Oh,
how little I knew about the coal mining industry in Britain, the daily lives of
herring fishermen, or the miserable existence and intense poverty of the
inhabitants of a mountainous region of Spain before this class!
Although
those things had never had consequence to spark my interest, after watching the
documentaries, I had the desire to learn more.
This very practice is at the heart of documentary filmmaking: the
creation of an alternate way of looking at the world and a desire for the
viewer to know something more. Nichols elaborates
that: “In viewing documentary films we expect to learn or to be moved, to
discover or be persuaded of possibilities that pertain to the historical world.”
(p. 38)
Each
film we viewed had their own stock elements belonging to the genre of documentaries:
reliance on social actors, verifiable information (both in title cards and in
visual evidence), an air of authenticity, etc.
But it is in the contemporary viewing of these pieces where a new
historical reality (or at least a perception of that reality) is created. It didn’t really matter that The Drifters seemed to recycle footage
repeatedly throughout the piece (note for instance how the fish are always in
the same formation and direction each time their mass in water is shown, or the
rope around the post, constantly winding, but never changing shape or size, to
cite a few examples.) In fact, the
process is still used today, where television news stations have stock footage
to pull and over which to add voice-of-authority or voice-of-God commentary.
Just
this week, KSL did a special on the story of the school bus that hit and killed
a little girl exiting from another school bus in the Jordan District. While later in the day, the footage was of
the two actual buses,
the initial story that I caught featured an image of a
bus that I recognized from a different story a few weeks ago.
Though they chose to use evidence that was
not directly associated with the event, it was historical archive footage that
served their purpose. Nichols highlights
this practice by stating that: “We tend to assess the organization of a documentary
in terms of the persuasiveness or convincingness of its representations rather
than the plausibility or fascination of its fabrications.” (p. 26)
As
an audience in a documentary, we agree to suspend our disbelief; making the
perception fed to us by the filmmaker, the reality. Clearly the shots of the men sleeping or
waking up in The Drifters are staged,
and the men eating in Coal Face were
positioned and lit for filmatic purposes; but these practices serve a purpose
to tell the narrative in a way that appears real. The films take the shaping of reality even
further by overlaying images and imposing mood music onto the piece, so the
evidentiary footage goes beyond mere newsreel into the realm of constructed
emotional manipulation. But it’s
manipulation that the audience accepts, and with which it chooses to engage,
because we do, in fact, desire to know more.
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