![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/bashir-1-500.jpg\" "\\"bashir-1-500\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nDB, again:<\/p>\n
People tend to think that documentary films are typified by two conditions. First, the events we see are unstaged, or at least unstaged by the filmmaker. If you mount a parade, the way that Coppola staged the Corpus Christi procession in\u00a0The Godfather Part II<\/em>, then you aren\u2019t making a documentary. But if you go to a town that is holding such a procession and shoot it, you are making a doc\u2014even though the parade was organized to some extent by others. Fiction films stage their events for the camera, but documentaries, we tend to think, capture spontaneous happenings.<\/p>\n Secondly, in a documentary the camera is seizing those events photographically. The great film theorist Andr\u00e9 Bazin saw cinema\u2019s defining characteristic as its capacity to record the actual unfolding of events with little human intervention. All the other arts rely on human creation at a basic level: the novelist selects words, the painter chooses colors. But the photographer or filmmaker employs a machine that impassively records what is happening in front of it. \u201cAll the arts are based on the presence of man,\u201d Bazin writes; \u201conly photography derives an advantage from his absence.\u201d This isn\u2019t to say that cinema can\u2019t be artful, only that it offers a different sort of creativity than we find in the traditional arts. The filmmaker works not with pure imaginings but obstinate chunks of actual time and space.<\/p>\n Given these two intuitions, unstaged events and direct recording of them, it would seem impossible to consider an animated film as a documentary. Animated films consist of almost completely staged tableaus\u2014drawings, miniatures, clay, even food or wood shavings (in the works of Jan Svankmajer<\/a>). And animated movies offer no recording in Bazin\u2019s sense of capturing the flow of real time and space. These films are made a frame at a time, and the movement we see onscreen doesn\u2019t derive from movement that occurred in reality. And of course you can make an animated film without a camera, for instance by painting directly on film or assembling computer-generated imagery.<\/p>\n Recently, however, we\u2019ve been faced with animated films that claim documentary validity. How is this possible? Maybe we need to rethink our assumptions about what documentary is.<\/p>\n \n In certain types of documentaries, especially those in the Direct Cinema or cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/em> traditions, the assumption that we’re seeing spontaneously occurring events holds good. But a documentary can consist wholly of staged footage. Think back to those grade-school educational shorts showing a tour of a nuclear power plant. Every awkward passage of dialogue recited by the hard-hatted, white-coated supervisor was scripted. The whole show was planned and rehearsed, but that doesn\u2019t detract from the factual content of the film.<\/p>\n Go further. Recall those attack maps that are shown in war films, tracing the progress of an army through enemy terrain. Now imagine an entire film made of those animated maps. The maps might even be enhanced with a few cartoon images, as in the above shot from one of the Why We Fight<\/em> films. The film would be entirely designed, presenting no spontaneous reality being captured by the camera. Yet it would plainly be a documentary, telling us that, say, the Germans marched into the Sudetenland in 1938 and proceeded on to Poland. So we don’t need photographic recording of actual events to count a film as a documentary either. Both the staging and the recording conditions don’t have to be present for a film to count as a documentary.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying that the claims advanced in my nuclear-power film or my attack-map movie would necessarily be accurate. They might be erroneous or inconclusive or false. But that possibility looms for any documentary. The point is that the films, presented and labeled as documentaries, are thereby\u00a0asserting<\/em> that the claims and conclusions are true.<\/p>\n Film theorist No\u00ebl Carroll defines documentary as the film of “purported fact.\u201d Carl Plantinga makes a similar point in saying that documentaries take “an assertive stance.” Both these writers argue that we take it for granted that a documentary is claiming something to be true about the world. The persons and actions are to be taken as representing states of affairs that exist, or once existed. This is not something that is presumed by The Gold Rush<\/em>, Magnificent Obsession<\/em>, or Speed Racer<\/em>. These films come to us labeled as fictional, and they do not assert that their events and agents ever existed.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t just a case of a professor stating something obvious in a fancy way. Once we see documentary films as tacitly asserting a state of affairs to be factual, we can see that no particular sort of images guarantees a film to be a doc.<\/p>\n Take the remarkable documentaries made by Adam Curtis<\/a>. These are in a way very old-fashioned. Blessed with a voice whose authoritative urgency makes you think that at last the veils are being ripped away, Curtis mounts detailed arguments framed as historical narratives. Freudian theory shaped the emergence of public relations, which was in turn exploited not just by business but by government (Century of the Self<\/em>). Islamic fundamentalism grew up intertwined with US Neoconservatism, both being reactions to perceptions that the West was becoming heartlessly materialistic (The Power of Nightmares<\/em>). Mathematical game theory came to form politicians\u2019 dominant conception of human behavior and civic community (The Trap<\/em>). The almost uninterrupted flow of Curtis\u2019s voice-over commentary could be transcribed and published as a piece of nonfiction. True, there are some interpolated talking heads, but those experts\u2019 statements could be printed as inset quotations.<\/p>\n What\u2019s particularly interesting is that Curtis\u2019 rapid-fire declamation accompanies images that often seem not to illustrate it, or at least not very firmly. Like the found footage in the preacher\u2019s sermon \u201cPuzzling Evidence\u201d in True Stories<\/em>, Curtis\u2019 images are enigmatic, tangential, or metaphorical.<\/p>\n Here are a few seconds from the start of The Power of Nightmares<\/em>. Eyes are staring upward, as if possessed.<\/p>\n We hear: [Our politicians] say that they will rescue us from dreadful . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n The eyes are replaced by a shot of a man wearing a cowl, and as this image zooms back the commentary continues.<\/p>\n . . . dangers that we cannot see and do not . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n Cut to a magician or mime demanding silence.<\/p>\n . . . understand.<\/strong><\/p>\n Cut to rockets being fired.<\/p>\n <\/span>And the greatest danger . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n Cut to a procession of cars, seen from above, rounding a corner into a government compound at night.<\/p>\n . . . of all is international terrorism.<\/strong><\/p>\n Cut to shot of security agent staring at us.<\/p>\n The ominous, not to say paranoid, tenor of the sequence is aided by the unexpected juxtapositions. For instance, you\u2019d think that the shot of the iconic terrorist (anonymous, with automatic weapon) would be synchronized with the final line of the commentary, referring to \u201cinternational terrorism.\u201d Instead the commentary links the mention of terrorism to an image of government deliberation, and then to an image of surveillance (aimed at us, but also perhaps suggesting the previous high-angle shot was the spy’s POV). The wild-eyed close-up might belong to a terrorist, but is accompanied by claims about rescuing us from fearsome threats, so the eyes could also belong to someone panicked–especially since they contrast immediately with the sober eyes of the gunman in the cowl. Perhaps the first shot represents the fearful public ready to be led by the politicians playing on fear. And the insert shot of the mime becomes sinister but also comic, perhaps debunking the official position that our dangers are unseen and unknowable. In all, the sequence bubbles with associations that are less fixed and more ambiguous than we’re likely to find in a more orthodox documentary, like Jarecki’s Why We Fight<\/em>.<\/p>\n My point isn\u2019t to analyze the image\/ sound relations in Curtis\u2019s work, a task that probably demands a whole book. (This sequence takes a mere eleven seconds.) I simply want to propose that regardless of what pictures Curtis shows, his films are documentaries in virtue of a soundtrack constructed as a discursive argument that makes truth claims. The picture track often works on us less as supporting evidence than as a stream of associations, the way metaphors or analogies give thrust to a persuasive speech.<\/p>\n \n \n Just as we could have an account of Germany’s 1938 invasion of Czechoslovakia presented in cartoon form, we could imagine The Power of Nightmares<\/em> illustrated with political cartoons.\u00a0Once we\u2019ve pried the image track loose from the assertions on the soundtrack, anything goes.<\/p>\n One example much on our minds now is Waltz with Bashir<\/em>. Ari Folman interviews former Israeli soldiers. But instead of using film footage of their conversations and, say, still photos of the events in Lebanon they took part in, he provides (until the final sequence) drawings a bit in the Eurocomics mold of Tardi<\/a> or Marc-Antoine Mathieu<\/a>. The result takes the form of a memoir, admittedly. But in both literature and cinema, memoir is a nonfiction genre.<\/p>\n Turning Satrapi\u2019s published memoir into an animated film did not change its status as a documentary. If we had contrary evidence, we could charge her with fibbing about her family life, her rebelliousness, or her life in Europe. But we\u2019d be questioning the presumptive assertions the film makes, not the fact that it is drawn and dubbed rather than photographed from life.<\/p>\n We\u2019re tempted to see the animation in these films as adding a level of distance from reality. We\u2019re so used to fly-on-the-wall documentaries that we may be suspicious of the cobra-like caricatures of the female teachers in Persepolis<\/em> or the hallucinatory dawn bombardment in Bashir<\/em>. Yet animation can show things, like the Israeli veterans’ dreams, that lie outside the reach of photography. And the artificiality doesn\u2019t dilute the claims about what the witnesses say happened any more than does purple prose in an autobiography. In fact, the stylization that animation bestows can intensify our perception of the events, as metaphors and vivid imagery in a written memoir do.<\/p>\n Animated documentaries are likely to remain pretty far from our prototype of the mode. Still, we should be grateful that even imagery that seems to be wholly fictional\u2014animated creatures\u2014can present things that really happen in our world. This mode of filmmaking can bear vibrant witness to things that cameras might not, or could not, or perhaps should not, record on the spot.<\/p>\n Andr\u00e9\u00a0Bazin’s arguments for the documentary basis of cinema are set out in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?<\/em> ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9-16. No\u00ebl Carroll’s argument that documentaries are framed as presenting “purported fact” can be found in <\/a>Theorizing the Moving Image<\/a><\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 224-259. On the “assertive stance” of documentaries, see Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film<\/a><\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15-25. Errol Morris interviews Adam Curtis here<\/a>. Thanks to Mike King<\/strong> for pointing me toward The Even More Fun Trip<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Another memoir supports the point. Marjane Satrapi\u2019s autobiographical graphic novels, Persepolis<\/em> and Persepolis 2<\/em>, assert factual claims about her life. The claims are presented as drawings and texts rather than simply as texts, but that doesn\u2019t change the fact that she presents agents and actions purported to have existed. True, on film the people whom she remembers are represented through voice actors speaking lines she wrote. But as with written memoirs (especially those that claim to remember conversations taking place fifty years ago), we can always be skeptical about whether the events presented actually took place.<\/p>\n<\/a>I realize I’m pointing toward a slippery slope here. Strip off the image track from Aardman<\/a>‘s <\/a>Creature Comforts<\/a><\/em> and you have impromptu recordings of ordinary people talking about their lives. Those monologues could have been accompanied by documentary-style talking heads. Does that make Creature Comforts<\/em> a documentary? I’d say not because the film doesn’t come to us labeled that way; it’s presented as comic animation using found soundtracks (like the movie based on the Lenny Bruce routine Thank You Mask Man<\/a><\/em>). Then there are Bob Sabiston<\/a>‘s rotoscoped films like Waking Life<\/em> and The Even More Fun Trip<\/a><\/em>, recently released on Wholphin<\/a><\/em> no. 7.<\/a> The latter (left) takes another documentary form, the home movie, as the basis for its animation. This seems to me an instance where the documentary category has the edge, but it’s a surely a borderline case.<\/p>\n
\n<\/a><\/p>\n