1 - An Introduction to Documentary Films

An Introduction to Documentary Films 
By Sylvain Duguay

[Introduction]
What is documentary film? How does it relate to this “Knowledge” Humanities class? How did documentary films come into being, and how did they develop over time? Those questions seem to be central to the course we just started. This past week, as an introduction to the course, we looked at the course outline, we participated in a small activity designed to get to know one another, and we had a look at the advent of cinema in general, and of documentary film in particular.

 [Title for part 1]
The Advent of Documentary Film 

We started the lesson in small groups, where we were asked to make a list of words we associate with documentary films, and then we shared those. From the list on the board, it seems clear that most people view documentary films as something informative or educational. But the words ranged from formal characteristics of documentary films (voice-over, interviews, etc.) to the topics covered by those films (war, politics, nature, etc.). We then saw how film was developed from photography, thought the experiments of Edward Muybridge and Jules Marey. It’s the French Lumière brothers who invented the first cinématographe. They sent their operators throughout the world to demonstrate the new technology and they drew very large crowds. After a year, though, they all came back to France and the Lumière started to sell their cinématographes to whoever wanted them.

At the beginning of cinema, two main trends were observable: fiction and non-fiction films. As we saw with “L’homme-orchestre”, by Georges Méliès, fiction film was mostly devoted to entertaining people through storytelling, magic, and visual effects. In this black and white film, a man is able to multiply himself and play all the instruments in a small band. It’s like the ancestor of special effects as we know them today. The Lumière film “Exit from the factory” exemplified the other trend: we simply see the workers of a factory leaving the grounds (for lunch or at the end of the day). It is non-fiction since the camera only records reality as it unfolds, not trying to stage it (or only minimally). It did not take long for those two ways of making films to take their own directions as many more people throughout the world started to experiment with film.

We also started to look at how documentary films constitute a field of knowledge. “Epistemology” is the philosophical term for the study of the nature, the sources, and the limits of knowledge. Knowledge can be defined as justified true beliefs, and documentary films often bring justifications to explain why their vision of the world (their belief system) is true, is reliable, is based on evidence or sound reasoning. Event though documentaries can be hard to define (as we saw from the variety of words in the lists we made), we will try to do that throughout the semester by watching a variety of films. As a guide, we looked at 5 categories of documentary films. They are not exclusive – more than one may apply to the same film:
1. Expository films: they simply expose a situation, often with a voice-over;
2. Observatory films: a small crew of filmmakers observes a situation as it unfolds, very discreetly. We are like a fly on the wall, spying on people’s lives;
3. Interactive: the filmmakers interact with the people on the screen (ex: interviews);
4. Reflexive: the filmmaker reflects on the process of filmmaking. It’s like a mirror reflecting film onto itself, forcing us to ask questions about truth and cinema.
5. Poetic: images and sound are used to compose a sort of visual poem, calling to our emotions rather than our reason.

[Additional Film’s Title]
Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922, USA, 79 min.) 

Robert Flaherty was a trader in the Canadian Arctic and as such he came in contact with many of the then called Eskimos (today’s Inuits). As he got to know them better, living with them and sharing their daily experiences, he started to film many of the events unfolding in the community. A first version of the film was lost to fire (film strips were highly flammable in those day), and Flaherty went back up north to shoot Nanook and his family again. We see, among other things, the Eskimos building an igloo, going walrus and seal hunting, visiting by kayak the trading post inhabited by White men, and many more details of their lives. The film was released to great critical acclaim, and it is known today as the first full-length documentary film.

Nanook of the North, by filming the day-to-day life of the inhabitants of the Arctic, clearly belongs to the category of the non-fiction film. As we watch the film, we have the impression to witness a way of life very foreign to ours, and to observe Nanook as his people as they take care of their needs for food, shelter, clothes, and more. The feeling is very realistic: the characters look natural, nature seems untouched by civilization, and there is an overall aura of authenticity attached to the images. But to say that it presents “the world as it is” may be stretching it a little.

Flaherty was faced with many challenges. His camera being very big (in the 1910s and 1920s cameras very not easily movable), he had to organize the action around the camera, rather than going where the action was taking place. Also, the film stock needing a lot of light, they needed to build an igloo open on one side in order to have enough light to give the “illusion” that they were inside. By the time Flaherty visited Nanook and his family (Nanook was not the Eskimo’s real name), they were already enjoying some of the perks of the civilized world (guns, clothes, etc.). Flaherty convinced them to reenact the ways of doing of their ancestors. Those factors, while they may force us to question the “truth” of what we see, were simple technological and logistical problems that had to be circumvented in order to make the film as real as possible. Even today, when we watch documentary films, we must always question what we see on the screen and ask ourselves what role (conscious or unconscious) the filmmaker did play in the shaping of the events depicted, and in what measure we can call them “real.”

[Title for section 3]
Opening our eyes and our minds to the world around us 

Documentary films definitely belong to the world of cinema: they have been central to the development of film since its early days and they as relevant today as they were then. It is important to be able to read documentary films properly in order to understand how they depict the reality onto which they turn their camera. By being more aware of the context of production, of the general history of the events depicted, and of the claims to truth made by the filmmakers, we are able to read the films properly, to understand their possible meanings, and to situate their relationship with truth.

Films like “L’homme orchestre” are certainly entertaining, but they do not really serve any other purpose than to amuse us. Documentary films, on the other hand, are “instrumental”: they have the purpose to educate and edify us. A film as simple as “Exit from the factory” tell us many things about the Paris of 1895 without even trying: who were the factory workers of the day (women and men), how they dressed, what means of transportation they used, how the buildings were made, etc. It’s a very brief glimpse into a past gone forever, yet preserved on film. While all those people have been long dead, they survive for us to watch and observe. Like our family photographs, or the home movies we make, they offer a trace of how people have lived and interacted together. I feel this way every time I take out the family albums, or run an old movie: I am reacquainted with images from the past, with people who have been a part of my life, some still here, some gone...

Films like “Nanook of the North” are more detailed: they take the time to introduce characters, their settings, and their daily activities. They are partly ethnographic (presenting another culture) by bringing to us an unknown way of life. By observing people in their habitat, we realize that our way of life, which we may believe is “normal”, is in fact nothing more than one way of living among many other possibilities. When we see this, our comprehension of the world changes, we open up to differences, and maybe become more accepting, more understanding of people around us.

By using the expository mode of filmmaking, those films open up a window on the world and it is our task to decode what they can teach us. We must make sure never to take for granted that was is shown to us is an absolute truth; we rather should take the opportunity to analyze the content of the films (as well as the way they carry their message) to understand what the is the relationship of documentary filmmaking to truth.

[Conclusion]

Using the possibilities of cinema to record the world as it was unfolding before their eyes, early filmmakers have laid the foundations for documentary film as we know it today. The short films of the Lumière brothers and the longer films like Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” allow us to access a world that has since disappeared. They speak to us though time, forcing us to question what we see, to appreciate the challenges they overcame during the filming process, and to question notions of truth and authenticity. We will most certainly come to understand those notions better as the semester progresses.