A Hop, Skip, and a Jump through the history of Documentary and Non-Fiction Film

I am going to post some clips from films discussed in our reading and in class. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it gives us a context with which to work with in order to discuss and understand the complicated history of documentary techniques and non-fiction filmmaking.

Please add your own suggestions, film titles, excerpts, and resources!

To start off, here is one of the earliest "ethnographic" films, Robert Flaherty's silent documentary film Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic (1922) includes many staged sequences and is historically inaccurate. Yet, the film also grew out of Flaherty's observations and relationships with the Inuit community through his travels and work there. In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk Nanook and his family in the Canadian arctic. Flaherty has been criticized for distorting the reality of his subjects' lives.

Flaherty has been criticized for deceptively portraying staged events as reality, yet staging events for the camera was the norm of documentary filmmakers of the time. With much of the action was staged for the camera, the film presents a romanticized and inaccurate view of Inuit life during the early 20th century. Some examples of the changes that Flaherty made are that "Nanook" was in fact named Allakariallak, while his "wife" as shown in the film was not actually Allakariallak's wife. And although Allakariallak normally used a gun when hunting, Flaherty encouraged him to hunt after the fashion of his recent ancestors in order to capture the way the Inuit lived before European influence. Flaherty also exaggerated the peril to Inuit hunters with his claim, often repeated, that Allakariallak had died of starvation two years after the film was completed, whereas it is now known that he more likely died of tuberculosis.

Flaherty defended his work by stating that a filmmaker must often distort a thing to catch its true spirit. Later filmmakers have pointed out that the only cameras available to Flaherty at the time were both large and immobile, making it impossible to effectively capture most interior shots or unstructured exterior scenes without significantly modifying the environment and subject action. For example, the Inuit crew had to build a special three-walled igloo for Flaherty's bulky camera so that there would be enough light for it to capture interior shots.

At the time, few "documentaries" had been made and there was little precedent to guide Flaherty's work. In addition, the colonial traveler/adventurer trope was quite prevalent as well as the romanticized and nostalgic narratives of the "other" (i.e. non-European and non-Caucasian). Since Flaherty's time, huge shifts (though many not huge enough) have occurred in terms of colonialism and post-colonialism as well as the politics of race, as well as ethnographic/anthropological study and self-representation. In documentary film, staging action and attempting to steer documentary action have come under intense scrutiny and have been the cause of many debates, controversy, and revisionist history. There are cinéma vérité purists who believe that reenactments deceive the audience, while others still hold to Flaherty's belief that a filmmaker, even a documentalist, is an artist who must steer and create his work of art in order to reveal the truth not always visible in straight-forward reportage. This position is most famously as stated by Werner Herzog in his manifesto, the "Minnesota Declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema", which includes such statements as, "Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. "