Documentary Films - a study

Documentary film as a very concept is something which can’t be defined in a textbook sense. It encompasses everything ranging from amateur home video to rare war footage. What started off as an exploration of the camera as an artificial eye took form of a well planned and motivated shooting exercise. There are immensely diversified forms of the medium and it would be impossible to talk about all of them even if the intentions are honest and the research is exhaustive because no matter how hard one tries, it is practically impossible to catch hold of all the significantly critical or definitive works primarily because of the absence of the very definition that we talked about earlier.
What one can do, instead, is to explain one’s perspective from what he has seen. And I would like to do just that- present my personal recollection of watching and relishing the films that I watched and relished.
If we go by a chronological dissection of the journey of a docu film, we come across the first ever films to be shot, which were the basic “discovery” and “awe” phase. The very images of those archaic films fill you with a sense of being there, as if it all were a cosmic event for you to see the times gone long back or lives lived eons ago, now left to the mercy of some film stock. Talking about film stock, it was a deciding factor in fixing the major intentions of shooting a film. Unlike today’s fortunate(or unfortunate- debatable) time when we have no limits to the things we can shoot over and over again just to get that perfect shot or that perfect still, our docu-ancestors had to make sure they were doing justice to the logistically precious film stock. So everything ranging from the subject to the location to the cast was decided once the balance amount was known, after the investment in the essentials of course.
So imagine that you intend to make a docu on railways- you would need to find out what exactly you wish to show. This concept which I perceive as Selective Filtering is the prerogative of the director. It is entirely up to him in his so-termed “subjectivity” as to how he wishes to realize the “vision” he has (if he has one). for example, going back to the Railways example, I wish to show a particular community of travelers- why they travel, do they have an alternative other than railways to commute, what is their financial state, what are the cultural repercussions of their decision, is this fact a prime mover of an economy or can be easily dispensed with, so on and so forth.
So as you saw, we might have limitless things to choose from in case of fixing the subject.
As with films, the “idea” is the closest you can get to understanding why a creative endeavor “succeeds” or “fails”. If the idea is something that inspires you to wake up in the middle of the night, take a walk and start writing, you would see the whole thing in your mind, and what could be a better example of a creative vision than this.
So if I am fired about my creative “germ” and engrossed in its appeal, I might as well be good at convincing others to see a shared dream.
We will stick to the same Railways example for convenience sake. And mind you, this is not something that I am personally close to. As a matter of fact, this would be the farthest topic from what my creative instincts will fathom. But coming back to the topic, what next? I have a brilliant plan; I have a couple of shoulders to carry it on. We sit and discuss, we brainstorm endlessly on our own perceptions and opinions about the topic. This discussion takes form of a structured paper which stands like a testimony of the process we have been through. So things are on paper now and we are all good to go realize our dream project. We hit the roads or the desired location for the shoot. It might be a collage of different indoor and outdoor locales. Some pieces might require artificial light in a studio; some might need to be interview format, while some mostly almost others need to shot in real-time on real locations like trains and stations. Apart from that, you might want to put in music and excerpts of images from different media. Again, you are the decider. What also might be required as a pre-exercise before starting the shoot is a survey or kind of a hit-the-road session. This helps in knowing the people we will work with, probably bettering or concretizing/structuring our intentions in a practically feasible manner, and furthermore get as accustomed and closer to the process as possible. This reminds me of the concept of Blocking in films, where you leave the camera on at the actual location of the shoot, for a stretchable time, just to finalize the quantity of lights, the spacing of characters, the movements, the basic vision of the filmed reality, the comfort level between the actors and the camera and the predictions of a possible fall-out, if any.
Now we have the idea in mind and on paper, the location in place, the logistics worked out. We need to fix up a shoot schedule now. The places that we wish to shoot- are they accessible legally, do we need to inform the authorities or seek permission to work under the legal framework? We need to answer all these critically important questions in this phase of the pre-shoot. The people come next. Ideally, if I were to see a film on the railways, what would I have liked watching or wished that I would see will form the things that I would like to look like in the final film. This essentially means I need to align my vision with reality. I need to see things happening in real. You might call this a script, but it is more of a cinema child- so I do not wish to dilute the cinematic terminology and would like to stick to the basic concept of an idea of a shoot.
So I write the script- the way the shoot will be done, the estimated time in reels, the things that I would like to show. Now trust me, I need to peep through an imaginary pair of eyes to see what my inside world will look from outside. The script would also have the people I wish to show, the time of the day I wish to do it at, the fictional/doctored elements involved(if any) and so on, the exclusion or inclusion of these varied elements would again be subjective according to a director.
So now I have the so-called screenplay on paper. I know exactly when I will shoot what. Now it is left to the logistics to fix days and location for the shoot, give an estimated gestation period to the shoot, talk to the actors/people, get them comfortable and rub-off their possible fear and apprehensions in facing the camera. Now it is very crucial to remove the element of camera-consciousness from the people who are being shot. The minute you get the sense of the person in front of the camera being conscious to an external presence, you lose the battle.
Coming back to our favorite excuse for a shoot- The Railways, I now know the people I would be showing on film- the janitors, the ticket sellers, the passengers, the relatives, the hawkers, the coolies, the beggars et al, how much time would each of them and why. This would depend on the alignment of individual “sequences” with the overture of the basic idea and the theme of the film. This semblance is very important. Each scene should form an important contributor, an indispensable part of the whole.

I wish to shoot a film on “The Saturated Development –Indian Railways”. It would consist of interviews with politicians, people on the road, people not on the road who write off railways as an archaic and lowly medium of travel, the artists and nature lovers who seek to explore newer sources of inspiration in the scenic countryside and the not-so scenic places en route. I would like to show some lonely shots of the train in a point-of-view manner. I would like to show why and how it works wonderfully for some and not for the others. I would like to pitch in some music to complement the feeling of journey; I would like to capture a moving India that lives on the wheels of these otherwise archaic wagons connected to the locomotive we all loved as kids.

Actuality films
Early films that delved with showing an actual event in real time, with almost no storytelling. The cameras could hold very small amount of film- may a minute or less in length.

Romanticism: Nanook of the North (1922)
A little element of directorial subjectivity comes in, with a pinch of imagination and a dash of personal motive.

Newsreel tradition: Russian Kino-Pravda newsreel series (cinema truth, or cinema verite in French), Why We Fight (Frank Capra- USA)
Reenactment of war footage by an eye-witness.

Realist tradition (Berlin, Symphony of a City, Rien que le heures, Man with the Movie Camera)
Focusing on man within man-made environments; it leaned more towards the impersonal (philosophical/holistic) or the avant garde

Propagandist tradition (Triumph of the Will-Leni Riefenstahl)
Made to serve a larger cause of administration-fueled persuasion, in an Orwellian color

Defining a Documentary Phase
Originality and rawness of the medium; improvisation; Italian Neo- Realism; French New Wave; intentional expulsion of a script, invisibility of the camera, suspension of superficiality, creative treatment of actuality.

Cinema verite (Harlan County, Don’t Look Back, Lonely Boy, Chronicle of a summer)
Although sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences between cinéma vérité (Jean Rouch) and the North American "Direct Cinema", pioneered among others by French Canadian Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman and Albert and David Maysles. The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement, Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choosing non-involvement, and Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favoring direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary. The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving camera (not a tripod) to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80:1. From there, editors find and sculpt the work into a film. The editors of the movement, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Myers, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde are often overlooked, but their input to the film so vital that they were often given co-director credits. Famous cinéma vérité/direct cinema films include Showman, Salesman, The Children Were Watching, Primary, Behind a Presidential Crisis, and Grey Gardens.

The '60s and '70s
In the 1960s and 1970s documentary film was often conceived as a political weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general, especially in Latin America, but also in the then turbulent Quebec society. La Hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, from 1968), directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, influenced a whole generation of filmmakers.
Compilation films
The creation of compilation films is not a recent development in the field of documentary. It was pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. More recent examples include Point of Order (1964),directed by Emile de Antonio about the McCarthy hearings and The Atomic Cafe which is made entirely out of found footage which various agencies of the U.S. government made about the safety of nuclear radiation (e.g., telling troops at one point that it's safe to be irradiated as long as they keep their eyes and mouths shut). Meanwhile The Last Cigarette combines the testimony of various tobacco company executives before the U.S. Congress with archival propaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.
Non-fiction film can also be used to produce the more subjective reflective attitude characteristic of essays. Important essay film makers include Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Raoul Peck and Harun Farocki.
Modern documentaries

Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins being the most successful examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets. This has made them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable.
The nature of documentary films has changed in the past 20 years from the cinema verité tradition. Landmark films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris, which incorporated stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger and Me, which made claims of chronology that were later questioned by critics such as Pauline Kael, placed far more overt interpretive control in the hands of the director. Indeed, the commercial success of the documentaries mentioned above may owe something to this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics usually refer to these works as "mondo films". However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Robert Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form.
The recent success of the documentary genre, and the advent of DVDs, has made documentaries financially viable even without a cinema release. There are now around thirty quality feature-length documentaries on notable photographers, for instance, a situation that would have seemed incredible twenty years ago. Documentaries are also being released only on the internet for those with broadband access, notably Stolen Honor (2004) about John Kerry.
Modern documentaries have a substantial overlap with other forms of television, with the development of so-called reality television that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged.
The making-of documentary shows how a movie or a computer game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is usually closer to an advertisement than to classical documentary.
Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices.
A docudrama or docu-drama is a type of work (usually a film or television show) that combines elements of documentary and drama, to some extent showing real events and to some extent using actors performing set pieces to take dramatic liberty with events.
Mockumentary, a portmanteau of mock documentary (also fictional documentary or false documentary), is a film and TV genre, or a single work of the genre. The mockumentary is presented as if it were a documentary, though it is not factual. It is a commonly used medium for parody and satire.
Mockumentaries are often presented as historical documentaries with b roll and talking heads discussing past events or as cinéma vérité pieces following people as they go through various events. Examples of this type of satire date back at least to the 1950s (a very early example was a short piece on the "Swiss Spaghetti Harvest" that appeared as an April fool's joke on the British television program Panorama in 1957), though the term "mockumentary" is thought to have first appeared in the mid-1980s when This Is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner used it in interviews to describe that film.
The false documentary form has also been used for some dramatic productions (and precursors to this approach date back to the radio days and HG Wells' The War of the Worlds).
Mockumentaries are often partly or wholly improvised, as an unscripted style of acting helps to maintain the pretense of reality. Comedic mockumentaries rarely have laugh tracks, also to sustain the atmosphere, although there are exceptions - for example, Operation Good Guys had a laugh track from its second series onwards.
Mondo film is a documentary film, more precisely a pseudo-documentary, usually depicting sensational topics and scenes.
The fad started with Mondo cane (1962) by Gualtiero Jacopetti and proved quite popular. Mondo films are often easily recognized by name, as even English language mondo films included the term often "mondo" in their titles. Over the years the film makers wanted to top each other in shock value in order to draw in audiences. Cruelty to animals, accidents, tribal initiation rites and surgeries are a common feature of a typical mondo. Much of the action is also staged, even though the film makers may claim their goal to document only "the reality". Today, mondo films are generally considered to be camp.
The Russ Meyer film Mondo Topless was one of the few "documentaries" restricted to the old midnight movie circuit of the pre-VCR era, as it explored strip clubs in 1960s San Francisco, at a time when strip clubs were a novelty in the United States restricted to centers of port-city decadence such as San Francisco.
Other examples of movies in this genre include Mondo di Notte by Gianni Proia, Mondo Balordo by Roberto Montero and Mondo Ford by Ricardo Fratelli.
The eighties saw a resurgence of Mondo movies, though now they focused almost solely on onscreen death, rather than cultures of the world. The Faces of Death series is probably the best known example of this type of mondo, or 'death' movie. The producers at this time still used faked footage, passed off as real.
The mondo film in the 21st century has transformed into a very 'in your face', gory spectacle, as seen in the 'Faces Of Gore' and 'Traces of Death' series. There is very little fake footage and many of these use news footage of accidents from the far east.
A nature documentary is a documentary film about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on film taken in their natural habitat. Nature documentaries are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema.
Most nature documentaries focus on a particular species, ecosystem or scientific idea (such as evolution). Although most take a scientific and educational approach, some anthropomorphise their subjects or present animals purely for the viewer's pleasure.
Although almost all nature documentaries have a human presenter, the presenter's role varies widely, ranging from explanatory voiceovers to extensive interaction or even confrontation with animals.
Well-known nature documentary makers and presenters include David Attenborough, Richard Brock, Jacques Cousteau, Marlin Perkins and Jeff Corwin.
The Panda Awards for nature documentaries are given every two years.
A pseudo documentary is a film genre which uses documentary style, location shooting and actuality film footage in the context of fictional narrative filmmaking. Most notably, it was associated with a briefly popular cycle of films that Hollywood put out in the late 1940s, especially those produced by Louis de Rochemont and directed by Henry Hathaway.

Reviews
The Housewife’s Flower
A fresh and a new take on the monotonous lives of a group of salesmen in Germany. They work for a company called Vorwerk. The film in a very real and unimaginative (temporal exteriority) manner, chronicles the lives of five salesmen, they go from door to door, each have a distinct style of selling, communicating and approaching people. The film gives you a sense of proximity to life in its daily routines, in its highs and lows, and its predictable and unamusing journey. What worked for me and as far as I can guess, not for others, is a sense of identification with the subject. These were a different group of people in some far end of the world but I could see images from my life in their ‘different’ lives. The meets at the end of every business day, the continuity(or inertia of success or failure), the same disgusting feeling of facing life every morning, the forgetting phase every night at bed, and so on….

WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception)
A very bad start (the narrator trying to be Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now- staring at the ceiling fan to the sounds of The Doors’ The End) made me think I have made a bad choice. But as the fast paced narrative took my attention, I was gripped into this rather investigative film about how misrepresentation of facts by the media in case of the gulf war and the recent infamous case of the non-existent but omnipresent WMD’s.
What it made me think was the eternal debate between form and content. And this film did it all the more, because though I must admit neither did the narrator have an incredibly impressive voice like the Hollywood actors nor the way the millions of bits from TV news reports, interviews with TV stalwarts from ABC, FOX, CNN, BBC and SKY, interspersed music bits to complement or highlight the irony of “we-bring-you-the-truth-as-it-happens-across-the-world” news reports, were put together, still I was deeply engrossed in the somehow-incongruous flow of the film. Why? Primarily because of the very subject of media “muzzling” and manipulations. Secondly, due to the investigative finesse of the director which unlike the Michael Moore’s now famous yellow-journalism genre, presents an unbiased “friendly” tone through-out. There is an appreciable level of vulnerability in the narrator approach which makes you one with the complex issues of international politics and the war tactics.