trailer trash

It used to be the case that if you mentioned the word “documentary”, the image projected someone’s would be of something serious, slow-paced and devoid of a certain something …and that would be traditional drama. Car chases, explosions, fast cutting, emotionally-resonant music, surreal animation, a “good guy” and a “bad guy”, a narrative sense of “will they get want they want?” would not be the elements pounding your senses as you watched your average documentary.

Now admittedly, most docs still don’t feature any of the trappings of your average Hollywood fiction, and drama comes in many forms, but an increasing number of supposedly factual films do use techniques from the scripted, big-budget landscape, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re often the ones that turn up on our cinema screens, get the publicity, and get nominated for Oscars.

I’m all for it. Not because I think appealing to the “entertainment” crowd is the only way for a 21st century crowd brought up on shock YouTube videos to want to watch something abou t something, but because documentary films have the chance to be the greatest post-modern medium there is.

Now what am I on about? Filmmaking as a general artistic form is a group endeavour and a blending of many arts, disciplines, crafts and human expression. For me, bar touch and taste, it has it all. Photography, lighting , music, architecture, dance, speech, design, fashion, make-up, sculpture, dreams, fears, sexuality, religion, spirituality… the list goes on and on in terms of what film can capture, shape, and convey to an audience, across time and culture. But for whatever reason, fiction film, in terms of mainstream consumption, has largely confined itself to conventions which remove an audience from reality because ultimately you are buying a ticket to sympathize with fictional people in fictional circumstances with fictional emotions. There is a space between the humanity involved in making the film and the emotion it is trying to convey (if at all).

But documentaries are not chained with that core truth. At their most basic, documentaries deal with subjects who are communicating something real for them - to the filmmaker, whether it’s by design or by (un)happy accident. By watching these subjects we are not living vicariously through an actor or metaphor for our own dreams and fears, we are glimpsing how others really do experience other lives, other challenges, while being made up from the same basic DNA that we are. (excepting the majority of wildlife docs which formed a large part of my childhood…)

And so what a documentary filmmaker can do, if they are so inclined, is to have it all - use techniques honed for making people laugh, cry, sit on the edge of their seats in amazement or terror, but mix it up with non-fictionalised moments, stories and truths to intensify the empathy and comprehension of an audience so the film’s subject matter becomes something more than an honest document of reality.

So many are content to communicate to an audience, but surely the ideal is to move one instead.

Editor Ben

Do you like big, shiny, expensive things? Things that scream quality, craft, engineering, excellence? I know I do. I also know that many a filmmaking conversation (fiction or non-fiction) is about The Kit: which camera, which lenses, which edit system, which sound-set up, which lights they should be using to win the next documentary Oscar… the goal posts for the right gear are always changing and the desire is always to get away from the “home DV” look and transcend to the promised land of “cinematic” framing, colour, and shallow depth of field…

But I digress. Because tools, while lovely and appealing and important for securing certain co-finance deals and broadcaster technical requirements, do not a good film make – especially a good or even great documentary. No, the most important tool is usually a director or producer who can beguile or even seduce – one that can compel someone in the most seemingly natural way to open a door, open a cheque book and most especially, to get a contributor to open their mouth.

A perfect example of this is one of our new releases Zdroj (Source) a Czechoslovakian film which opens on what seems a complete non-starter - director Martin Marecek and his crew being denied filming access by an oil field security official. But within moments, Marecek’s natural opponent suddenly becomes an alley. As the crew are led through the oil field to the security office, the official gives an almost perfect summation of Azerbaijan’s oil exploration history as if he were reading it from a prepared script. At the appropriate moment, he even casually points in the direction of what is the world’s first oil rig.

Add a carefully researched set of oil industry film footage to the official’s apparent monologue, and voila - Zdroj has a great opening.

Now, it could be argued that this official would have said what he said to anyone had they turned up and asked, but what follows throughout the rest of Zdroj suggests otherwise. Person after person whom the documentary crew come across appear willing to give them what they want. Even when it comes to what seems like something that might show the country or the oil industry in a damaging light. That kind of access is pure documentary gold and I regard as testament to Marecek and his crew’s skills as filmmakers.

Whether you’re making a film or shooting a portrait, the relationship between the story recorder and the story teller is vital. When that relationship sings, the pieces of kit, the ones that have a tendency to make people nervous and throw a pose or throw a strop, becomes invisible.

Then the relationship just becomes a conversation between two people, and that’s when you get to witness magic.

Editor Ben