Everything is Political - Documentary Film

My favorite type of film/television genre is documentary. What I find most fascinating about documentaries is the fact that they purport themselves to be fact; yet, directors must answer to no one, so strict adherence to truths is completely unnecessary. Any framing of an image, whether for television, cinema, or even an art gallery, is inherently a political act. In my opinion, the representation of reality and the investment viewers have in the truthfulness of what they see is unmatched to viewer expectations of any other genre. If an action film fails to live up to the number of explosions one might like, for example, the film is typically shrugged off as a poor example of an action film. A documentary that contains even the slightest misrepresentation of truth, however, ceases the work from being documentary altogether. In fact, it may be classified any number of ways but documentary.

The same repercussions can be said for literary works deemed memoir or biography, which is why I see teaching documentary as a vital component to the traditional language arts classroom. Take the firestorm surrounding James Frey’s novel, A Million Little Pieces, for instance. After it was discovered that many of Frey’s accounts were fictional, readers, and most notably Oprah Winfrey, were outraged that they had been duped. Their indignation had everything to do with genre. If Frey’s novel were packaged as fiction, would it have changed the literary merit of the text? It’s doubtful. Would it have made his story any less poignant? Probably not. The point is, genre matters, and so does whether or not something is purported to be true. It is my hope to get students asking: Why do we care whether or not a film, television show, or piece of writing is truthful when it is presented to audiences as entertainment? This would be my way of presenting the notion that entertainment is never just entertainment – that everything is political, has meaning.

The main feature of documentary films is that they represent truth in some way. This doesn’t mean that they represent universal truths, but rather that the filmmaker can take facts and organize them in such a way to present a semblance of truth. Though there are a multitude of subgenres to documentary, each of which contains their own specifications, voice-overs, interviews, and archival footage are three of the most prevalent characteristics of modern documentaries.

Voice-overs are typical in today’s documentaries for the purposes of narration. Such narrations not only facilitate the message of a documentary piece, they also lend a sense of credibility to the images one sees on-screen. Here is an example of narration by both director (Werner Herzog) and filmmaker (Timothy Treadwell) in the film Grizzly Man:

Interviews are also popular in modern documentaries. “Talking-head” sequences, as they are called, often validate the filmmaker’s message by providing first-person narratives and/or expert opinions. Director Spike Lee relies heavily on interviews in his documentary film, When the Levees Broke:

Archival footage is typically used in documentaries to justify arguments without using narration or voice-overs. The archived footage, in essence, can speak for itself. Though stock footage is typically used in documentaries of a historic nature, it can also be employed to comment on issues that persist beyond a set historical period. Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s film, The Weather Underground, is riddled with stock footage to comment on historic events and to illustrate themes that span beyond just the 60s, 70s, and 80s:

While documentaries attempt to depict truths, they are also limited by those truths. After all, once a director fabricates any aspect of his or her show or film, all credibility is lost. The problem with documentary is that it is held in such high regard that it often supersedes reality itself. Because documentary is seen as factual, one all too easily forgets to question the images they are presented with. Again, every time an image is framed, the author’s intention must be called into question. This notion of realness is one of the many facets of documentary (and real life) that Jennie Livingston tackles in her documentary, Paris is Burning:

What does it mean to be real? Livingston suggests that authenticity is the ability to pass as reality without anyone questioning otherwise. This, in my opinion, is the backbone of documentary form. Documentary films are those cinematic and televised works that make audiences unquestionably think they are witnessing reality. After all, anyone who has seen Luis Bunuel’s world renowned documentary, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan, knows that images can lie. Everything is political.

Teaching Activity:

Because Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan only runs approximately 30 minutes, I would hold a screening of the film. After, I’d pass out copies of Vivian Sobchack’s article, “Synthetic Vision: The Dialectical Imperative of Luis Bunuel’s Las Hurdes,” have the students discuss the article in pairs, and assign them the task of shoot their own ethnographic documentary in the form of Bunuel.