Independent Contemporary Documentary Films Journalism

Independent Contemporary Documentary Films

Journalism seems to have strayed from its early history of working a story towards the presentation of unbiased facts. At the beginning of Operation Freedom, the invasion of Iraq by U.S. military forces, George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, offered press reporters the opportunity to embed with the invading troops, to cover the war from as inside a position as they could possibly hope to achieve in reporting the events and action of the invasion of Iraq. For a moment, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were the media darlings of the day; touted as pro-freedom seekers. Their pro-freedom stance was, of course, evidenced by the fact that journalists covering the war were now not just riding along with the troops, but inside the armored vehicles, hunched down in cramped quarters speeding through the desert.

Reporters reported from inside the cramped quarters, video of well-known media faces dressed down in desert gear were featured in nearly every media report on the invasion (the media stopped short of donning camouflage).

It was very different reporting than any war footage to come out of a military engagement since World War I. The story was suddenly not unbiased and about the events that were taking place - that would happen after Bush and Rumsfeld cased to be media darlings and reporting reverted back to its traditional methods. Rather, the reporting was focused on the reporting. Viewers had to wonder if indeed when the focus of the journalists was the journalists themselves, could the public be receiving the facts and the real story about what was going on. How was it that journalism move so far away from its independent reporting of the facts that it became "embedded" in its own 15 minutes of fame?

Then, redemption, in the form of real independent journalism emerged, and the stories began to slowly trickle out from Iraq and Afghanistan through independent and unbiased documentary works.

One such documentary filmmaker was Deborah Scranton (2006), who went 180 degree turn left of the traditional media, and chose what she refers to as "virtual" embedding with the troops (WBH Forum 2006). Speaking before the WBH Forum about the "process" of making the documentary, Scranton explained that the New Hampshire National Guard offered here the opportunity to document their Guard in Iraq. Scranton decided that the film needed to be from the perspective of the soldier, and instead of traveling to Iraq, she would equip the troops with cameras, and the reporting and the film would be 100% the story of the soldiers based on their experiences. Scranton discussed at length the soldier's concerns when she met with them and explained her idea. Their concerns were that their stories would become lost in her personal agenda. This suggests that the soldiers had their own experiences with, and impressions of previous embedded reporting.

Scranton convinced the soldiers that the story she would put out based on their experiences and the images they took, would be theirs, without her own agenda imposed upon it. It was a conscious decision, Scranton says, not to go personally to Iraq, in order to stay true to capturing the story from the perspective of the soldiers. "To get their stories, you have to give of yourself," Scranton says, meaning ":...being a human being firs, and a journalist and filmmaker second (Scranton 2006).

Scranton is convinced that the documentary remained true to the soldiers story, as it was filmed by them, was about them, reflected them, their mission.

Scranton says, too, that the internet played a critical role in the making of this film, because more than 800 hours of film was transferred from the soldier's theatre, back to the filmmaker's workshop (Scranton 2006).

The result of Scranton's idea and the soldier's filming is the documentary War Tapes (2006). The footage was taken from cameras mounted on soldier's helmets, their dashboards, their kevalor vests, and hand held. Scranton makes sure to mention that the filming of documentary footage was always secondary to the soldier's personal safety, to the mission, and to their service to their country.

The film conveys the strength and courage of the soldiers as they face battle with often times unseen enemies who strike out at them from the cover of urban homes and children playing in the streets. It is an unbiased, like-it-or-not, reality of facing war. It conveys, too, the bond that exists between men whose lives are at risk, and they do whatever they have to do, make whatever jokes or small talk necessary to think about anything but dying in the hours of waiting. The moments of actual gunfire and action are not so long as people might think. The film tells the story of a new kind of war, one that is more a hit and run of urban warfare than the image of soldiers in Vietnam or World War II.

Scranton remains true to her promise to the soldiers, and allows the documentary to be by them, about them, their story. There is no political agenda in the documentary, no corporate directive for ratings, no eye on the Pulitzer Prize of reporting; only the soldier's experience. The politics becomes the burden of the viewer; is this what we want to risk the lives of our sons and daughters for? Is this worth a soldier's leg, his arm, his eyesight? Do we have a clear understanding of what is going on there? We do, because Scranton's and the soldier's documentary tells what is going on there - there is, going on, an obeying of command and focus on the mission at hand. There is little tossing around of political ideologies, because surrendering the soldier's mind to that kind of rhetoric and nonsense would cause him or her to lose his edge, and when a soldier is at risk, the entire team is at risk, and the mission is at risk.

What becomes clear, too, in the film is that the soldiers are convinced that in performing their duty, obeying the command, carrying out the mission, that they are making a difference. That is, difference in the hearts and minds of the people who meet them, who see them in the action of their duty setting aside the bias of politics to eradicate opposing forces that hide behind families.

War Tapes is a documentary film, that does not have a side, only a story, and the viewer is left free to choose sides and make decisions about what they see. This is an attempt to return the journalistic perspective back to the story. It demonstrates, too, that in order to get the "real" story, free of corporate, political, or journalist agenda, that the public may have to rely upon the new comers to journalism, who need the facts and the truth to launch their careers.

Another documentary film is James Longley's Iraq in Pieces (2006), is a forthright examination of the people of Iraq, and their thoughts about the war and governance. The documentary opens with a scene of the chaos that is currently the life of the people of Iraq. It cuts to the perspective of an Iraqi, then to another. An old man says that Iraq will be cut into three pieces, and that is followed by a young child, who says, "Iraq cannot be cut into pieces." What the documentary shows is a population attempting to live their daily lives amid the violence that is going on around them, and the violence is the expression of competing forces over which the people themselves have little control over. The Iraqis are not a people without a voice, and Longley gives them the opportunity to speak. Mohammad Haithem Majid is the young boy featured in much of the documentary.

Longley exposes Iraq's Muslim diversity; Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds. Iraq's people are tired of living in fear, being afraid, dodging bombs and dictatorial despots. There is the sense that these people want peace - but they want peace for their groups. They are a fragmented society. This is their story, their perspectives, and it is not necessarily what the powers that be want to understand, but that is the reason for the documentary; to bring to viewers the perspective of those people most impacted by the forces of the contending power blocks - elected, insurgent and occupying powers.

The stories that come across in these documentaries are starkly different from what is conveyed to the public via the media news sources. The documentary filmmakers have not gone unnoticed by journalism scholars; but nor have journalists who have surrendered their journalistic integrity to corporate agendas. Researcher Paula Rabinowitz (1994) says that there is a politics, too, in documentary film. However, the documentary film politics is usually one of the most purely unbiased, democratic politics available to the public because the nature of the documentary is one that lends itself to the voice of the subject of the documentary (Rabinowiz 1). In this way, the documentary is free of the politics of government, special interest, and corporate agenda.

This does not mean that the documentary filmmaker is not taking a perspective; it means that the presentation of a perspective is original within the subject matter. It does not mean that the filmmaker has not sought to understand and to capture that perspective, much the way that Scranton captured the perspective of the soldiers and Longley captured the perspective of the vying groups in Iraq.

Audiences of all stripes do what they will with images, no matter how instrumental their makers. (Rabinowitz 1)." This is the goal of documentary filmmaking. It places the information, the perspective, into the sphere of the viewer, and the viewer is then inclined, or not, to act or to develop his or her own view with the support of the documentary film's information. It does not mean that the viewer is not going to seek to inform his or herself with other sources of information.

The nature of documentary filmmaking requires a subjectivity on the part of the filmmaker. Michael Renov (2004), says:

The documentary film has long been tied up with the question of science. Since the protocinematic experiments in human and animal locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge and others, the cinema has demonstrated a potential for the observation and investigation of people and of social/historical phenomena. In the 19305, noted avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter described this potential with particular urgency:

Technology, overcoming time and space, has brought all life on earth so close together that the most remote "facts, " as much as those closest to hand, have become significant for each individual's life. Reason has given rise to a secularisation of the divine. Everything that happens on earth has become more interesting and more significant than it ever was before. Our age demands the documented fact.... The modern reproductive technology of the cinematograph was uniquely responsive to the need for factual sustenance.... The camera created a reservoir of human observation in the simplest possible way (Renov 171-172)."

This is perhaps what documentary filmmaking is most about, turning the story over to the camera to capture the images and voices, and to give those images to the viewers. When Renov says, "Our age demands the documented fact (172)," he is saying that the documentary has a place in the public arena because other sources of information are filtered and strained and do not always give the public the story, or stage the story from a perspective of a corporate agenda or political agenda.

The documentary also normally conveys to the viewer that there are many perspectives, and journalism today fails to do that. Journalism today seems more of an effort to persuade the public to adopt the journalists' perspective, and to surrender to the journalist their free thinking, and to allow the journalist to think for them. Documentary film encourages introspection and thought, encourages investigation and, if it is successful, motivates the viewer to look to other sources for more information and new perspectives.

Choosing the subject of a documentary usually means that the filmmaker is assessing the public's interest in a news worthy subject of historical impact or interest. It also means that someone, most notably the filmmaker, understands that perspectives are incomplete without providing the direct perspective from the people who are the story.

Stella Bruzzi (2000) writes that documentary filmmakers are not unaware of their roles as the purveyors of truth and fact, and says that there are, for contemporary documentary filmmakers, rules to guide them. Bruzzi writes:

To initiate an analysis of documentary as a perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation (that is, to propose that the two remain distinct but interactive) this opening section will juxtapose the notion of film as record with the use of voice-over. This is not an arbitrary selection, but a decision to establish this book's underlying thesis that documentary does not perceive its ultimate aim to be the authentic representation of the real through an examination of (a) the component of documentary that uniquely exemplifies the ideal of a non-fictional image's 'purity' (film as record), and (b) the component that most overtly illustrates the intrusion of bias, subjectivity and conscious structuring of those 'pure' events (narration). In 1971 the German documentary dramatist Peter Weiss offered a definition of documentary theatre that is pertinent to this argument. In 'The Materials and the Models', Weiss argues that, whilst documentary theatre 'refrains from all invention; it takes authentic material and puts it on the stage, unaltered in content, edited in form' (Weiss 1971:41), it also 'presents facts for examination' and 'takes sides' (p. 42). Weiss manifestly does not automatically perceive the imposition of a structure (whether through editing or other means) to mean the loss of objectivity, instead he advocates documentary theatre rooted in dialectical analysis, the principal components of which are the raw material and the theatrical model. His intention in a play such as the Investigation - as he intimates later in 'The Materials and the Models' - is to extract from the material 'universal truths', to supply 'an historical context' and to draw attention to 'other possible consequences' (p. 43) of the events encompassed by the play. The raw material is incapable of drawing out or articulating the truths, motives or underlying causes it both contains and implies, so it falls to the writer to extract this general framework. Weiss's notes towards a definition of documentary theatre suggest that documentary is born of a negotiation between two potentially conflicting factors: the real and its representation; but rather than perceive this to be a problem that must be surmounted - as is perceived in much documentary film theory - Weiss accepts this propensity towards a dialectical understanding of the factual world to be an asset and a virtue (9)."