Godwin's Documentary

[bcholmes]

During this year's Academy Awards, there was a brief segment remembering some of the great legends that passed away in the year since the previous Awards ceremony. One of the names mentioned was Leni Riefenstahl. My friend Chris, the movie buff, wrote an obituary for her.

I've taken classes in documentary film, and so I've seen her documentary about Hitler's Nuremberg rally, Triumph des Willens (a.k.a. Truimph of the Will). It's talked about a lot in such classes because of its relationship with propaganda.

Riefenstahl, herself, denied that she was making propaganda. In her mind, she was simply filming an important rally. When Hitler flies down from the heavens to be greeted by adoring fans lining the streets... well, that's just how it happened. In 1964, she said:

If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film... it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating events in order to illustrate a thesis, or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that.

There is good reason to be suspicious about what Riefenstahl says. She glosses over (and sometimes outright denies -- see for example The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl) the fact that she was involved in the planning of the rally, and that it was designed specifically around the filming. And many believe that, despite what she says, key scenes were filmed after the rally itself.

For decades, Riefenstahl denied the existence of an earlier film for the Nazi party, Der Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of the Faith) until the only known copy of it turned up in a university storage room in the mid-nineties.

Have you ever seen Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North?

I had lunch one day my friend Chris, and I was kvetching about Nanook of the North. "What's wrong with Nanook?" Chris asked, annoyedly. This is apparently one of his favourite films.

"Flaherty staged it," I said. Nanook hunted with a rifle. Lived in a house, not an igloo. Flaherty wanted to document a people that existed fifty years earlier, and because they weren't around, he tried his best to recreate it. I've seen Nanook more times than I care to. It comes up in the documentary film classes, the classes about "the ethnographic gaze", and in pretty much all the history of film classes. One of the earliest documentaries ever. Mostly staged.

Did I tell you about the course that was all back-to-back holocaust documentaries? Not one of the more upbeat courses I've taken. I'm pleased to report that we didn't watch all nine hours of Shoah; I think I might have committed suicide. Nonetheless, there were very powerful parts of that documentary.

I was, in many ways, pleased at the scenes which Lanzmann filmed with an ex-Nazi who agreed to talk to him but not be subject of filming. Lanzmann filmed him anyway, without his knowledge. He believed that recording what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany was more important, by far, than respecting an ex-Nazi's desire for privacy.

There is a gut-wrenching scene in the film when Lanzmann asks a barber in Israel to describe events in the concentration camp. Just prior to being gassed, the Nazi's would send barbers in to the chambers to cut the hair of the victims. This barber was one such person. Lenzmann asks him to cut a man's hair as he speaks. From behind the camera, Lanzmann pushes and pushes the barber to recall: did the people ask questions? were they afraid? what did you say to them? exactly what happened? You can see the moment when all the feelings that this man has quashed suddenly overwhelm him. It's horrible.

Lanzmann is not a silent observer in these events. Neither is Marcel Ophuls in the Academy Award-winning Hotel Terminus. Ophuls is practically adversarial when he talks to people in South America -- people who have aided Klaus Barbie. "Has he taught you how to recognize Jews?" Ophuls asks. "Do you know that I am a Jew?"

I think my favourite film from that course was Alain Renais' documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), because he really challenges whether or not we've learned from the holocaust. At one point, he says:

An incinerator can be made to look like a picture postcard. Later -- today -- tourists have themselves photographed in front of them.

Think about that. People have themselves photographed in front of the incinerators. Eww. Just ew.

Renais' documentary is a 30-minute long commentary on the events of the holocaust, and also about the here-and-now-ness of Auschwitz. Wikipedia uses the phrase, "the diffusion of guilt". Yeah. That.

Did you know that, in 1958, the Academy Award-winning Disney documentary White Wilderness began the legend that lemmings jump off cliffs to their deaths? The film crew built a snow-covered turntable to film the lemmings (which were imported). Showed them jumping off into the sea (except that they were in Alberta, and the sea was quite far away).

One of my film profs showed us Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy) in one of my documentary film classes. This was an unusual choice since Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are clearly actors playing roles. The director, Roberto Rossellini, was experimenting with new forms of directing. He would, for example, tie strings to the actors toes and when he'd want them to say something -- anything, really, there was no script -- he'd tug on the strings. My prof addressed this choice saying, "Here was someone who wanted to document a feeling -- a time in history. An attitude and a way of viewing the world that existed just after the second world war ended."

For years, the Canadian film industry was almost solely interested in the documentary form. Most of the NFB-funded films were documentaries. I remember talking at length about perhaps the most famous of all NFB documentaries: Not a Love Story, an anti-pornography film. Do you notice the choices that Bonnie Sherr Klein makes? Who she chooses to film? Does she use the stripper Linda Lee Tracey? The well-educated and articulate people she speaks to are all anti-pornography. The other point of view? Well, she talks to some strippers, but they have to keep putting coins in the machine or the metal barrier comes down.

Is the documentary gaze manipulative? Is the ethnographic gaze manipulative?

Yes, yes, yes. A thousand times, yes. Documentary film making must involve editing. Editing is the choice about what to highlight and what to omit.

Several times, I have read Truth about Bowling for Columbine. Every time, I read essentially the same first paragraph:

Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" won the Oscar for best documentary. Unfortunately, it is not a documentary, by the Academy's own definition.

And he loses me, right there. Because, frankly, at that moment I know that the author is speaking beyond his knowledge. There are other points, too. The guy just doesn't understand documentary film and its history.

Comments

[firecat]

What a marvelous post. May I link to it?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Feel free.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Ditto on "marvelous post"!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

My response got so long I was worried about running into the character limit for comments. So I'll move it to my own journal.

And add my (a) desire to link to it and (b) commending it as a great post to the mix.