New Challenges for Doc film

Brian Wilson

Documentary: I think we are in trouble

Audiences in the 1890s required for the new medium what they expected of older media--stories, narratives with begin middles, climaxes and denouements and ends. And it was the fict film that was to provide for this age old want. Only when Flah began to structure his actuality material so that it too might satisfy those needs could Grearson and others detect a new form and name it "documentary"

But the need for structure implicitly contradicts the notion of unstructured actuality--idea of doc is sustained by ignoring this contradict. Rotha: "documentary's essence lies in the dramatization of actual material."

Questioning the basis of the idea on which doc rests

Effects of the camer's presence, decision when to film and when not; how to light what lens to use, and where to stand; where to position mic--one can legitimately begin to query what is "actual" in Rotha's
"actual material"

Then there is crucial work of molding the film into a culturally satisfying shape--need to ignore sequence of rushes, crosscut, build climaxes, to remove or add sound, add commentary and music, titles…

On the basis of Grier's notion of a separate form we have estab a hierarch of truth in film whereby documentary stands higher than fiction film.

By late 40's crude idea of separating doc from fiction had rec'd may knocks.

Night mail: mail sorter sequences in studio: "We couldn’t afford what they have in feature films--that is, a rocker set…so all we could do was to move by hand, out of picture, certan things like balls of string hanging down, make them sway regularly to give the impression of the train moving, and get the chaps to sway a little bit."

Since doc required the same tech as feature the resultant confusion could only be unscrambled by call the purpose of the filmmakers and the resonses of the audience into the balance

For some the solution to the problem of rediscovering the roots of doc lay in advancing the technology--i.e. direct cinema…by 1960 the technology was at hand to break out of the bind created by using feature film equipment to make documentaries… possible to observe without elaborate previously agreed-upon arrangements, without direction, without lights

Verite--the grain had been found: "acutual material" as mined from life, fresh and vivid before your very eyes. Yet the need for "dramatization" rooted as it was in millennia of storytelling, had not gone away

Chronique: Rouch and Morrin understood better the effect of observation than the Americans… They understood better the observer on the observed and obeying their own notion of what "truths" were possible in the filmmaking process, they resolved that honestly demanded they be visible in the final film.

The new tech did not solve the probs of doc, rather it pushed them back to basics. Tech did not touch the moral and ethical difficulties of the filmmaker. If anything the ease with which he could penetrate other people's lives increased these problems. And it did not tackle the basic need for all messages to be structed in obedience to cultural codes--to tell stories. Direct cinema and verite did not create a new code…

For Morin and Rouch the only verite was one that included the filmaker--as if it were the case that the only subject for doc film -- as if it were the case that the only subject for docu film was the making of docu film.

Having establ that some films contain a greater degree of a particular sort of truth than others, and having done so on pretty tenuous grounds, can any valid basis for such work now be drawn?

In UK verite has become simply a question of long handheld takes, acuality sound, and a certain looseness with the rules of continuity cutting.

Verite invites us to consider material as evidence. The "Fly on the wall": rhetoric increases this…

Verite claims to stand not only as specifics but also as examples of general cases… impression that events are happening simultaneously because of crosscutting between different areas rendes the material that much more suspect