights into the supermarket, lights into the planners’ committee room, lights into the house, special lighting for all the close-ups - each separate tin of food would need careful lighting - thinking much more carefully of the 101 shots that are possible in each situation. In fact the whole operation takes much more time and you get much more out of the film.
Why don’t we make more of these films? The reasons, as always in television are time and money. Such good and rapidly filmed reports come out of political programmes by the talking-head method that more and more people are saying why shouldn’t any film be tackled in this way? Why do you need so many weeks to set up a documentary film? If current affairs can do it with two weeks’ research, why can’t you do it with two or three weeks’ research? And so more and more the actual time given to set up a film is just not sufficient to use techniques other than the talking-head method. Looking at most television documentaries on the screen today, you are looking at a film report; ‘walking talking’ films with a slight extra gloss on some of the visual commentary linking sequences.
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?