Documentary Contradictions

In Paul Arthur’s “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments”, he quotes Brian Winston who says, about documentary film, that “ ‘the need for structure implicitly contradicts the notion of unstructured reality’ and documentary movements are sustained by ‘ignoring this contradiction’”.

Don’t we ignore this contradiction in all movies? Do we want the same things from documentaries as we want from fictional films: sympathetic characters, compelling crisis, understandable and complete resolution? Because documentaries are based in “reality”, we expect a portrayal that is unencumbered by cinematic/narrative structures. The impossibility of this all-seeing camera or unbiased portrayal is suggested by Winston, and has easy proofs. It seems we crave, or are trained, or almost expect fictional devices anyway – we will put the pieces together and construct a narrative whether we are given one or not.

Popular, contemporary documentaries like Spellbound or Rock School show “real people” in “real” but somewhat extraordinary situations…things that are not so far-fetched that we can’t relate to them, but are still out of most peoples’ reach: champion child spellers, kids playing Black Sabbath on the guitar in the context of “school”. They use the same cinematic tricks as mainstream Hollywood films to engage the audience, build our trust and empathy for the characters, introduce a crisis (which gets us rooting for the good guys) and then resolving it, in a tidy package of 90 minutes.

Everyone knows that “real life” doesn’t work that way, so why do we expect that documentaries (or for that matter, reality television) can capture “real life”? The timeframe and format of non-experimental mainstream film cannot accommodate the complexities, the boredom, and the qualities of time/events passing that our daily lives contain.

The value of a documentary is that it can be a glimpse, a window into a larger world that the viewer doesn’t have access to. It can be an affirmation of concerns, fears, the hopes of its audience. But it can’t be a portrayal of an unmediated or “pure” reality, even if that is what we want…