Opinion Sur Joven

Documentaries are boring. They are the poor cousins of fiction films. Documentaries are almost not films, but minor products meant for TV. If you believe this, you’re right. And wrong.

Sponge Doc

The documentary genre as we know it was more or less initiated by “Nanook of the North”, by Robert J. Flaherty, in 1922. It’s a masterpiece that describes the everyday life of an Eskimo in Alaska. The film is tender and amusing, but at some point we start wondering if there’s anything other than seal for dinner.

That’s the type of documentary we are most familiar with: the ethnographic one. The film-maker observes, dissects and organizes a story with knowledge on his side. In some cases, the knowledge was “on a side”, but this gave rise to a furious dispute about whether it was on the left or the right side of the director.

As years went by, the methods and the forms evolved; the range of topics is broader now as well. And documentaries showed their sponge conditions: any topic may be treated as a documentary if the film-maker finds a creative way to do it. Let’s see some illustrious examples:

“En Construcción” is a documentary directed by José Luis Guerin on the construction of a building in a bohemian neighborhood in Barcelona. It Spears and lets the workers speak, and its information provides us not only with a vivid image of social reality, but also with an intimate world of bonds, relationships and possible ways of living.

Another deep and entertaining proposal is “Santiago”, by João Moreira Salles. In this case the director resumes an old, truncated documentary project. He takes some of the old tapes and asks himself: “What did I do wrong? Why wasn’t my documentary as I wanted it to be?” Not only does he answer and finds himself throughout the film, but he also reaches wonderful aesthetic and staging levels.

In “Salvador Allende”, by Patricio Guzmán, the Chilean director talks about the Chilean president with admiration and relates him with his life, his dreams and what he could have become. If there’s a documentary ignoring the idea of objectivity and coldness this genre implies, it’s this one, because its dramatic structure is rich and it’s full of emotions.

These recent examples points one thing out (don’t ask me with which finger): the genre doesn’t need “great topics”. Just good ideas, an identity in the layout and adequate production. And, of course, technology to make it possible, although not so expensive as to cost an arm and a leg (which would make the shooting even more difficult).

Almost one hundred years ago, technologies made it possible to film the first moving images. Today, technological breakthroughs make shooting be just a matter of method.

Doc technologies

Jean Cocteau once said: “Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper”. The author of this article doesn’t know how much a Faber-Castell pencil costs, but it’s surely cheaper than filming anything. However, it implies that Cocteau was metaphorically speaking, which -if so- turns out to be profound and prophetic.

Today, more than ever in the history of film, anyone can make a documentary. Some household-price cameras have a professional film quality. The necessary gadgets are small, portable and, of course, very attractive. Filming with lighting and composition standards is much easier today than it was fifteen or twenty years ago.

The biggest problem is, however, as old as trying to avoid your mother-in-law. How can we find a good story? So many things made easier and so much simplicity when it comes to capturing images from the real world make us suddenly face the awful truth of our real necessity. Choosing the observation object is the first step in our career. And, as Aristotle used to say, “well begun is half done”. If turning on a camera and capturing moving images is so simple and anyone can do it, why aren’t there dozens of Kubricks and Scorseses waiting in line to get their Oscars?

Following the white rabbit

Like with every new wave, the documentary genre needed its academic legitimization. It’s true that, since Cocteau, the genre has received innumerable awards, but there were at least two crucial points to reaffirm it:

in 2004, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” won the top award at the most prestigious film festival in the world: Cannes. We can’t omit the importance of such an accomplishment. Not only was a documentary being awarded, but this was a full-length film filled with all sorts of arguments against George W. Bush’s government. It was breaking a long fiction hegemony with a very clear message the French (and the rest of the world) were sending to the United States: “We know what you’re doing, we know who you are”; this, of course, is a biased interpretation of my own. The Middle East was suffering the war against Islamic terrorism, the North American counteroffensive was claiming national security, a chubby guy wearing glasses and a cap was saying: “Don’t believe anything they say” and Cannes was awarding him.

The Dardenne brothers are another example of documentary genre legitimization. Not as hot as the Jonas Brothers, these two siblings have taken the fiction-documentary concept to a new limit. Movies such as “Rosetta”, “Le Fils” or “L’Enfant” are fictions conceived under certain documentary premises: the tempo, the framing and the total absence of music are some of the distinctive features of the documentary genre, used in this case to characterize strongly dramatic stories. Not that the whole plot has to be developed in monotony, but the emphasis is as much disguised as possible.

The Dardenne brothers offer their exemplary stories with almost all formal topics of the documentary genre, and that’s why they have challenged fiction. They’ve received awards from all over the world, as well as criticism and plagiarism. But no one can doubt these films have definitely encouraged many others to escape the fiction protocol -or not much of a fiction protocol- in film.

Like in any other challenge, some you win, some you lose. Although there’s a rhythm we must be willing to follow due to certain slowness, the results regarding the mood and the exposition of the conflict turn out to be both very subtle and French.

All cases described in this article represent the anxious white rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland”. We must follow them to where they take us.

Telling a story, generating emotions or expressing pain are still the engines of art, and hence of documentaries. Sensitivity upon injustice is what leads political documentarians to hit a nerve. But only their ability to handle the tools of cinematography will take their documentaries to the next level. Today, like in many other aspects of life, we seem to be close to everyone and everything, all the time. However, once this illusion fades away, we realize we still need to reach out, make an effort and a great commitment to get things done. And, as a sponge film-maker says, still be home in time for dinner. Of course there are no secrets, but only some words of encouragement: “Lights, camera… Action!”

Illustration by Guadalupe Giani

If you liked this article, please subscribe by clicking here