TRUE STORIES?
Melanie Harris 13/06/08
On 30 October 1938, a Halloween drama special The War of the Worlds was
broadcast on CBS Radio, New York, in the form of a series of news bulletins,
describing an alien invasion of the city. The urgency of the reports increased with
each interruption of the concert (a nice touch lending credibility to the programme).
An estimated 25% of the six million listeners believed the broadcast to be real.
People jumped in their cars and headed out of the city, following instructions from the
supposed newscaster: ‘…I'm speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building, New
York City. The bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as
the Martians approach. Estimated in last two hours three million people have moved
out along the roads to the north Hutchison River Parkway still kept open for motor
traffic. Avoid bridges to Long Island - hopelessly jammed...’ The event caused an
outcry: listeners, newspapers and politicians did not appreciate the deception. An
untrue story presented as true, it catapulted director Orson Welles to fame and
sparked a debate about media representations of fact and fiction that continues
today.
Even earlier in 1922, Nanook of the North, a silent film by Robert Flaherty, was
presented as the first feature-length documentary. Ground-breaking cinema, the film
captured the traditional Inuit methods of hunting, fishing and igloo-building in the
Canadian Arctic. It was later revealed much of the action was staged; ‘Nanook’ was
in fact a man called Allakariallak, his wife in the film was not his actual wife, Inuits by
then hunted with guns not spears, and a special three-walled igloo was built to
accommodate the huge camera for interior shots. In his defence, Flaherty claimed
distortion was often necessary in order to convey the true spirit of something.
Flaherty’s technique was to spend a long time living with his subjects, not filming until
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he had ‘found’ a dramatic enough story, which he was prepared to construct in order
to better serve both the people he was filming and the audience. So perhaps
Flaherty was the first real drama documentary maker, a director who believed it was
possible to create a deeper and more satisfying narrative truth by mixing
documentary and reconstruction.
In the media industry there are numerous definitions of drama documentary and
confusingly many of the terms are interchangeable. As well as drama documentary
there’s dramatized documentary, documentary drama, docu-drama, factual drama,
mock-umentary, faction, constructed reality shows, trauma drama and so on, and not
everyone agrees which is which. Both the terms and the form have evolved over
time. Amazingly, Coronation Street (ITV 1960-) and Z Cars (BBC 1962–78), were
described as ‘story documentaries’ when first screened because of their basis in
closely observed lives. There is however some industry and academic consensus
that drama documentary is essentially documentary (following actual events or
people,) which uses drama where necessary to fill in the gaps. Drama
documentaries assert the factual nature of their material, often using voice over or
captions to emphasise the historical accuracy of the film. The audience is invited to
view the drama elements as truthful representations (reconstructions) rather than
imaginary scenes.
Has documentary always involved an element of artifice? Certainly the great
British documentary maker John Grierson (1898-1972) argued for a creative
treatment of actuality. In the early years of filmmaking, it was impossible to use
large, bulky equipment on location. In the 1936 documentary Night Mail from
Grierson’s GPO Film Unit, directors Basil Wright and Harry Watt used a mocked up
Scot Guardsman steam locomotive to illustrate the London to Scotland train journey,
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with music by Benjamin Britten and poem by W.H. Auden. It was a highly
constructed piece of filmmaking that became a documentary classic.
Sometimes material is just too sensitive, or the events themselves are in the past,
out of reach of the documentary filmmaker. For example in Touching the Void
(2003), director Kevin Macdonald combined dramatic and documentary techniques to
tell the story of climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates. Shot on location in the
Peruvian Andes with actors, he reconstructed their astonishing adventure,
intercutting the drama with narration by the climbers themselves. The audience are
in no doubt they are watching a factual story with actors playing real people in order
to best illustrate what happened on the west face of the Siula Grande back in 1985.
Some remarkable drama documentaries are almost entirely dramatic
reconstructions of real events. Who Bombed Birmingham (1990), became a
landmark television programme instrumental in the campaign to overturn the
convictions of the original ‘Birmingham Six’. Many of the people director Mike
Beckham needed to interview were unavailable so he used actors and screen
captions to accentuate the documentary nature of the piece. The film opened with:
‘…. In 1985 three journalists from the television current affairs programme World in
Action began examining the case. Drawing on court transcripts, taped interviews
and contemporary statements, this film is a reconstruction of the three year
investigation into the true story behind the bombings.’ Again, the intention of the
filmmaker to tell a documentary story is clearly communicated to the audience.
UK television drama documentary was pioneered by Granada’s highly successful
World in Action team, from the early sixties through to the late nineties. Led by
Leslie Woodhead, their ‘dramatized documentaries’ expanded the social sphere of
news and current affairs investigations. Driven by a journalistic imperative to
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interrogate news stories and bring topical and political issues into the arena of public
debate, the style was a mixture of reportage and film making, forging the careers of
many journalists, producers and directors including Michael Apted (7 Up series, Coal
Miner’s Daughter) Mike Hodges (Get Carter, Croupier) and Paul Greengrass (United
93, The Bourne Supremacy). The series was famed for its gritty visual style, use of
voice over, undercover techniques and dramatic reconstructions, proving
controversial and litigious on many occasions. The Friends and Influence of John L
Poulson – an investigative programme about the architect convicted of corrupting
politicians and civil servants to further his construction business – was scheduled to
be broadcast in January 1973. The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA)
banned the film without giving coherent reasons. In response, Granada broadcast a
blank screen during the transmission, attracting the third highest television audience
that week. A public outcry of censorship overturned the ban and the programme was
shown three months later.
World in Action set out to inform, educate and entertain and was not afraid to mix
forms in order to grab attention. In the same vein, directors Ken Loach and Peter
Watkins in the 1960s attempted to do something new with fictional drama on
television. Rooted in the docu-drama form – a scripted film based on real-life events
– they shot in a documentary style, deliberately blurring the boundaries between
fiction and reality. This ‘cinema verite’ style characterizes Watkins’ The War Game
(1965), which was held back by the BBC for twenty years until 1985, on the grounds
that ‘the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the
medium of broadcasting.’ Depicting the effects of a Soviet nuclear attack on Britain,
the film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1966. The
merging of drama and documentary styles for television is famously illustrated in Ken
Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966), a piece about homelessness written by Jeremy
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Sandford and produced by Tony Garnett. An early example of the power of
television to highlight social problems, Cathy Come Home attracted an audience of
12 million, effected changes in housing policy and the charity Shelter was formed in
its wake.
Alan Clarke’s Scum (1977) was banned from broadcast by the BBC until 1991
because of its depiction of extreme violence in the Borstal system. Clarke and writer
Roy Minton set out to show the bullying, rampaging and rape endemic in the
institution but in telescoping the violence into a single Play for Today were criticized
for creating a melodrama: a charge not infrequently leveled at the docu-drama form.
Loach and others argued the establishment objected to the political content in their
work. Unlike the drama documentary coming from a current affairs sensibility, their
work originated from the television drama department of the BBC and was shown in
The Wednesday Play slot, later becoming The Play for Today.
Do these distinctions really matter? Are documentary and drama simply different
ways of telling stories? And is documentary any more truthful than drama? After all,
the camera is not an unbiased eye. The material of documentaries is chosen,
manipulated and edited. Early documentary makers Flaherty and Grierson argued a
re-ordering or rehearsing of documentary material was necessary in order to reveal
the essential truth of the real lives they sought to portray. The documentary maker
and drama director borrow each other’s styles and techniques in order to create
powerful and meaningful work for their audiences. Some of these distinctions are
cultural. There’s less appetite for mixing the forms in Germany for example, where in
1996 Michael Born, a respected television documentary maker, was sentenced to
four years imprisonment for passing off fiction as fact in many of his programmes.
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In the UK, drama based on real lives has become more and more popular. The
difference between drama documentary and documentary drama (or factual drama)
is sometimes unclear. Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough (1996), came from the World
in Action team, explored the failure of the police, the football authorities and even the
government, to exercise a duty of care at the stadium in Sheffield on 15 April 1989.
In this sense it is absolutely a part of the Granada tradition of campaigning, social
action drama documentary. But the impact of the film, largely due to McGovern’s
skill as a writer, lies not so much in its examination of the failure of institutions, as in
the dramatic portrayal of the central characters. The private expressions of grief and
loss amongst the bereaved families are difficult to forget. In this sense, the story
unfolds from the inside out, rather than the outside in.
Nick Broomfield, one of the UK’s most distinctive documentary filmmakers,
developed a trademark style of placing himself in his films in order to acknowledge
the filming process and ensure the audience can see they are watching a
construction of real life events. Driving Me Crazy (1988), a documentary about the
making of a film of a stage musical, is the first of his films to illustrate his view: ‘If
you're making a film, it's more honest to make your presence felt than to hang back
furtively on the other side of the room, because no-one really benefits from that.
You're there with all your equipment, but pretending you're not there.’ After a string
of successful documentaries Broomfield has recently made two feature films: Ghosts
(2006) about the Chinese cockle pickers of the Morecambe Bay tragedy and an Iraqi
war film Battle for Haditha (2007), an investigation into the massacre of 24 Iraqis at
the hands of US marines. Both are dramas, based on real events and in both he
employs documentary film making techniques. He cites Paul Greengrass, Michael
Winterbottom and Mike Figgis as directors like himself from factual backgrounds who
are now shooting drama with a new sensibility, creating films ‘that look different, in
which the emotions are different and the tradition is different.’
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So documentary is an expansive, evolving form, allowing for all kinds of new
shapes and styles in order to find a way to tell a story both true and truthful.
Whatever approach the filmmaker adopts, he or she has the same obligation
Hemingway ascribed to himself, ‘A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of
fidelity to the truth must be so high that his invention out of his experience should
produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed
badly but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to
make it an absolute truth.’
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