Ethics and Factual Television: a short history
Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is often cited as the first real documentary, but
by today’s standards it seems more like The Only Way is Essex or Real Housewives of New
Jersey. Flaherty brought to the screen an original vision of Inuit life in the far north of
Canada, a vivid contrast to the feature-length fictions and timid travelogues that dominated
the cinemas of the 1920s. He spent several years filming, developing his negatives on site,
dealing with all manner of technical and physical difficulties. It was a tour-de-force, and even
in 2014 came seventh in a Sight and Sound poll of filmmakers asked to name the best ever
documentaries.
But in making Nanook of the North, Flaherty violated almost all the ethical standards that
guide today’s filmmakers. He made up a story and got his Inuit subjects to act it out. He
ignored their current situation in favour of a romanticised idea of their past, asking them to
reconstruct the hunting techniques of their grandfathers. He made them appear to be ignorant
of the modern world for comic effect. He fathered a child with one of the women he was
working with. He took all the acclaim and abandoned the community (and his son) to their
fate, which, according to Melanie McGrath’s excellent book The Long Exile, was a
particularly unpleasant tale of forced relocation and deprivation.
Today’s documentary filmmakers are concerned with showing the truth of a situation,
however they conceive it. Many certainly do use reconstructions, but within tightly controlled
limits. They are held to account for the methods they use to obtain their footage and the
permission to include it into a film. They have to be concerned about the public reaction to
their subjects and often offer some kind of ‘after-sales service’ in the form of continued
support. So how, in less than a century, have the ethics of documentary changed so
fundamentally?
Flaherty was doing something new; there were no standards to guide him. He had found it
difficult to find finance, and at one stage he accidentally destroyed almost all his footage. He
wanted to tell a tale of human endurance in the face of hostile nature to audiences who
regarded the Inuit as scarcely human, if they even knew who they were. He was working in a
commercial cinema environment, before television and public service broadcasting, before
public outcries about documentary ethics, before digital technologies, before even sync sound
recording. After Nanook, documentary existed; but Nanook was scarcely a model that anyone
could follow.
The immediate future for documentary lay in the hands of filmmakers whose motives were
more socially enlightened and reformist. The British documentary movement, the American
filmmakers working for the New Deal administration, even the Soviet documentarians like
Esfir Shub, were all concerned with portraying the problems of ordinary people. They were
all paid directly by the state or by large corporations to do so. Many were acutely aware of
the ethical problems that this involved, which they solved by appealing to a sense of personal
honesty. To be a true documentary filmmaker was to be truthful about their subjects and what
they saw, and then to communicate this as powerfully as possible. So they used a poetic
treatment of reality underpinned by an ethic of personal responsibility.
The documentary filmmakers of the 1930s also made extensive use of reconstructions. Unlike
Flaherty’s reconstructions of a past that existed only in hearsay, these reconstructions were
underpinned by personal observation and extensive research. Their cameras and sound
equipment were limited in what they could do in the everyday world, but these
documentarians overcame these limitations by documenting, by meticulous note-taking so
that they could prove the truthfulness of their reconstructions. Everything in their films had to
be based on concrete evidence. So Humphrey Jennings’ groundbreaking Fires Were Started
(aka I was A Fireman) from 1943 used real firemen to play fictional firemen in a story
fashioned from incidents which had happened in the previous two years. At points, the film is
far less clear than were contemporary fiction films, simply because the film respects
researched facts rather than the demands of smooth storytelling. So Flaherty’s inheritors took
documentary in the direction that we recognise today: filmmaking from reality whose
fundamental ethics are based on the honesty of the filmmaker as the broker in the process of
putting reality on the screen.
At the same time, many of these filmmakers had a social purpose. By showing and
interpreting the world in an honest way, they aimed to change it. Jennings’ film is explicitly
wartime propaganda, emphasising the business-like heroism of firemen during the London
Blitz. There is an obvious potential for conflict between the two aims of honesty and
promoting social change, and the history of documentary since the 1930s is in many ways the
history of successive attempts to reconcile them.
Television has been a crucial broker in this process, especially in Europe. Documentaries
found their natural home on TV, whereas in cinema they had long been marginalised by
feature length fiction films. In some countries, particularly the Netherlands and Scandinavia,
documentary maintained a steady presence in cinemas. There were even isolated examples of
socially critical feature film documentaries in US cinemas, particularly Barbara Kopple’s
Academy Award winning Harlan County, USA in 1976. But from the 1950s until
comparatively recently, it was television documentaries which were the main focus of
arguments about the ethics of filming, and the battles over who had the power to show what.
By the end of the 1950s, television documentaries had settled into a public service television
mode. Public service documentaries aimed to enlighten and educate their viewers, showing
and explaining as they went. Until the recent proliferation of channels, they were also
required to be balanced rather than opinionated, much to the frustration of those filmmakers
who wanted to change the world rather than explain it. Even then, scrupulous balance
occasionally caused problems for broadcasters. Paul Hamann’s 1985 BBC film Real Lives: At
the Edge of the Union was made at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, soon after
a wave of bombings on the UK mainland. It gave exactly equal airtime to two members of the
Northern Irish Assembly: the republican Martin McGuinness (widely suspected of being a
member of the IRA) and the staunch unionist Gregory Campbell. Both were allowed to
express their views unchallenged. The Thatcher government wanted to ban the film, causing
an internal crisis as the BBC is not meant to be censored by the British government. The film
was delayed for two months but eventually shown, and just 30 people complained that it
lacked the required balance. However, the damage was done within the BBC, and, thirty
years on, Real Lives is still seen as the moment when the BBC began to avoid political
controversies in its documentary output.
In its observational approach to the two contrasting politicians, Real Lives also shows how
much documentary filmmaking had changed since the 1940s. Meticulously researched
reconstruction was no longer the dominant form: lightweight equipment meant that
filmmakers could follow action as it happened. Early in the 1960s several companies
developed lightweight 16mm cameras which could be used with crystal sync tape sound
recording. This equipment answered the desire of documentarians to use their cameras rather
than their notebooks to observe the world, playing into the common belief that “the camera
cannot lie”. Half a century later, this belief has proved simplistic for all kinds of reasons. But
it revolutionised what documentary could do, the places it could go to, and the intimacy of
portrayal that it could provide. Observational documentary was born, but to call it ‘fly on the
wall’ was an overstatement: the technique still required a minimum of two or three filmers in
the room, and it also had other unintended consequences which quickly became clear. In the
early 1970s, two series were made in the US and UK which showed the everyday lives of a
family. They both aimed to observe an interesting and relatively typical family for several
weeks of their lives, by following them with minimally invasive crews. Unlike earlier TV
documentaries, there was no agenda, no social purpose beyond that of observing everyday
life.
Both series demonstrated the new ethical problems that were emerging as a result of the
observational technique. The Loud family in the US An American Family (1973) and the
Wilkins in the UK The Family (1974) became celebrities. Paul Watson’s UK series
intensified the problems by showing events just a week or so after they had happened, so by
the middle of the series the family were using the programmes to respond to press and public
comments about them. Mrs Wilkins briefly had a newspaper column to express her trenchant
views. Their daughter moved forward the date of her wedding so it could feature in the last
episode. The Wilkins and the Louds performed for the camera (some family members being
more willing than others). They spontaneously altered their lives to accommodate the realities
of the demands of television viewers as they saw them. Documentary had overcome the
problems of reconstruction only to encounter a new set of difficulties: ‘performance for the
camera’, of course, but also that of exploitation of ordinary people. The subsequent lives of
both the Louds and the Wilkins seem to bear this out, with the families breaking up under the
strain of public scrutiny. Indeed, Pat Loud asked her husband for a divorce on screen during
the series.
Both series were enormously popular; the technique was too important to abandon. So
filmmakers now had a new responsibility in relation to their subjects, to minimise the level of
exploitation involved in filming by being as straight as possible in their dealings with their
subjects. This is endlessly difficult in practice as the subjects of the most engaging
documentaries are often those whose lives are complicated. They often come from a different
social background to that of filmmakers and find it difficult to engage with the mechanisms
of power, which include broadcasting. As Brian Winston once brutally put it, “concentrates
on the victims of society”.
Regularly, documentaries face the challenge that they are exploitative. In the decades since
The Family, Paul Watson has continued to court this accusation, filming people declining into
Alzheimer’s disease, alcoholics in the advanced stages of addiction (Rain in My Heart),
bigoted middle class people discussing politics and social issues in The Dinner Party, and
even upper class men on an anarchic Fishing Party. In each case, however, Watson has
proved to have been scrupulous in his dealings. The exaggerated characters of The Fishing
Party had, amazingly, offered themselves as a suitable subject for the BBC to film. The four
people featured in Rain in My Heart are all too aware of that they are being filmed as a
warning to others. Watson appears occasionally in the film debating with himself, and the
viewer, about the key ethical issues raised by his film. Is he is exploiting his subjects? Does
his sympathetic presence and the promise of TV exposure encourage them to exaggerate their
behaviour? Should his duty as a human being outweigh that of the observational filmmaker:
whether he should intervene to stop the self-harm that his camera is witnessing? We see him
plead with his subjects, accuse them of showing off, and at one moment he ‘accidentally’
knocks over a bottle that one is about to consume. Watson’s engagement with the families of
his subjects did not end with the transmission of the documentary. He continued to offer his
help as they coped with their subsequent lives.
In Rain in My Heart, Watson also has some sour comments about reality TV, then in its early
stages, as he finds it more and more difficult to get cooperation from hospital administrators
in his valuable project. The late 1990s saw a growing suspicion of documentary because of
the ethical decisions made in both reality TV and documentary. The most outrageous was the
ITV documentary The Connection for the prestigious Network First series. Filmmaker Marc
de Beaufort claimed to have filmed the entire journey of a Columbian drugs ‘mule’ as he
ingested cocaine-filled condoms and travelled to London. A striking interview in a secret
location with one of the key members of the Cali drugs cartel rounded off this dramatic film.
And dramatic it indeed was. De Beaufort had staged most of the key sequences (the secret
interview location was his own hotel room; the interviewee a carpark attendant). Once
exposed by the Guardian newspaper, several executives were disgraced, and the broadcaster
fined several million pounds. It was a low point for TV documentary: de Beaufort had
systematically broken the bond of trust between filmmaker and the TV audience.
At the same time, reconstruction was making a surreptitious comeback. The dramatic
demands of reality TV (merging observational documentary techniques with entertainment
storytelling) required greater use of reconstruction and even improvisation by its characters.
The amateur dramatics of Made in Chelsea or The Only Way is Essex were still some way
off, but the subjects of ‘docusoaps’ (as reality TV was then known) were encouraged to ‘big
themselves up’ as characters, and to stage events in various ways. One character in Driving
School was shown waking her husband in the middle of the night with her anxieties about her
forthcoming ordeal. Viewers protested; the Daily Mail protested. It was utterly implausible
that the crew should have been waiting quietly in their bedroom in case they had a middle-ofthe-night conversation. The production team had had no qualms about asking the couple to
reconstruct the incident when they reported it. However, many viewers felt differently. This
vividly shows the expectations of truthfulness that then prevailed, and the sense of outrage
when an emerging genre hybrid was making documentary-like claims.
Then a further case emerged: a Channel 4 documentary entitled Daddy’s Girl was extensively
trailed in the week before broadcast. The subject was fascinating: a young woman whose
father was vehemently opposed to her proposed marriage, and all parties had consented to
appear (father, daughter and intended husband), expressing their opinions in a forthright
manner. Then the real father contacted Channel 4, demanding to know why someone was
impersonating him; not just anyone, it emerged, but his daughter’s intended husband, a man
of whom he utterly disapproved. The entire production team had been hoodwinked by Stuart
Smith and Vitoria Greetham, with Smith getting a mate to pretend to be Greetham’s fiancé
while he impersonated her father. The couple became celebrities briefly, accused on a TV
chat show by Angela Rippon of lies and deception. They seemed somewhat taken aback by
this accusation as they saw the whole thing as a “being creative” or “being economical with
the truth”. For them it was perhaps; but for anyone concerned about the ethics of
documentary, it was another instance of untrustworthiness.
Clearly an ethical shift was taking place. The values that had underpinned the observational
documentary were crumbling: people were no longer content with ‘being themselves and
ignoring the camera’, and filmmakers were under all kinds of pressure to justify themselves
and their methods: ‘trust me’ was no longer enough of a guarantee. In the same period in the
US, filmmakers were using the new freedom of the premium subscription TV channel HBO to
make films that addressed exactly these issues. Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1989)
forensically examined the naïve belief in the ‘eye witness’ to demonstrate the multitude of
small inconsistencies that lead to a wrongful conviction for murder. Some witnesses
misremembered; some saw events through a veil of prejudice; others simply lied. The pace of
Morris’s film is utterly unlike that of a TV documentary, and it requires concentration from its
viewers. He reconstructs the incident of a shooting several time over, using big close-ups of
details, a technique widely used since for reconstructions in documentaries. But each of his
sequences are subtly different, bringing out the inconsistencies of the eye witness accounts. It
is still a shock for viewers when they realise that no two reconstruction sequences are the same.
By the beginning of this century, traditional documentary approaches were consistently under
fire as a result of both the television scandals and the thoroughgoing interrogation of its
fundamental beliefs in documentaries like Morris’s. At the same time, the viewers themselves
began ‘self-documenting’, using newly available cheap video technology, video-enabled
mobile devices and social media. Documentary suddenly seemed to be everywhere, used and
abused, questioned and taken for granted. So the current situation is complicated. The genre
is diverging into two distinctive genres. On the one side are documentary films, often feature
length, which invent styles that are appropriate to their particular subject and the precise
circumstances of production. On the other are the popular documentary forms which have
taken a different direction towards various genre hybrids and reality TV formats. On an
ethical level, they face the same kinds of problems, made more acute by the fact that those
problems are now subjects of general interest. In the past, ethical problems were arcane issues
that filmmakers discussed between themselves. Now that virtually everyone watching
documentary has themselves wielded a camera or had ambivalent feelings about being
filmed, documentary ethics has become something that everyone worries about. TV
documentary viewers now criticise the ethical decisions made by filmmakers using the
evidence that they find in the films.
There have been several responses to this new situation. Generally, documentaries became
more personal. Filmmakers put themselves into their films to show their own fallibility, to
reveal the relationships they have with their subjects. Nick Broomfield puts a comedy version
of himself into his films (as a hapless sound recordist), making the circumstances of filming
take centre stage. A Broomfield documentary is usually the story of a plucky film crew trying
– and usually failing – to get their story. The screen character Nick Broomfield is puzzled and
inept, and his subjects reveal themselves essentially because they can’t really believe that this
is anything other than a student film. The Broomfield persona is very different from that of
Michael Moore. Moore is the indignant seeker of truth, utterly sure of himself and the
righteousness of his cause: he’s the noisy new version of the now discredited line ‘trust me,
I’m a documentary filmmaker’. So his immensely popular feature films have been
extensively criticised by, among others, David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke who have spent
long hours picking holes in his films. Every elision of time or events for narrative
convenience has been ruthlessly pressed into service to prove that Michael Moore is a Big
Fat Stupid White Man (Harpercollins 2005). Quite apart from showing the level of cheap
abuse that is often heaped on documentary filmmakers, this also brings into relief the
essentially old-fashioned nature of Moore’s filmmaking. Though he is all over his films, as
both voice and physical presence, often inciting action, his films are not really subjective. He
continues to insist that he offers an objective investigation of the truth rather than a personal
reflection on a social problem.
Most documentary filmmakers have now developed a more conversational style, even when
they remain behind the camera. This has been helped by new lightweight equipment that
enables the filmer to maintain eye contact with their subject even whilst filming. Even as
committed an observational filmmaker as Kim Longinotto allows the warmth of her
relationship with her subjects to shine through clearly in a film like Rough Aunties (2008). In
documentaries like this, it is clear why the participants have agreed to be filmed. Some want
publicity for their cause or their beliefs; others want to be heard; still others are willing, if not
eager, to use the process of filmmaking as a kind of therapy. These documentaries have recast
the form as one that shows the truth of a particular interaction, that of filming. The films
show the reality of a relationship that the filmmaker and their subjects embark upon together.
In those circumstances, there are many who will agree to take part.
But not all television documentary is like this, by any means. One development has
eliminated the traditional filmmaker almost entirely. Series like Educating Essex and 24
Hours in A&E use a ‘fixed rig’, a large number of remote controlled cameras installed within
a building (a school, a hospital) where something interesting is bound to happen. The people
know they are being filmed, they can withhold their permission if they like (hence all the
blurred out faces), but there is no interaction between the filmers and the filmed. Instead of a
camera crew, there is a truck or portakabin somewhere nearby where the editorial crew are
waiting to record the output from the relevant cameras when it looks as though an interesting
incident or story is about to develop. On the face of it, this might seem like the reassertion of
old-fashioned observation. However, the results are highly artificial due in part to the fixed
positioning of the cameras, and in part to the very heavily editorialised presentation of the
stories. It is highly effective TV as a result, but most of the time we are watching fragments
of an event, the significance of which we have to be told in voice-over rather than observe for
ourselves.
Documentary has now become as complex and multifaceted as the people it films. There are
some who, a bit like Victoria Greetham and Stuart Smith, regard the whole thing as the
opportunity to have a laugh. That is one of the key characteristics of reality TV. The most
extreme end of that genre is indeed people having laugh: whether celebrities like The
Osbournes and Keeping Up With the Kardashians or the engaging amateur dramatics of The
Only Way is Essex. In all these cases, the ‘documentary’ elements are limited to the work of
the film crews who have to follow actions improvised on the basis of a pre-arranged and
agreed script. Mainstream reality TV series, however, are formulaic rather than scripted.
They sweep up a public that regards itself as street-wise about filmmaking into projects
where all sides acknowledge that the performed selves bear only a passing relationship with
the private selves. Usually, these are formats in which real people are offered a challenge of
some kind, and are expected to respond with outsized versions of their usual behaviours. The
arch, teasing voice-over of a series like Come Dine With Me makes this abundantly clear. Yet
even in this reality TV end of the documentary business, the fundamental ethical
considerations refuse to go away. If anything, they are intensified by the squeeze on
programming costs and industrial production line processes under which these series are now
made.
It is still possible for documentaries to address big social issues, of course. But here, too, the
ethical problems seems to have become more rather than less difficult. In 2013, Channel 4
offered an insight into a street where, it was claimed, most of the inhabitants lived on
benefits. They called it Benefits Street in the end, though this was not the working title under
which the subjects knew it. The series became the focus for a public debate, and the
participants were totally unprepared for the media blizzard that followed. Benefits Street was
accused of ‘poverty porn’, and a public meeting of 100 people from James Turner Street in
Birmingham (the programme made no attempt an anonymity) have said that they have been
‘misrepresented’. They were offered a live hour-long debate after the final show. The creative
director of Love, Keiran Smith, defended the ways in which the participants were recruited
by the filmers. He was evasive about whether they were told that the series would concentrate
on benefits, and stressed that the series dealt with other themes, and emphasised solidarity in
the face of hardship. But were they prepared for what might happen when they appeared on
TV, any more than the Wilkins family were back in 1984? Benefits Street featured people
who experienced difficulties in thinking through the consequences of their actions even
within the space of their own lives. So how could they think through the consequences of
their own media exposure, even if they were avid consumers of such TV shows themselves?
Many of the participants seemed to be excluded from the digital revolution that has enabled
the widespread public scepticism about the making of documentaries. If they had known what
would happen, then most of them would probably have refused to participate. Those that
made it through the experience were the exhibitionists and the media-savvy, with ‘White
Dee’ becoming, like Mrs Wilkins thirty years before her, a minor media celebrity and
commentator on the waywardness of the socially marginalised.
There is another question that lingers around Benefits Street. What was offered back to the
community? Everyone else was happy: Channel 4 had a success with an exceptional audience
of over 5 million viewers. Columnists filled columns, politicians justified policies. But the
street itself was offered no help, no initiatives to improve its environment, no training in
creating a better life, no reward for being pilloried. No resources were available, apparently,
and none were asked for. In the end, there remains one simple question that participants can
and should ask. It is difficult for a filmmaker to answer because it is weighed down with
many ethical uncertainties that lie at the heart of the documentary project. It is also the
question that can establish whether the two sides of the documentary process, the filmers and
the filmed, can trust each other. The question is “what’s in it for me?”
John Ellis is a former documentary producer and professor at Royal Holloway University of
London He is the author of Documentary, Witness and Self-revelation (Routledge 2012)