The Interactive Mode of
Documentary

1) The Interactive Mode of Documentary
Representation
2) Cinéma Vérité
3) Ethical Questions

Interactive documentary … arose from the … desire to make the filmmaker's perspective more evident.
Interview styles and interventionalist tactics arose, allowing the film maker to participate more actively in present events. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality , p.
33

Interactive Mode
• The prominence of filmmaker’s presence
• Interaction with people through interviews
• People express their opinions and the filmmaker juxtapose them with contrary opinions and combine with filmed images or/and archival footage.

Interactive Mode
• Documentary as oral history
• The viewer as a witness to the historical world as presented by one who inhabits it

Interactive Mode
• Medium shots of interviewees
• Long takes
• Synchronous sound recording
• (Inter-cutting interviews with recorded images, newsreel or/and archival footage)

Interactive Mode
• Jean Rouch and Cinéma
Vérité
• Anthropologist, filmmaker, civil engineer and explorer
(1917-2004)

• Civil engineer turned ethnographer.
• Recording rites, rituals and communities in
West Africa, Niger and Cote D’Ivoire

Cinéma Vérité
• Cronique d’un ete
( Chronicle of a
Summer, 1960)
• Ground-breaking documentary with
Edgar Morin

Cinéma Vérité
• Two women sent to streets in Paris to interview passersby
• Starting with a simple question, ‘Are you happy, sir?’, the interviews delve into the lives of the interviewees.
• Marceline, a Holocaust survivor; Angelo, who works in a Renault factory; Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast; and Mari-Lou, a young, beautiful and depressed Italian immigrant

Cinéma Vérité
• As the film progresses, the light opening scenes give way to intimate revelations and hotly contested political arguments.
• To use the camera as their tool and the filmmaking process as a means to explore their subject's preoccupations

Cinéma Vérité
• Marcel Ophüls, Hotel Terminus: The Life and
Times of Klaus Barbi (1988)
• A documentary of the prozess against Klaus
Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, and about his life after the war.

Cinéma Vérité
• Ophuls’ sarcastic, sceptical and aggressive interviews with dozens of people mainly Barbie’s enablers and apologists.
• Interviews reveal how
Barbie was useful to US intelligence and South
American dictators escape from France

Cinéma Vérité
• Barbie’s anti-communism a handy excuse for his being able to remain in Bolivia till his extradition in 1987 - remaining in safe haven
• Barbie’s trial in Lyon proves Ophuls’s point - the verdict to Barbie’s crime

Cinéma Vérité
• Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985)
• 9 1/2 hour documentary of the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage.
• Interviews with survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis
• Shoah in Poland Part II

Ethical Questions
• How genuine are reactions shown by an interviewée? Does interaction between a film maker and his subject always bring out truth?

Ethical Questions
• The manners in which the filmmaker presents the interviews:
• The ways in which filmmaker prompts the interviewée;
• The filmmaker as provocateur;
• Whether the filmmaker allows interviewées to put their case fully or not;
• The manners the filmmaker edits the interviews for his documentary.
• ARE INTERVIEWS CARRIED OUT FAIRLY?

Ethical Questions
• Michael Moore, Roger and
Me (1990)
• About the negative economic impact of General
Motors COE, Roger Smith‘s summary action of closing several auto plants in Flint,
Michigan, costing 40,000 people their jobs.

Ethical Questions
• Yawning gap between the rich and the poor; the disintegration of a one-time prosperous community
• Criticisms - Moore did talk to Roger Smith but the footage was not included in the film

Ethical Questions
• The eviction at the end of the film took place on the day different from Smith’s speech.
• Manipulation and tampering facts and interviews
• Satire; scepticism; social comment