Castration of the Documentary
By Jean Painlevé
Documentary…: “Any cultural film”, “Non-theatrical film”, “Short film”, “Reduced format”, etc… In response to the official muddle on the part of international experts, the World Union for Documentary formulated the following definition in 1947:
DOCUMENTARY: “Any film which, by rational or emotions means and with shots of actual phenomena or the authentic and valid reconstruction of these, has the express intention of enhancing human knowledge and setting out problems and their solutions from an economic, social and cultural point of view.”
It will be a long time before we can properly assess this statement and use it profitably: by then the public will have matured, and the documentary format will have degenerated. In the golden age, the documentary was booed: this is how it gained respectability (some third-rate films also benefited from this, but there were fewer of these than there are today because it was not yet a free-for-all and it was mainly dedicated directors who made documentaries). Then we, and even the intelligentsia in the avant-garde cinemas, merely grumbled. “For goodness sake!”, said a former nursemaid of Radiguet who was sitting behind me in the Ursulines cinema in about 1927, “another documentary by Painlevé”. Eventually it became the done thing not to arrive before the start of the main feature. Now, on the other hand, a cultured gentleman attending a cinema performance should at least applaud the documentary, regardless of what it is like – because he has learned something, and the idea has been drummed into him sufficiently that documentaries give cinema a certain vigour; there is even an elite who claim that they can bear only documentaries… In other words, in addition to a few genuine cinephiles, it is mainly the opponents of cinema who appreciate documentaries. This group, however, represents only a tiny number of cinema-goers, of ‘customers’, that is, of cinema’s only true recourse. We try to win over the public with the most nauseating conformism, and not simply to sell an inferior product. I too would like to join in the booing, but that would give too much pleasure to those who denigrate the genre itself, who are keen to disregard the proof that there are as many dreadful ‘feature films’ as there are mediocre documentaries. (When the cartoons are also amateurish despite the technical advances made, all that I have to look forward to is the delightful episodes of White Teeth during the advertisement breaks.)
There are currently several thousand documentaries struggling through the system, blocking the French market. (Those people who lie in wait for me on street corners should give up: I have not made documentaries for a general audience for six years, and therefore am not contributing to the gridlock.) This quantity of films in the system can be explained not only by foreign competition and competition from other types of short feature, but in particular by a cancerous proliferation brought about by the relatively easy solution that a short feature offers to the imagination of a novice film-maker who has no other opportunity to make his name, and is also due to the opportunities (which are now disappearing) afforded by governmental or private financial aid. On the other hand, the likely commercial return is terribly risky in the current state of the market and given current cinematic habits. Without the takings from the ‘paracommercial’ and the ‘non-commercial’ angles, a documentary would have no chance at all. Indeed, the documentary needs to become a public or private service in order to survive. The film-maker must toe the line. Since cost-effectiveness is difficult for even the most commonplace, the most insipid documentaries, which have little impact on the viewer or the producer’s purse, we can only imagine what tends to happen to constructive films or films which try simply to stir up the audience and create new resonances. These will have to go underground instead of being simply the poor relations kept away from the limelight. It is hardly encouraging for the few producers, usually former film-makers themselves, who want to support high-quality work. You need the genius of a Flaherty or an Ivens, or the surprising novelty of a Kon-Tiki adventure, to break down the barrier of indifference.
Substantial financial support is certainly not sufficient to make a good film, but as Alphonse Allais said, “l’argent çà aide à supporter la pauvreté” (money helps to make poverty bearable). The problem is that the vast majority of the audience, those who bring cinema to life, come to see fictional films. Cinema owners are well aware of this: of course, a cinema owner does not see the whole programme as determined by the distributor, because he has better things to do than waste his time at the cinema, but he hears what the customers say, and can judge for his own local area. If he is interested, for example, in the problems of childhood, he can tell just by looking around him whether the film of the week was appealing to children. When after a ‘Cité sanglante” the boys start to pester or hit the girls, then they have enjoyed the film. In that case, this well-informed man will no longer bother with a documentary, which only exhausts minds which have come to be entertained. Besides, the programme’s distributor is most keen to make a profit from the feature film… So we come to the conclusion that these are not sufficient reasons, or even an explanation for the current degeneration. The number of producers and film-makers is continuing to increase (do they believe in their genius or in Father Christmas?). Some of them are only in the business to make money and deliver a shoddy end-product. The profusion of films should mean there is choice, and a few fine achievements should leap out from the competition… But everything is corrupt to the core (not only in cinema, admittedly). We think we can pull through by holding childish events like awards ceremonies in festivals which are not even organised by the Profession (although the judging panels are made up of professionals; nothing disgusts me more than a professional getting involved in giving out prizes – an action which is repugnant in itself – and even more so in this profession. In support of this view, I give you the example of the crook in the medical science profession whose first action was to create a ‘Grand-Prix’ - awarded to one of his films! This is reminiscent of Anquetil, a blackmailer who founded the ‘Grand-Prix de la Société des Nations pour la Vertu’ in 1920 and awarded it to one of his books, containing a collection of pornography under the guise of scholarly indignation.
The question is raised as to whether film-makers are worn out or whether they are simply spineless under the control of producers only interested in business. Although we do not expect the incisiveness of Fraju’s Hôtel des Invalides, the interpretative intensity of Zimbaca’s Création du monde or the enveloping atmosphere of Lamorice’s Bim of all our films, it is unthinkable that film-makers should have nothing to say on their chosen subject. I hear them muttering that the subject has been imposed on them. That is too easy. Some, for want of anything better, settle for, and are happy with that shameful excuse of “fine shots” which modern technical perfection makes accessible to even the most ignorant enthusiasts. The unexpected, the unusual, photographic lyricism; these are unheard of, extinct. “Fine shot” is replacing all of these qualities. Indeed, even by the end of a film about an abbey we still have not been told where it is to be found! There is another useful formula: “evoke what you are unable to show the audience.” “En fermant les yeux, je vois là-bas” (the well-known tune highlights the power of the imagination). But we can still listen! As for words without pictures, literature on film, there is already plenty of this… One film invites us to imagine invisible combat; another to imagine a hundred thousand men, absent from the screen. Of course, this is poetic licence, taking liberties with the seventh art… It is simply evidence of incompetence and cinematic swindling. It is also a swindle when we make a “documentary”, even one disguised as a “report”, other than as a tourist, during a stay in a country about which our only knowledge is gleaned from books and predecessors’ accounts. To create exotic effects we overuse Adventure (all that is left are ape-men in New Zealand and astronautics), and the countries or peoples we travel through are badly absorbed and reduced to metres of film; as a result, rivers, seas, mountains, forests, animals with fur, feathers, seen on foot and on horseback, make up a small incoherent jumble which is good enough to fool an audience seeking shivers of fear or heroism from their cinema seats. The confusion is so great now that we expect the most surprising exploits to end in an advertisement for a shirt to cure rheumatism, or a reincarnated spitting image of the hero of Alphonse Daudet’s “Port-Tarascon” to finish by singing the praises of a brand of spinach. The use of film can be justified for any purpose: investigating a death, a shipwreck, etc… Confusion reigns: confusing sporting achievement and cinema, mixing up basic sociology with the useful account which film can make possible… and confusion rules over the functions of film as well as its genres, putting radio presenters in place of television presenters, and film-makers in place of radio experts.
The pioneers of film were rather more discreet. In the old days there was De Wawrin’s In the Land of the Head Hunters, Titayna’s Indiens, nos Frères, and before even that was La Symphonie de la Forêt Vierge, whose German maker died on the job. This was a different film from the weak Nazi production which appeared 17 years later, in 1942, L’Enfer de la Forêt Vierge, in which the admirable sequence of giant otters hardly made up for the mediocrity of the whole film. Films boasting large-scale production, which were soon ridiculed, such as Africa Speaks, or Trader Horn – in which a guide was sacrificed, to a rhinoceros, not a lion, for the camera’s pleasure – were no more artificial than some recent documentaries which were presented amid a blaze of hype, but failed to live up to their hype in the screening. (Except when a dramatic effect is required, the conditions in game reserves are a lot less dangerous than those faced by a circus trainer in a cage of rearing wild beasts.) If we consider other genres of documentary film, it is clear that emulators of the calibre of Ichac or Cousteau have not yet shown signs of life.
A total lack of sincerity, short-sighted invention, perfunctory special effects: these are all to be found among all the imitators, who may themselves be initiators (for when you utter a cry, and it is repeated, not only does it become less pure but it quickly becomes contrived. Trying something new without borrowing from others is the least one can do). This is therefore another factor which distinguishes cinema from cooking where the reheated leftovers are sometimes better than the original. All of my comments are addressed as much to feature films, just as critics’ ignorance tends to apply to cinema as a whole. One critic discovered scientific cinema in 1951 in a Walt Disney film, Le petit coin de terre (a charming antiscientific montage of documents, some of which were sensational; the collection as a whole is not at all memorable). Perhaps because of his youth, he had never recognised the documentary genre in, among others, the UFA films which quite rightly dominated the screens for 20 years and are still screened from time to time, or more recently, Soviet films, for example, which since 1945 have been applauded by all audiences; Réanimation de l’organisme, Sables de mort, etc… And when a critic praises Fred Astaire, do you think that it will be for his role in the adorable Gay Divorcee? No, in a by-product, Top Hat. And if another recommends a terrible “musical film” – Oh great Armontel, what were you going to do faced with this abundance! – we can’t even use the excuse of age to ignore Tourbillon de Paris, as this leader of its type, otherwise fresh and young, continues to be screened periodically, despite being 15 years old. In discussing L’Espion, no critic has recalled Lueur, and so on…
Since before 1944 when Luciano Emer and Enrico Gras created a masterpiece based on a Bosch painting, we have been flocking to see this cheap process of distortion – this is justifiable when the aim is to produce a screen adaptation of a work whose action inspires the film script, as Resnais did later for Picasso’s Guernica. But it is not valid to want to bring a painting to life simply by showing a series of works. Van Gogh is characterised by the fact that in leaving the brothel he cut off his ear, or that his brother Theo was possibly a rogue. I don’t know, I have not investigated the subject and I do not want to create family feuds: I just mean that even very skilful editing of views of his paintings will not reconstruct his character. Moreover, alongside Resnais’s excellent production, there are so many failed, aimless productions, right down to a film of engravings showing, among other things: a raging sea with a ship and people singing “Il était un”, then a palm tree (Martinique), and people singing the lament “Mon Doudou”. A lack of means is no excuse for a lack of imagination; it simply aggravates it. It is quite sad as it is that paintings should be dealt with in black and white (excuses heard include: cost price, technical difficulties, incorrect rendering… but even so…). And then we must add into the equation the indifferent workhorse, the drudge who has neither studied nor understood nor felt the thing which he is trying to represent! We forget, perhaps too quickly, on the other hand, that although it is possible to make films about any subject, few subjects are suited to film, and even by tying our brains in a Louis XV knot, we will only end up with a forgery.
In the case of works like Visages Anciens, Visages Modernes by Dekeukelere and Storck, or Haesaerts’s De Renoir à Picasso, film was essential to the presentation of their theses – whether we accept them or not. On the other hand so many pointless films are simply taking the easy route. Not to mention those who have taken refuge in the marvellous task of educational film, for example, or who bleed the medico-chirurgical field dry. Don’t assume that the arduous side of cinema leaves no room for lyricism: consider, even limiting ourselves to technical films, the impeccable Métier circulaire or the remarkable Jetée de Zonguldac. No. The failures in the “specialised film” category exhibit the same problems as documentaries for a general audience: lack of cinematic taste, lack of knowledge of the elementary laws ruling its presentation to an appropriate audience (decisions about its audience and purpose should be made before beginning work on a documentary), the loss of all empathy between the creator and the subject.
As a contrast to these explanatory films which may flop, there are impenetrable films which may be successful; films made for limited audiences, small groups of enthusiasts. These films require prior knowledge of the complete works of an author (if their subject is an author), detail on their love affairs, the hidden side of Parisian life from a necessarily bygone age. For the common people, the sketch is elliptical and fleeting, and not at all enlightening! Although they concern a few hundred people in the country (adopted or native), and attract a few thousand snobs, such films are far removed from the “general public”. (This is reminiscent of the travelling salesmen who can amuse themselves just by calling out the corresponding number of the fund of endlessly-repeated stories which they carry around with them for years.)
It is producers and distributors, cinema owners, spectators, and so on, who are responsible for all these evils. Money is a factor too… The financial argument has had its day: it is a squalid argument at least for those who claim to try to influence their contemporaries despite unfavourable conditions. In all professions there are those who simply do it for a living, disparaging it if necessary, as well-known authors or theatre actors do with cinema – and then there are the others, those who live for the profession. I address these remarks particularly to this minority. Those of you who do not trot out the old saying to pass of their worst failures - “It’s better than nothing” – those of you who want to impose your stamp on a subject which you have actually experienced, those of you who do not agree to make a film about beetroot just because your grandfather was diabetic, those of you who despise hypersensitivity and refuse to botch a job: it is you who have the fate of the documentary in your hands, slowly disfigured in endless ways and from all sides. And do not forget that a illuminating subject is not enough to ensure a good film: the worst clichés can destroy a film, and its subject matter with it! Of course in the current economic climate for cinema in France, you will have difficulty expressing yourself in worthwhile fashion outside of a few rare and modest attempts at technical or aesthetic research. But if you have reached the end of these intentionally polemical lines hoping to find fertile debate, then re-read the definition at the beginning and you will find a solid framework for planning your films, a framework which will allow you to impose a coherence on your ideas and desires.
Jean Painlevé
President of the Fédération Française des Ciné-Clubs.
Les textes et les photographies ne sont pas libres de droits. Toute reproduction est soumise à l'accord préalable des Documents Cinématographiques. © Les Documents Cinématographiques.