In What Sense Is Documentary Films Political - Essay Example

In What Sense are Documentary Films Political The documentary is stylistically viewed in terms of being a non-narrative genre of film. In fact, theterm documentary is actually a rather broad umbrella term that covers a wide variety of sub-genres, some of which may seem contradictory to each other. For instance, some documentaries strive to present as objective a perspective as possible using a stationary camera and static interviews. Others engage highly stylistic forms of subjectivity intent on unapologetically pressing forward an agenda. The National Socialist Party Congress of 1934 was filmed for a documentary by the infamous Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. This stunning example of political manipulation through the art of the cinema reveals in excruciatingly yet undeniably artistic fashion how the great Nazi rallies were prepared by utilizing a geometric formation that successfully and subtly succeeded in transforming what was in reality a rather nebulous mass of humanity into what appeared to be single-minded entity. The deliberate and chilling procession by Adolf Hitler's toward his place of honor above and away from everybody else stands as a symbol of his rise from lowly and anonymous soldier to destroyer of worlds. When the madman rise to the stand where his beady eyes survey the glory that has been created to extol his own particular brand of insanity, he becomes far more than just a small town boy made good; he is a god. In keeping with the title of Riefenstahl's account, Hitler in that moment becomes nothing less than the very epitome of the people's triumph of the will. No longer just a single entity, he transforms into a symbol of the German character. Documentary films come with a built-in advantage that dramatic films lack: audiences have been conditioned to expect that this genre of cinema will accurately reflect reality while presenting substantiated factual materials. Because of this audience expectation, documentaries have long been considered the primary channel for delivering a message. Once America entered into the fray following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States War Department moved quickly to build up motivation among young male audiences to enlist and put their lives on the line. Among the many other award-winning moviemakers who were recruited to make propaganda films was multiple Academy Award winner Frank Capra. His Why We Fight series was instrumental in getting wary Americans to eagerly sign up for what looked to be a long war. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the first segment of Why We Fight, "Prelude to War" (Capra, Litvak, 1943) to be shown not only on military bases but also in high schools and even inside churches (Hnicke, 1997, p. 270). The films of Nazi propagandist Fritz Hippler were shown to audiences around the world, and the infamous The Eternal Jew (Hippler, 1940) is also, unfortunately, entirely representative of the rest of Hippler's demented oeuvre. In fact, it is widely considered to be one of the most hate-filled representations ever put on film. If the documentary form is not necessarily intended to entertain but to inform, then this film is an example of what a documentary film should not be. The only people it could possibly entertain are like-minded anti-Semites and the only information contained within is a glimpse into the evil that allowed the Third Reich to rise to rule. As might be expected in light of the ease with German citizens embraced the terror of Hitler, audiences throughout the country eagerly embraced its portrait of the upcoming annihilation of the Jewish race. Film in the right hands can act to mandate policy and the Nazi documentaries of Fritz Hipper mandated that that genocide would become a national policy (Hoffmann, 1997, p. 173). Jews are bad is a remarkably simplistic idea and political documentaries have proven time and again that nothing is more remarkably effective than flogging a simple idea like a dead horse. Politics in any arena works best when the manipulation is in perfect concert with the almost maddening repetition of a few basic ideas. The arena of politics is an interesting paradox; is the site where one most wants complex answers to complex problems, yet it is the historically the location of the simplest answers that are embraced fully by the masses. The Nazis used film to forward their simple political idea that the Jewish race was less than human, or "Untermensch" (Michael & Doerr, 2002, p. 408). In the films and the posters that were placed in the lobbies outside German cinemas, the Germans were presented as Aryan masters of the universe: bold, strong, healthy. By contrast, Jews were shown to be evil, disease ridden, dirty; vermin that had to be annihilated before they infected the pure Aryan race with another black plague. These films and posters endeavored to engender an irrational fear and hatred of the Jews; the fact that the Holocaust took place is an indication that the politics of film worked. The first documentation of the horrors of the Holocaust that was shot by those not themselves culpable was filmed by Allied troops as they first penetrated the evils inside the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. However, this shocking footage was quickly seized and hidden in the archives of the British Ministry of Information due to concerns over what the reaction would be to such images in light of a German that was still divided (Shandler, 1999, p. 20). This self-censoring of material deemed too sensitive is an example of the type of politics that are often put into play behind the scenes of documentary filmmaking. Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) is also a documentary about the Holocaust, but compared to the raw images of those first soldiers who brought cameras to record the skeletal bodies of the concentration camp survivors, it is also a beautiful work of art. Is the lesson to be learned that even the most horrible images should be framed by artistry before being offered to the public Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) explores many of the concern that the Holocaust brings to the mind of anyone who watches any cinematic representation of it. The use of archival footage adds both immediacy and authenticity. The documentary also makes excellent use of the judicious use of several very brief segments shot in colour at Auschwitz in 1955 to counterpoint the much more familiar black and white newsreels and photographs. Several visual images that appear in Resnais' film has never been made public before and the counterpointing of archival footage with then-contemporary footage of Auschwitz minus the horrors has the jarring effect of both dislocating and relocating the evil being witnessed (Insdorf, 2003, p. 36). Documentary filmmakers have traditionally proclaimed themselves quite vocally to be the truth-telling faction of a medium that has built enormous profits upon the idea of dreamlike fiction. While mainstream film presents images of thirty year old actors playing teenagers, or profoundly unrealistic images of gang members breaking into song and dancing ballet on the streets of New York, the documentarian is the last bastion of grainy, black & white reality. And by reality, what these filmmakers really mean is truth. Documentaries tend to be only place where politicians are ever placed on film in all their earnestness; they may mug for the camera in a cameo in a Hollywood comedy, but the documentarian has exclusive rights to the seriousness of the rule. An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) uses time-honored documentary effects of using statistics and data to push across it message of climate change and global warming. Thirty years ago a documentary about the weather-even one featured a former Vice-President, might not have been considered a "political" film. It is interesting that this movie is regarded more as a political document-even a radical leftist tract by its detractors-than as film about meteorological changes to the planet. Through a slide show presentation that Gore has presented live across the globe, the former Presidential candidate presents the scientific evidence for global warming, while in other sequences he carries on a monologue about politics in general. What makes such a movie political There is nothing particularly political about the subject, and just because it stars a politician is no reason to assume it must be political in nature. The answer to the question of why this film must be considered a political film lies in the fact that it is a documentary and documentaries are expected to contain only facts and no interpretations. The politicising of aesthetics can be seen in a typical criticism of the film: "In the end, the film loses its credibility by resorting to ever more frightening and unlikely scenarios designed to galvanise the audience into action. But this is in keeping, in a sense, with Al Gore, the man who in a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He might have been involved with some legislation that affected the development of the Internet, but he certainly didn't create it" (Behreandt, 2006). The introduction of a completely irrelevant statement by Al Gore to support the contention that the data and statistics compiled not by Al Gore but by thousands of scientists is an indication of just how far documentaries have fallen. In the case of the modern documentary, all too often the messenger is the message. At the very least, the criticism of rhetorical documentaries is directed not toward the content, but toward the maker. "Our good old liberal attitude to documentary, and the liberal tradition of personal freedom which went with it, have been declared, in terms often arrogant and illiterate, to be a public danger" (Aitken, 1998, p. 120). An interesting case for how politics somehow obscures facts can be illustrated by one of the most incendiary and controversial documentaries of recent times. Most documentaries fail to reach wide audiences, or even become massive acknowledged. That is certainly not the case Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 (2004). As has been the case with all his documentaries, in this film Michael Moore takes center-stage in his own film as a crusader hell-bent on exposing hidden truths. Aside from its polemical assault on the failures and lies of the Bush administration, however, the movie is an excellent example of a certain subgenre of political film: the antiwar film. By utilising a multiple attack that contains a wide variety of images designed to illustrate the political manipulation behind the patriotic fervor that causes otherwise peaceful citizens to turn into bloodlusting warmongers, Moore makes a strong case for the politicisation of war. The film contains powerful images of grieving family members, bloodied dead bodies in the streets, dubious soldiers in Iraq, livid Iraqis, and gullible teens being easily maneuver into enlisting. The real political power of the documentary film is illustrated here in that it offers an alternative to the "patriotic" self-censorship of the mainstream media. Very little of the criticism is of Moore's film is directed to its anti-war images, however. The bulk of the movie is its assault on the lack of leadership and the corruption within the Bush administration. What is interesting is that all of the images of Bush that appear in the film are culled from the public domain. It is a textbook example of how a "documentary, a structured and motivated non-fiction film, does not aspire to convey in as pure a way as possible the real material at its core because this is what newsreel or other comparable forms of amateur, accidental and non-narrative film do" (Bruzzi, 2000, p. 22). An image by itself exists in a vacuum; there is no inherent political association with an image such as, for instance, a person having his hair done. The domain of the objective image no longer exists, of course. That same image can be manipulated in a thousand different ways. Fahrenheit 911 (Moore, 2004) begins with images of Al Gore celebrating his victory in the Presidential election. Of course, Gore didn't technically win; it's only a dream. Moore then offers a counterpoint: pro-Bush politicians getting their hair and make-up done as they prepare to go on TV. That benign image of someone having their hair brushed and their appearance improved and their flaws disguised suddenly is turned into a devastating political statement. After all, these are the same people whom Moore will presently accuse of spreading lies and misinformation about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as they attempted to win public support for an unnecessary war. At the time, Moore was assaulted for daring to make such suggestions; today it is roundly accepted by all but the most oblivious of Bush supporters that intelligence leading up to the war was manipulated to conform to policy (Decosse, 2006). One of the most devastating scenes in the entire movie is also one of the most controversial, though it is perhaps ironic that it is a scene that is one of the most objectively presented and least manipulated in the entire film, though, it must be admitted, as the scene progresses Moore adds a narration that actually detracts from the power of the sequence. It is the morning of September 11, 2001 and Pres. George W. Bush sits in an elementary school classroom, aware only that a plane has hit the World Trade Center. Then one of his advisors arrives to tell him of the second plane and whispers that America is under attack. The power of this scene lies in the simplicity of showing the recorded facts. The facts are indisputable: George W. Bush did, in fact, spend seven minutes sitting in a classroom listening to children reading a book while outside nobody could be sure what to expect next. The political component in showing a scene like this, therefore, is entirely dependent upon the preconceptions that one brings to it. For instance, one critic looked at the presentation of this factual historical truth thusly: "The sequence showing President Bush reading to a class of Florida schoolchildren on 9/11, being informed that a second airliner had crashed into the second tower and then sitting there, absorbing what he had just heard, trying to decide what to do and say as several minutes tick away, was employed by Moore to illustrate Bush's failure of leadership" (Buchanan, 2004, p. 3). What the critic apparently fails to understand is that his interpretation of the events is no more manipulative then Moore's. In fact, it is a good deal less, since the facts of the scene clearly do mandate a failure of leadership. What this scene represents is the realisation that "the performance of the documentary is precisely to remand, if not actively remake, the subject into a historical agent" (Rabinowitz, 1994, p. 8). The associational system editing traces back to the great Soviet masters of montage. In fact, even the Soviet dramatic masterpieces feel more like a documentary than many contemporary documentaries. The associational school of editing eschews the use of straightforward images in place of juxtaposition of images or sound information that often only indirectly comments on the thematic concerns. This methodology penetrates to the viewer's political consciousness and coerces an intellectual engagement that applies subjective reasoning to even the most objective of imagery. The silent film A Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov 1929) is one of the premiere examples of how associational techniques can be used. This film is literally a visual lesson in how future documentary filmmakers would master the art of the cinema to manipulate the viewer's perception of reality through the use of both editing and special effects (Cook, 1996, p. 135). Extending the use of associational techniques to the political spectrum involves the introduction of rhetoric. Some documentaries are implicitly political in that the struggle for objectivity, though usually in vain. Other documentaries are explicit in their desire to forward their agenda. The rhetorical approach uses an assortment of procedures to fashion a line of reasoning. There are essential four features common to rhetorical documentaries: persuasion; presenting opinion instead of making claims to the factual accuracy; when facts are presented, they are supplemented by an appeal to the emotions; the desire to effect a change in the perspective of the audience (Higson, 1997, p. 190). By way of influencing the audience, the documentarian utilises several cinematic devices, including the positioning the film as a more reliable source of information than the media; using evidence to support his contentions; and, especially, appealing to the charges emotions of the audience A paradigmatic example of this type of rhetorical use of the documentary form is Errol Morris' documentary that sets out to prove an innocent man was unjustly convicted, The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1998). Morris appeals directly the political views of the audience on the subject of capital punishment as he manipulates their reason and emotion by filming the actual participants in the story. One particularly effective choice for manipulating the viewer into political outrage at the injustice directed toward his protagonist is to place the interview with the main character first so that it seems as if the rest of those in the film are contradicting the premise. An even better technique involves recreations of the event so that viewers can better understand exactly what happened (Ferncase, 1996, p. 109). What happens in a documentary film that doesn't in dramatic film is that a contract is established between the audience and the filmmaker. Because the documentary presupposes a higher level of authenticity, the expectation on the part of the audience is that they will become spectators to a revelation. Even though the audience is at least subconsciously aware that scenes are edited and otherwise manipulated through the same cinematic effects as a dramatic film, it becomes much easier to overlook these flourishes. The documentary also arrives with a certain static staid quality attached to it. In other words, even the most exciting documentary doesn't arrive with expectations of non-stop action. The serious stature of documentary works to elevate it immediately into the sphere of authenticity. Except that, of course, even a static image with no manipulative effects attached is subject to personal interpretation. The more associational effects are used, the more likely that interpretation is subject to socio-political re-interpretations. References Aitken, I. (Ed.). (1998). The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Behreandt, D. (2006, September 18). Hot Air: An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's New Documentary about Global Warming, Is Intriguing, but Fails to Convince in the End. The New American, 22, 31+. Bruzzi, S. (2000). New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Buchanan, J. M. (2004, July 27). Fallen Ones. The Christian Century, 121, 3. Cook, D. A. (1996). A History of Narrative Film. New York: W. W. Norton. Decosse, D. E. (2006). Authority, Lies, and War: Democracy and the Development of Just War Theory. Theological Studies, 67(2), 378+. Ferncase, R. K. (1996). Outsider Features : American Independent Films of the 1980s /. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Higson, A. (1997). Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (1st ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hoffmann, H. (1997). The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933-1945 (Broadwin, J. A. & Berghahn, V. R., Trans.). Providence, RI: Berghahn Books. Hnicke, M. (1997). Chapter Nine "Know Your Enemy" American Wartime Images Of Germany, 1942-1943. In Enemy Images in American History, Hase, R. F. & Lehmkuhl, U. (Eds.) (pp. 231-276). Providence, RI: Berghahn Books. Insdorf, A. (2003). Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. New York: Cambridge University Press. Michael, R., & Doerr, K. (2002). Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rabinowitz, P. (1994). They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. London: Verso. Shandler, J. (1999). While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. 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