I was watching a documentary the other night—I’m not going to say which one here, because it was good and intelligent overall, and the filmmakers might be reading this—and got annoyed immediately because it was steeped in the same storytelling cliches as so many other documentaries made nowadays.
It started with a sort of compressed, trailer-like summary of the entire running time of the thing I hadn’t watched yet, then cut to credits, then reintroduced the main subject in the middle of a current project/mission/endeavor before flashing back to the beginning and moving through their life chronologically. Along the way, there were little sections that felt like the musical montages in a Hollywood feature that sprint through chronology to get to the next big moment. There was an “ironically funny” montage scored with a pop song that seemed to make fun of one of the main subjects a little bit. The interviewees were all sitting in chairs, like in a TV newsmagazine segment. They weren’t allowed to speak for more than a few seconds at a time before the movie cut to some other image or piece of footage.
The thing didn’t breathe. It couldn’t because it was dancing as fast as it could.
It made me wish, for probably the zillionth time in recent decades, that we could have more work in the vein of cinema verite or “direct cinema” that was so omnipresent from the early 1960s through the ’80s. Then, it was considered sufficient for a documentary to pick an interesting subject and/or people and hang out with them for a bit, rather than constantly contriving and laboring to entertain—and in the process, borrowing a lot of the same techniques from commercial fiction films that documentarians were once rightly suspicious of.
Nonfiction filmmakers don’t all secretly wish they were making scripted movies with actors, but the cliches sometimes make it feel as if they are. A movie where a thing is stolen tends to be presented as if it were a heist movie. A musical documentary about an artist’s rise and fall is structured more or less like a Hollywood biopic and falls back on inspirational cliches about survival and perseverance. In so doing, it glances over the more unsavory things in the subject’s past. (That’s probably because you need music rights to make a music documentary, film rights to make a documentary about a filmmaker, and literary rights to excerpt text from a writer-philosopher like James Baldwin and have somebody speak it in a new context, and the family tends to control all that.) The goal is no longer to capture or even represent reality but to recontextualize it as a story or, more specifically, as entertainment. A gripping narrative. A humdinger.
I think we as a culture of filmmakers, film critics, and film viewers need to get back to the Maysles Brothers and other filmmakers of their era—pre-Internet, pre-cable television—and reconnect with the idea that the documentary mode of filmmaking in the middle part of the 20th century—the purest, most uncompromising period, to my eyes—was mainly about, well, documenting stuff. You know: seeing, observing, reporting, presenting. Making y0u feel like you’re there.
Many of the greatest works of nonfiction cinema from that period are revered primarily because they concentrate on that and don’t get so hung up on giving everything a propulsive momentum and a Hollywood feature-like presentation. That’s why so many nonfiction films about sports teams or individual athletes build toward a big game, match, or hoped-for comeback (it’s a sports movie, but real!). It’s why so many legal documentaries start with the crime or offense and take you through the process until a final verdict is delivered. It’s why many military or war documentaries are about a particular mission. Most of them have what screenwriting instructors would call a three-act structure.
This invites the question (OK, it’s just me asking the question): If nonfiction films are determined to look, feel, and move like fiction, what’s the point of nonfiction filmmaking? Why not just read a book, a PDF, or a collection of Wikipedia pages?
It didn’t used to be like this.
The first documentary I saw that made an impression on me and made me think about the difference between fiction and nonfiction was “Gimme Shelter,” the movie about the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969 that ended with a murder. Directors Albert and David Maysles and editor Charlotte Zwerin framed the story around Mick Jagger visiting the editing room and reacting to the project being put together. The murder was replayed on the editing table (this was the days when documentaries were shot on 16mm film!) by running the footage forward and backward and freeze-framing it, like the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination. Jagger’s reactions to the tragedy, the filmmakers’ feelings of complicity, and the larger societal context for these large and chaotic gatherings of youth culture were the movie’s main points.
I branched out into other works by people who were major players in the so-called “direct cinema” movement founded by Robert Drew, who did two great documentaries about John F. Kennedy, “Primary” (which is about what you think it’s about—the gears of the electoral machine) and “Crisis,” which allowed Drew into the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It’s fascinating now to consider that this period of nonfiction filmmaking was a reaction to the way things had been done from the silent era, when there was a lot more fudging of events and details, and some straight-up dramatizing and inventing. Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” and “Louisiana Story” and other notable nonfiction works fr0m the first half of the 20th century the first nonfiction films to be taken seriously on a large scale, but substantial portions of them were devised from whole cloth—scripted, you might say. And the insistence on Hollywood feature film quality images and sound closed off the possibility of just gathering up a couple bags of equipment on a whim and traveling light, as they say, to whatever the location happened to be. Drew, who I profiled over 20 years ago, told me that he built the first handheld 16mm camera sync-sound camera (with advice and help from fellow documentarians) because he wanted to make it easier and less expensive to make nonfiction, and make the subjects feel more at ease than they would if the were staring into a big camera under hot lights while surrounded by a large crew. Was he successful? I think the wave of classics that he helped usher in speaks for itself.
What makes the best midcentury American and English nonfiction features seem fresh and startling (and somehow new almost 70 years later) is the feeling that you are an invisible witness to things as they happen. You feel the atmosphere of the place and the energy of being in the same space with the people. Even moments of inertia are abuzz with the possibility that something incredible could happen at any moment. There are pauses and silences.
And there are moments that don’t further the plot, such as it is (the idea that a nonfiction movie could have a “plot” indicates how far we’ve strayed from Drew’s grace). Think of the Maysles Brothers’ “Salesman,” about Bible salesmen going door-to-door in suburban Florida: We watch one of the subjects driving endlessly around the neighborhoods, musing about the streets and conveying how out-of-place he feels, and how unrelenting the pressures of capitalism can be. All without ever seeming like the movie is trying to do this.
Sometimes a silent reaction tells you more than words ever could, as in Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason,” the entirety of which consists of an evening spent in the company of the title character, a gay hustler and wannabe-cabaret performer; the hesitations before Jason begins a new story and the little looks he gives to the filmmakers/the viewer as if to guage their reaction are as indelible as anything he says. You get a sense of a whole person, not a cog functioning inside of a story.
The opening mini-version of a nonfiction film has been around as long as so-called “reality TV” programs and cable documentaries about true crime and network TV news magazines and personality profiles. But it seemed to tighten its viselike grip on documentary filmmaking once streaming platforms came in. It’s all very fishy to me. It’s as if the filmmakers are trying (or being ordered) to create a way for people to pretend they watched the actual movie when they only watched the first few minutes.
Is an algorithm being gamed? There used to be a very complicated equation at Netflix, still the largest streaming platform, for determining viewership numbers. It pointedly avoided telling you what percentage of a program’s audience watched the entire thing from start to finish and still avoids doing that. Basically, those who watched all 90 minutes of a program or movie and those who only watched the first few minutes are thrown together into an average. This turns these streaming numbers into voodoo that doesn’t relate to the actual experience of watching a thing and engaging with it. Whether you autoplayed it while you were sleeping or half-listened to it while making dinner, Netflix pretends you saw the whole thing.
Given all this, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that filmmakers are designing work around the rules and/or constraints of whoever is writing the check for finishing funds or distribution or licensing. A similar but much bigger and more amorphous set of influences explains why so many of the nonfiction series and movies that get picked up for distribution and/or streaming are about true crime or celebrities. One that’s about both is a funding slamdunk.
Great work has been (and will continue to be) produced in these established modern modes. But only if filmmakers are able to navigate the minefield of permissions and rights and still come out with something that’s not a glorified advertisement for the subject and their intellectual property or cultural legacy (as Ezra Edelman discovered when his Prince documentary was canceled by Prince’s family for delving into Prince’s problematic relationship to women).
However, the more purist, direct cinema attitude toward the mission and function of nonfiction filmmaking is being lost. It never was too commercial and thrived artistically because nonfiction filmmaking had not yet learned how to mimic feature film techniques. The abstract, hypnotic re-creation sequences in Errol Morris’ 1988 true crime doc “The Thin Blue Line” might have sent us down this road in certain ways, prompting multiple generations of filmmakers to want to be like Morris without realizing there’s only one of him, and that even Morris sometimes can get lost inside his own visionary navel.
There are living masters of old-school documentary filmmaking. The greatest is Frederick Wiseman, whose films are covered extensively on this site. Start with “Titicut Follies” or “In Jackson Heights” if you’re new to his work. But know going in that there are no narrators, no talking heads, and no identifying names or titles. Watching his movies is like arriving in a new town where you don’t know anyone and trying to figure out who is who and what’s important. In other words, it asks you to do a little work and have a little imagination.
That, more than anything else, should be a more important mission for nonfiction filmmaking. We have plenty of entertainment options. What’s missing is a sense of what life is like.