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Documentary is a much maligned genre: it’s frequently a switch-offrather than a switch-on. Yet most people can mention a documentarythat’s really moved or fascinated them – on 9 /11 or Michael Jackson,for example – and large numbers of people have been caught up bydocusoaps like At Home with the Eubanks (C5) or The Osbournes(MTV and C4) and reality TV shows like Big Brother. So studyingdocumentary shouldn’t be as bad as it first appears. Here are someof the reasons why:

– it’s an enormously varied genre and is full of surprises;– whatever you like, there’s probably a documentary on it;– and – as your media teachers will say – it’s good for you, because

it’s very revealing about most of the key issues in Media Studies.

Studying documentary … the key issue?At the centre of all work on documentary is realism: documentaries –whether moving image or any kind of photojournalism – claim toshow us ‘reality as it really is’. They don’t. They portray versions ofreality, which suggest points of view about what they’re showing.The version of reality you see can be influenced by the documentary-makers themselves (reflecting their points of view), as well as by thedemands of the organisation and the audiences they are producingthe documentary for.

Pavel Pawlikowski, producer of several documentaries for BBC anddirector of the film, The Last Resort:

I make no bones about manipulating my subjects. I do it throughchoices in photography, sound, music, editing and narrative devices.

Imagining Reality

Documentaries are, however, no different from any other form ofrealism. Realism is simply a way of conveying a sense of reality foran audience. There are several ways of doing this. EastEnders andHollyoaks both aim to convey a sense of ‘the real’ for their audiences:in Hollyoaks the camerawork changes from static to hand-held, thepace of the editing is high and there are frequent editing effects andstylised lighting; in EastEnders, the camerawork is more static, thepace of the editing is much slower and the lighting tends to lookmore naturalistic. In other words, both soaps aim to convey a senseof the real, but they do that in different ways.

Realism: different ways of conveying a sense of the real for differentaudiences.

therealthing

studying documentary If you were asked to list your top five genres, it’sunlikely that you would include documentary.Jeremy Points, a former Head of Media, Film andCommunication Studies and now Media Studies Officerfor the WJEC Board, hopes to convince you thatdocumentary should be up there with the Sci-Fis andthe Horrors.

1:The documentary shot … Auguste Lumiere, Workers Leavingthe Factory (1895) The first documentary? Real orstage-managed?

2:Completed in the editing room…Dziga Vertov, Man with the MovieCamera (1929)Vertov, who used the phrase‘Kino-pravda’ – ‘cinema truth’,

borrowed later by French documentary maker, Jean Rouch as ‘CinémaVérité’ – talked about his work as ‘putting facts together in a newstructure’ so that people’s perceptions could be actively changed.This film ‘put facts together’ about a day in the life of Leningrad – inthe editing room.

The development of the genre: the main documentary

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Put formally, realism in fiction and documentaries is not a ‘windowon reality’ but is a constructed and ideological representation of it –a representation which reflects points of view about the subject-matter. You’ll be trying to understand what is involved in that ineverything you explore through the documentaries you study.

Representation: the images we see on TV or in film, plus points ofview about them.Ideologies: simply put, are points of view people like filmmakers andaudiences hold which reflect their attitudes, values and beliefs.

Documentary – the creative treatmentof actualityWhat do you understand by ‘documentary’? Most people say that adocumentary is factual rather than fictional or real rather than made-up. A few ideas and definitions which seem to support that idea arelisted below.

• ‘Documentary is something to do with conveying information –whether about topics, issues, events or life in the present or past …Based on fact, not fiction.’ (Oxford English Dictionary)

• The word comes from the French ‘document’, meaning a file.Hence, documentary is a kind of ‘fact file’, although the French word‘documentaire’ meant something like a travelogue, as earlydocumentaries took you to places you hadn’t been to.

• ‘Something that documents part of life around us. It’s difficult todefine, as documentaries these days are so diverse.’ (Paul Hamann,former Head of Documentaries and History, BBC)

• ‘Documentary – the presentation of actual facts that makes themcredible and telling to people at the same time.’ (William Stoff)

• Other writers stress with their definitions that documentariesalmost have a duty to raise social and political issues to keepsocieties informed.

Paul Rotha (contemporary of Grierson) in 1939:The use of the film medium to interpret creatively and in social termsthe life of the people as it exists in reality.

Paul Wells in 1998: A non-fiction text using ‘actuality’ footage, which may include liverecording of events and relevant research material (i.e. interviews,statistics, etc). This kind of text is usually informed by a particularpoint of view, and seeks to address a particular social issue which isrelated to and potentially affects the audience.

What do you think? Should broadcasters produce moredocumentaries on 9 /11, the recent Iraq war, the continuing politicaltensions in Northern Ireland or more reality TV like Big Brother?

All those points are true but, to me, they only tell part of the story.What I think is crucial to all documentaries is what documentary-makers do with the facts – the reality – that they are using as thebasis of their documentary.

John Grierson, one of the pioneers of documentary-making, whomade his first documentaries in the 1920s and 1930s and who firstpopularised the term ‘documentary’, described it as ‘the creativetreatment of actuality’. This is a key definition worth thinking aboutwhich suggests that documentary-makers do more than simply‘record’ reality – they ‘treat’ it ‘creatively’.

Transforming reality – starting with thereal‘Reality’ is only the starting point of a documentary. In Media Studiestoday, we tend to describe documentaries, like all forms of realism,as ‘constructed’ versions of the real. But perhaps we ought to followthe media writer John Corner who described documentaries as‘transforming’ reality into something else – into a creative (andconstructed) film or a TV programme.

Documentary – the key questionsOnce you’ve sorted out what a documentary is, you’ll be exploringthe conventions of the genre through extracts and case studies. Butmost importantly you’ll need to ask all the time how thoseconventions are being used.

• Do they provide a window on reality or are they just a version ofreality?

• Do they convey points of view about what you see and thus shapethe way you think and feel about people, events and issues?

Exploring documentary conventions andhow they’re usedConventions are the standard ingredients of a genre whichaudiences expect to see. Some documentaries work with thestandard conventions whilst other stretch and challenge them.Although with most film and television genres you might listconventions in terms of settings, locations, lighting and costume(mise-en-scène), characters, narrative, icons and sound, I think it’smore useful to group the conventions of documentary in terms ofhow information is conveyed. These conventions tend to vary slightlywith different styles of documentary. Take first the main conventionsof the standard ‘expository’ documentary – a documentary whichaims to inform audiences about an event or issue, normally using apresenter and / or voiceover to provide a commentary. I looked at adocumentary on Jennifer Lopez (shown on ITV) and found all of these.

Verbal information and sound– voiceover providing commentary and / or presenter;– interviews (with experts, witnesses to events, ordinary people –

sometimes talking direct to camera, sometimes with theinterviewer in the picture);

3:: The classic documentary

John Grierson, Night Ma il (1936)– typical of what’s often called

‘expository’ documentary,because it aims to inform – wasin fact a means of selling the

efficiency of the Post Office. It also tried to give the impression thatBritain was one big happy family. Scenes in the Royal Mail sortingcarriage were in fact shot in a studio.

4:Cinéma Vérité /Direct orObservational CinemaD.A. Pennebaker, Don’t Look Back(1966)Jean Rouch introduced handheldcameras and interviewed people on

the streets and called it Cinema Vérité. Pennebaker & Leacock usedthe same techniques and called it direct or observational techniques.As in this film on Bob Dylan, the style revolutionised documentarymaking.

styles – transformations of the real >>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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– mainly natural sound but music used frequently to createatmosphere or underline points.

Visual information– variety of locations appropriate to subject, chosen to illustrate

points: • archive footage • visual effects • still images.

Camerawork, lighting & framing – the way visualinformation is conveyed• Camerawork – conventional use of establishing shots, generally

static camerawork for interviews, often direct to camera, somesteadicam (frequently within locations), some hand-held (often toheighten action or create a casual atomosphere).

• Framing – tends to look less set-up than films but oftendocumentaries change between careful framing of intervieweesand locations with sequences which are more casual.

These conventions in fact developed as the genre itself developed –from expository and investigative documentaries, to Cinéma Vérité(or direct / observational cinema) in the late 50s and 60s, to fly-on-the-wall in the 70s and early 80s, to the performative in the 80s and90s and to the various forms of hybrid (docusoaps and the reality TVgame show hybrids) of the 90s and into the present. Have a look atthe time-line of the main documentary styles running along thebottom of the article to remind you.

Documentary – a developing genre?You can see many, if not all, of those different styles of documentaryimmediately you start to look at documentaries on TV and film today.These are the ways in which the genre of documentary hasdeveloped, reminding you that any genre is always open to change.

Many documentaries, in fact, blend different styles. Think no furtherthan some of the send-ups: The Royle Family parodies bothdocusoaps and the fly-on-the-wall documentary popular in the 1970sand 80s. The handheld camerawork with natural or amateur lighting,common in lots of documentaries and used memorably in the mock-documentary horror film, The Blair Witch Project has its roots in adocumentary movement called ‘Cinéma Vérité’ in France, and director observational cinema in America. Interestingly, this came toprominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a result of newlighter-weight cameras (effectively the first steadicams). It’s a goodexample of the way technology prompts a particular camera style.

Different styles – different audiencesGenres are not only dynamic, reflecting changes in society, cultureand technology, they also represent a balance between the profitmotives of the industry and the enjoyment of the audience.

First of all, there’s a good reason why documentaries are shown ontelevision at all. The laws governing terrestrial broadcasting in Britaindemand that broadcasters provide a public service and show

programmes which inform, educate and entertain. Documentariesare an easy – and relatively cheap way – of informing and educating.

More than that, though, television companies need to attractaudiences – to justify the licence fee (if you’re the BBC) and to attractadvertisers (who provide your finance if you’re in independenttelevision or satellite). In addition to the need to provide a publicservice, BBC2 and Channel 4 have a duty to cater for minorityaudiences. As a result, the documentaries shown on those channelstend to be much less mainstream than BBC1 and ITV – although youmight notice that Channel 4 pioneered Big Brother to attract youngeraudiences (also claimed by Channel 4 to be a minority not wellcatered for).

The new digital channels and satellite have different audiences againand try to produce documentary programmes in keeping with theirchannel identities. Satellite broadcasters, in fact, don’t have toproduce programmes which inform, educate and entertain at all asthey are not bound by national broadcasting laws. BSkyB recentlycommissioned a reality TV show based on six men competing for theattentions of a beautiful woman – except that the woman turned outto be a man. As The Sun said (also owned by BSkyB owner RupertMurdoch) this was a ‘reality show too far’. All of these points emergeby looking at the kinds of documentary produced by all the differentbroadcasters – which is something you need to do.

Putting it all together – editing andpositioningYou’re now familiar with the way conventions have developedthrough different documentary styles and how documentariesfrequently mix those styles. Now you need to come back to the basicquestion: how do documentaries creatively transform the real? Muchof this comes down to editing – a crucial element in documentary.

At its simplest, editing a documentary is about selecting whatmaterial will be included in the final documentary, organising it intosomething that will interest the audience (turning the footage into anarrative) and ending up with an interpretation of the subject of thedocumentary. Documentary-makers tend to film about ten times theamount of material which is finally used (in some cases more). Rightaway there are two ways in which documentaries transform material:

– they convert the material into a story– they only show part of the ‘whole’ picture.

What they also do is edit together material to make a point.

Michael Moore’s recent Bowling for Columbine (2002), adocumentary on how two school students shot schoolchildren in thesmall town of Columbine USA, is full of this kind of editing. Onesequence starts with an interview with an organic farmer in Michigan,James Nichols. After this first sequence of Nichols innocentlyintroducing himself on his farm, we are shown archive footage of hisarrest for involvement in the Oklahoma bombing and the killing of

5:Fly-on-the-wallRoger Graef, The PoliceThe 70s and 80s broughtcameras into people’s livingrooms and workplaces (likeflies on the wall). Do theysimply observe?

6:Seriously InvestigatingPanorama, BBC – RichardDimbleby presentingThe investigative documentary – likethe expository – has tended to beassociated with TV and aims to

investigate issues. Despite looking balanced, they generally convey aparticular point of view about the issues they investigate.

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167 people. Timothy McVeigh was executed, James Nichols’ brotherwas imprisoned but there was insufficient evidence against JamesNichols himself. Michael Moore comments that the ‘Feds didn’t havethe goods on him’. We then see a further sequence of James Nichols,full of close-ups and including cutaways of an expressionless MichaelMoore, nervily defensive, accusing his ex-wife of spreading rumoursabout him. The editing – and Michael Moore’s questions – exposehim as being at least stupid and at worst a terrorist bomber.

The editing has, in other words, positioned the audience to adopt aparticular point of view. This is what documentaries do all the time –and something you’ll be able to uncover by asking how documentaryconventions are used. Below are questions you can ask when you’reexploring your own documentaries.

How documentaries use conventions

The verbal• Does the presenter/voiceover attempt to persuade audiences of a

point of view?• What kind of language is used – emotive, guiding audiences to

think in a particular way?• What kinds of interviewees are used? Ordinary people / experts? Do

we believe some more than others?• Are music or sound effects used to suggest a point of view about

the subject?

The visual• If there’s a presenter/ people being interviewed, what image is

given to them and why (dress, physical image, body language,backdrop against which they’re filmed)?

• How does camerawork affect your point of view about what /who isbeing filmed?

• If visual effects are used, how do they affect your point of viewabout the subject?

• How is editing used? (Length of shots/scenes, placing contrastingscenes next to one another to make a point, cutaways.) Are yourattitudes to people and the subject affected by editing?

• How does turning the subject of a documentary into a ‘story’ affectthe subject?

The documentary style• Does the documentary style affect how you think about the peopleportrayed / the subject of the documentary? M M

,follow it up: Find out more about documentary onMoreMediaMag: Biggie and Tupac from MM1Michael Jackson from MM4Pennebaker and Hegedus; Big Brother 4; How to construct aradio documentary from MM6

Further readingVivienne Clark, James Hunt and Eileen Lewis: Key Concepts inMedia Studies, Longmans (2003) – good overview section ondocumentaryJo Wilcock: Documentaries: A teacher’s guide /ClassroomResources Auteur Publications (revised 2003)Paul Wells: ‘The Documentary Form’ in Introduction to FilmStudies, Ed. Jill Nelmes, 2nd edition, Routledge (1999) – goodoverview with case studies on Robert Flaherty, HumphreyJennings, Leni Riefenstahl, Frederick Wiseman and HoopDreams/When We Were KingsJon Ronson: ‘The egotists have landed’ in Sight and Sound,Nov 2002 – on ‘performative’ documentary and Bowling forColumbine – articles can be reprinted from the Bfi website –www.bfi.org.ukMichael Moore and Nick Broomfield have their ownsites:www.michaelmoore.comwww.nickbroomfield.com

Jeremy Points is the Subject Officer for Media Studies for WJEC.

7:Enter the performersMichael Moore, Bowling forColumbineThe 80s and 90s brought theperformers: Nick Broomfield andMichael Moore, who took centre

stage in their own documentaries. Both have produced documentariesrecently: Michael Moore’s brilliant Bowling for Columbine (2002),based on the killing of high school students in Columbine, Colorado inApril 1999 and raises questions about US gun laws. Nick Broomfieldhas returned to an earlier subject, Aileen Wournos, a female serialkiller who was recently executed and for whom Nick Broomfieldhimself was called in as a witness. Aileen: The Selling of a Serial Killer(released 2003).

8:The first hybridsDocumentary meets soapopera – to increase televisionrat ings?Th e O ff ice – a send-up of thedocusoap, focusing on key

characters who talk direct to camera . A ‘hybrid’ documentary,where at least two genres are mixed.

9:The current phase of hybrids:documentary meets soap meetsgame show and even talk show– definitely increasing ratingsThe more recent reality TVmakes a hybrid out of

documentary, soap opera, game show and even talk show, whenparticipants are interviewed.

styles – transformations of the real >>>>>>>>>??????