Not everything is as it seems in documentary-making

Geoffrey Macnab reports on a controversy splitting the film world

Friday 11 January 2008 01:00 GMT
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There is truth... and then there is truth, documentary-style. At the Berlin Festival next month, when audiences watch Errol Morris's new documentary about the American abuses at Abu Ghraib, they will be confronted with dramatic reconstructions of some of the most notorious incidents that took place in the benighted Baghdad jail. The film has the working title S.O.P (slang for "standard operating procedure")

"It is a combination of interviews and recreations," says the film's producer, Diane Weyermann of Participant Productions. "It is a very specific Errol Morris film, visually stunning with unbelievably powerful interviews and storytelling."

Meanwhile, at Sundance in a couple of weeks, festivalgoers can see Gonzalo Arijon's Stranded – the Andes Plane Crash Survivors. This is the story of the rugby players who survived through cannibalism for 72 days after their plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. Arijon, a friend of several survivors, takes them back to the site of their trauma. He, too, uses reconstructions. He, too, is after the truth that a newsreel or a bald statement of "facts" can't convey.

The nagging question is just how far documentary-makers should be allowed to manipulate events in their pursuit of this truth, however they define it. Those who do take liberties, through reconstructing or staging scenes, can look back to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), about an Inuit fisherman. Flaherty had no qualms about making his subjects carry spears rather than guns during hunts (on the grounds that it looked more exotic) or of having characters play roles.

In the current climate in British television, in the wake of "faked" royal documentaries and footage of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay's Nanook-like fishing exploits, Flaherty would doubtless be the subject of a witch hunt. However, many follow Flaherty's example.

For Werner Herzog, one of the most celebrated working documentary-makers, the obsession with filming reality is a dead end. At the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam last month Herzog was in belligerent mood. He had finished a new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, about the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. It is a typically quizzical piece of film-making in which Herzog ponders such questions as whether there is insanity among penguins. Herzog's real concern, however, is with what he describes as "ecstatic truth".

"Staging is the thing that everyone in documentary should do," Herzog told me, as if it was a mission statement. "The so-called cinéma vérité is, if at all, the answer of the Sixties, but we have had an onslaught on our sense of reality. There has been an explosion of new tools like digital effects, but it translates also in cultural forms like reality TV, which is staged, and even WrestleMania, which is a totally invented form of reality of so-called fights."

He argued that "recording reality and presenting it" was simply not what film-making was about and mocked "the pretence that a filmed fact constituted a truth".

So what is ecstatic truth? Herzog likens it to "the mystic transport of medieval mystics". This quest for truth is not necessarily fact-related. "Otherwise, the Manhattan phone directory would be the book of books. How do you approach such an elusive, strange, thing like truth? I believe it is poetry and music – and you sense it immediately."

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It is worth remembering the many contrivances – in particular, the use of poetry and music – that are used in Harry Watt's Night Mail (1936), one of the greatest British documentaries. The artifice lies not just in the Benjamin Britten score and the WH Auden poetry – "This is the Night Mail crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order." It is in the very fabric of the film. Purists might be startled to learn that the scenes of postal workers sorting envelopes on the train were shot in a studio. "To simulate movement, a piece of string was dangled and jiggled about, and the men sorting the mail – real Post Office workers, swayed in accompaniment," the writer Blake Morrison revealed in a recent essay.

For visionaries such as Herzog, the striving after transcendent truth results in beautiful and surprising film-making. In Errol Morris's work, reconstruction can add urgency and depth to his arguments. In lesser hands, though, the results can be very different. What audiences are likely to get are "fake" documentaries in which the lines between drama and reality are blurred.

Some in the documentary world welcome this. Others are appalled. For Weyermann of Participant (which has been behind such films as An Inconvenient Truth and Brett Morgen's Chicago 10, a documentary that includes animated reconstructions), as documentary evolves, it is only natural that film-makers should use new storytelling opportunities.

"I embrace the opening up of the form," Weyermann says. "To the extent that narrative elements are part of documentary, this can be a very positive thing. What does it really mean to be real, to be true? There are so many alterations of reality that take place in the act of filming and editing that the argument that something that incorporates fictional elements is false is bogus."

Iranian film-maker Maziar Bahari, director of Greetings From Sadr City, is likewise sanguine about the increasing crossover between fiction and documentary. "The main difference between a fiction film and a documentary is suspension of reality," he suggests. "If a documentary constantly reminds the viewers that they are watching a real thing but uses dramatised sequences, that is fine. I am not against dramatised sequences." However, in his own work, Bahari will not direct his subjects or to use editing tricks. To do so, he believes, it to break the unwritten contract between documentary-maker and viewer. "If someone enters a house you should be in the house and see him coming in or you should follow him in. I hate it when you see someone knocking on the door and then you see the answer from inside the house."

Veteran British director Leslie Woodhead (whose credits include Children of Beslan) disdains those who "fake" it. "I am immensely troubled by the blurry overlap between documentary and recreation," he says. "You need to let the audience know what they are doing so they can apply scepticism."

Often,Woodhead points out, documentary-makers who use dramatised elements and reconstructions aren't doing so because they are on a Herzog-like quest for ecstatic truth. Their motivation is likely to be more prosaic. Archive material tends to be so expensive that they can't afford to use it. Rather than pay £3,000 for a minute or two of old stock, it is easier to switch on the black and white button on the camera, wave it about and pretend the resulting footage was shot many years ago.

In his own work on eastern European subjects in the 1970s and 1980s, Woodhead sometimes resorted to dramatised scenes and recreations. "My justification was that they were subjects behind the Iron Curtain which we could not get access to by conventional means. For me, that kind of dramatisation was a last resort."

Arguably, there comes a point where traditional documentary can't do justice to its subject matter without resorting to manipulation or crossing moral boundaries. "That's probably why I changed to features," the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski reflected. Sometimes, he confessed regarding his documentary work, he grew too close to his subjects and found himself trespassing "in a realm which is out of bounds. That is the main reason why I escaped from documentaries."

So if you want to tell a story in exactly the way you want, you will have far more freedom if you use the label "fiction". Whatever else, no one then will be able to accuse you of "making it up" or "taking liberties".

Errol Morris's 'S.O.P. Standard Operating Procedure' premieres at the Berlin Festival in February (www.berlinale .de); a new edition of 'Night Mail' has just been released on DVD by the British Film Institute

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