The Face Behind the Truth in Cinema

Documentarians often want to get as close to their subject matter as possible. Some documentarians have an insider perspective which ignites a spark to create a piece that illuminates a specific topic or area of study. There are also documentarians that have no affiliation with said subject matter, but want to explore the topic in question. Finally, there are documentarians that have a foot in both worlds. Insider/outsider is a theory in which a documentarian can be close to a subject, but also possess characteristics or traits that make them distant from the topic in question (Coles, 1998). Such is the case with the directors of both Stranger with a Camera and The House I Live In. Due to their own location, both Eugene Jarecki and Elizabeth Barret exhibit characteristics that make them fall into the insider/outsider roles as directors. Robert Coles defines location by stating, “We notice what we notice because of who we are” (Coles, 1998, p. 7). Included in this is, a person’s education, race, class, and gender. Both directors realize they are outsiders and utilize a lens into a world in which they are not otherwise a part of. Jarecki’s lens comes in the form of Nanny Jeter, his family’s nanny from when he was a child. Barret’s lens for her documentary is the community that she shared with Ison. The two directors enter into a world that they are not a part of because of their location, but forge a connection to the subject matter through means of a lens.

As a viewer, the documentary’s intention to inform is more completely fulfilled by research conducted beyond the scope of the camera lens. Had I never written this paper, for instance, the reason for all the violence embedded within the subject matter would remain as enigmatic as the documentary itself.

Documentary films in particular have been the preferred channel for the diffusion of propaganda because of its association with ‘a truthful cinema.’ John Grierson, coiner the term documentary, defined it as “the creative treatment of actuality.” However, Hilmar Hoffman talks about film’s illusory power by explaining that what exists to the viewer is only what the camera ‘sees,’ and due to the absence of alternate perspectives, the viewer conventionally perceives the images shown as reality. In this regard, documentary films are able to influence, represent, and create a particular consciousness by doctoring events, thus making it untrustworthy and, ultimately, the ideal medium to communicate

The aesthetics of realism in each film can be utilized in many diverse ways to offer certain truths about the world of the film to further express the film’s story. These theatrical elements emphasize what the film attempts to relay to the audience; moreover, it intensifies the authenticity of each aspect of the film. The use of real people, on-camera interviews, textual information, and of direct address to the camera displays the realism of each film.

Many documentary makers include their individual cultural assumptions and discourses to distort the truth and position the target audience to react in a desired manner. This

Since documentary films are made in a great variety of tradition, style, characteristics and purpose, they can be broadly categorized into five schools depending on their chronological existence. Newsreel strictly describes records of the actual events without dramatizing the event. This school follows the tradition of the soviet newsreels e.g. Reisner’s The March of Time. Propagandist school on the other hand, employs pseudo-documentary as an instrument of political propaganda by making full use of the persuasive capacity of this audio-visual medium. This school primarily follows the style of Soviet and Nazi propaganda films. Triumph of the Will is a suitable example in this regard. Realist school portrays contemporary city scene, gives a

The way that the two narratives are structured around voyeurism in terms of watching and being watched, also places emphasis on the method of these films’ enunciation. Typically, classical narrative employs specific techniques to mask the “nuts and bolts of a films construction” (Wells 42), meaning that it appears as though the film flows

He states, “[I]n documentary, realism serves to make an argument about the historical world seem persuasive” (Nichols 165). Persuading the audience is vital in films pertaining to social issues such as defining and examining

Theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that narrative films are mainly a “product of construction” and cautious compilations of “selections of images that have been shot” (Renée).

1. I was intrigued by Rabiger's distinction between true documentary and propaganda. I had previously thought propaganda to be far more manipulative and malicious in intention, but Rabiger's assertion that even well-meaning filmmakers focusing on a favorite issue can undermine the element of discovery that is inherent in true documentary has caused me to question what I know about propaganda and how my opinions shape what I view as propagandistic.

This reminded me of the mockumentary No Lies and how I was fooled into thinking it was a documentary because of the way it was shot. Even before taking this course I knew that documentaries have a specific style and that they are true and real. However, after watching this short documentary I was a bit upset because I believe there is a secret contract between the filmmaker and viewer.

“The reflexive mode of representation gives emphasis to the encounter between filmmaker and viewer rather than filmmaker and subject.”

Many of them, including Newsom’s 2011 production Miss Representation, do show truth and reality. However, this does not mean that what is being shown is objective or the complete picture. In Miss Representation, Newsom takes true, provocative images from media and uses them to persuade viewers to see how harmful they are. What is shown in these films is typically a portion of the truth that supports the view of the filmmaker, meaning that it can be true but is not necessarily objective. In a sense, documentary filmmakers are able to use their work as an advertisement for their belief system. In Bazin’s view this would not be acceptable, as intervention on the filmmaker’s part interferes with the reality of the film that is important to the integrity of the film (Memorial University, 2007). This intervention can occur with the filmmaker being selective in what images they choose to put in their film, or it can be in the form of highly editing the images so that they are not a fair representation of the original image or are taken out of context. Despite this, many images in the videos were taken directly from pre-existing media so it is not far from realistic either. To Perez, it is indisputable that films contain some “visual lies”, including documentaries (Memorial University, 2007). This is true in Miss Representation because of the presence of lies that existed in the media

Through a synthesis of observational photography and cinematic montage, Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov created Man With A Movie Camera, a radical work that is fully divorced from the theatrical and literary tradition of the use of fiction to communicate deeper truths and themes of reality. The film captures a day of urban Soviet city life and through juxtaposition and abstraction, morphs into a rhythmic visual poem that conveys a utopian vision of an egalitarian socialist society. Rejecting the formalism of bourgeois melodrama and rigid objectivity of Soviet realism, the film also boldly celebrates the transcendent power of cinematic expression. The cinematographer, editor, and the camera itself become primary characters as, for the first time, documentary filmmaking pulls back the curtain on itself, revealing the constructivist nature of the medium as well as its ability to exceed the limitations of time, physical space and human observation. Vertov’s conception of “film-truth,” sought to unify the authentic and abstract into a cohesive work of film art, free from the restrictions of language, that would assist the proletarian masses around the world in developing a more profound and

One of the three filmmakers, and the first person, who will be focused on in this portion of the essay is Richard Leacock. As mentioned earlier, along with Drew, Leacock was “responsible for putting cinema verite methods into practice on a grand scale” (Mamber 23). The first film Leacock worked on after his departure from Drew’s Associates was Happy Mother’s Day in 1963. Happy Mother’s Day was made by Leacock, but he was hired by the Saturday Evening Associates and the film was played on ABC- but it was cut and completely different Leacock’s original. Leacock’s film was very detailed and relied on human behavior to tell a