Opinion - News Analysis   

The remarkable rise of documentary cinema

Mark Lawson

Most documentary films are as much about propaganda as civil service films 60 years ago.

IF YOU are ever stuck for a tie-break question to decide a quiz, try this: how many Oscars has the British Government won? This is not a joke about Tony Blair's thespian tendencies; the answer is two. In 1944, the Ministry of Information's Desert Victory won the first ever Academy Award for documentary; and two years later the trophy was shared with the U.S. Government for The True Glory.

Next year, this unexpected line of cinema history may have a late continuation, with the possibility of a man who almost became the American President taking the documentary Oscar. An Inconvenient Truth, the movie about global warming by the former Vice-President, Al Gore, must be a serious contender for the prize. Although, given Mr. Gore's luck, the film will get the most votes only for the Supreme Court to give the statuette to Who Killed the Electric Car? or The U.S. vs John Lennon, or any other of the numerous factual films that are currently appearing.

But the success of the politician's first big-screen project is the latest example of a remarkable and unpredicted trend in cinema. Although objectively the film is a souped-up PowerPoint presentation — director Davis Guggenheim has simply aimed a camera at a lecture on environmental catastrophe that Mr. Gore gives around the world — An Inconvenient Truth was at one point the most successful movie around in America, based on the calculation of earnings per screen. This performance confirms the evidence of other recent informational hits — such as Michael Moore's Bush-whacker, Farenheit 9/11, or Morgan Spurlock's Big Mac-basher, Super Size Me — that documentary is hot in Hollywood.

The fact that the British Government took or shared the documentary Oscars in 1944 and 1946 — with the U.S. navy's The Fighting Lady triumphing in the intervening year — shows the scale of the initial division between fiction and fact in cinema.

Although the gulf was deepened by the 1939-45 conflict — during which only official crews had access to the key reality material — documentary had always been associated with propaganda or, at best, support or short films, such as Night Mail (1936) and Coal Face (1935). These were two of the factual collaborations between the poet W.H. Auden and the producer John Grierson, and had a combined running length of 36 minutes.

After the period of domination by stories about the forces, documentary film, with both Walt Disney and Jacques Cousteau taking the Oscar in the 1950s, was defined by wildlife, a connection that endured for decades. During that time a reality piece would occasionally achieve critical and audience recognition — for example, Michael Moore's car-business documentary, Roger and Me (1989), or in the same year Hotel Terminus, a portrait of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

It was not until the turn of the millennium that we saw documentaries that, judged by impact and takings, might plausibly have competed for the main Oscars.

The key pieces in establishing real life as a big-screen force were Buena Vista Social Club (1999), by Wim Wenders, followed by Farenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me. Because artistic successes are always copied, moviegoers have sometimes had to try hard since then to find something made up. Recent factual smashes include Errol Morris' The Fog of War, a biography of the Vietnam war villain Robert McNamara; the business autopsy Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; and, returning documentary to its cute zoological roots, the Antarctic docu-drama March of the Penguins. This week When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee's four-hour film, premiered in New Orleans.

One reason that documentary became cinema's new direction can be deduced from comparison with the publishing industry where, during the same period that the movie-doc was rising, biographical and non-fiction books began to eclipse the attention given to fiction.

Practical reason

Another, more practical, explanation was that television networks in both the U.S. and the U.K. became intolerant of long, serious factual films, preferring the reality and folks-and-quotes shows that became known as "infotainment." This encouraged directors to find another outlet for their work.

However, the relationship between cinema documentary and television has always been testy. Sometimes the big screen has been a vital sanctuary for pieces censored or rejected from the living room: for example, 1965's The War Game, by Peter Watkins, which imagined nuclear conflagration to the horror of TV executives, who banned it.

But, less creditably, some producers and reviewers seem to feel that cinematic release confers a status on a piece that is not achieved by television transmission. Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares — a BBC three-parter about the West and terrorism — was only regarded as having achieved true seriousness in some quarters when it was cut in length but screened at the Cannes Film Festival and selected fleapits.

The eccentricity of this prejudice is that a film that has substantially reduced its potential audience is bizarrely regarded as having suddenly broken through. And a second drawback is that work that lacks the visual richness to be projected on to a large screen is nevertheless blown up in this way, simply because the director feels a rise in status. Several of the recent hit documentaries felt more suited to the lower exposure of being part of a flow of programmes on a minority TV channel.

Cinematic documentary, though, can be, and usually is, aggressively editorialising. A viewer finishes these films certain that the earth is burning (An Inconvenient Truth); or that a petrol-head conspiracy prevented cleaner vehicles (Who Killed the Electric Car?); or that the executives of Enron (The Smartest Guys in the Room) were as guilty as the Yorkshire Ripper.

All of these assertions may be true but some of these subjects might benefit from the post-screening discussions or counterblasts on which television would have insisted. More than 60 years after the Ministry of Information began the genre, Oscar-hunting documentaries remain a branch of propaganda. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

A critical, quality debate
The confession of Gunter Grass
Will the fragile peace last in Lebanon?
What the U.S. is doing to Pakistan
Corrections and clarifications
Muslim community tries where government has failed
The remarkable rise of documentary cinema
G8 failing Africa on AIDS
Nuclear deal
Stretching the limits
The cola controversy

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu