- The real departure of the Titanic
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There are two major categories of filmmaking: documentaries and fiction. Documentaries strive to reflect the world as it is with real-life protagonists. Fictional films recount stories that have been invented or reconstituted from real facts with roles played by actors.
The following two film clips depict the departure of the Titanic, the infamous passenger liner that sadly sank in the North Atlantic Ocean… Only one of them is from a documentary, but which one?
The images in the first clip are from the film "Titanic Departure" (UK, 1912). They show the real Titanic setting sail on 10 April 1912 from the Port of Southampton in the United Kingdom. The passenger liner was filmed in real time on the day that it departed: this is a documentary.
The second clip, from "Titanic" (USA, 1997) by James Cameron, reconstructs the departure of the passenger liner using extras, special effects and a huge amount of continuity editing, i.e. cutting the scene into several shots (the passengers on the bridge, the public on the quays, the propellers under water, etc.): this is a fictional film.
These two examples might make you believe that it is easy to tell the difference between a documentary and a fictional film, but this isn't always the case, as the following two clips will demonstrate…
In the first clip, from "Black Swan" (USA, 2011), the director Darren Aronofsky films professional actors, including Natalie Portman and Vincent Cassel. The very fact that they are film stars is the first clue that this is a fictional film. Another clue is that, based on the continuity editing, we assume that, during the shoot, this same scene had to have been filmed several times and that the actors repeated the same dialogue whilst being filmed from different angles. Despite its realism, this is most certainly a fictional film.
In the second clip, from the film "The Paris Opera" (France, 2017) by Jean-Stéphane Bron, the protagonists are not actors. These are real dancers in rehearsal whom the director filmed in real time in order to depict their work. This is a documentary.
These two clips highlight the fact that it is not always easy to tell the difference between a fictional film and a documentary. Sometimes, a fictional film comes across as so real that it could make you believe it is a documentary. And, like a fictional film, a documentary consists of a narrative and tells a story, except that it has not been invented.
In fictional films, professional actors play the characters or roles, whereas the protagonists of documentaries appear just as they are in real life and do what they would normally do, only this time in front of a camera.
In his short lesson, Jean-Stéphane Bron nicely sums up this fundamental difference: "When a documentary film comes to an end, the protagonists continue to live their lives, whereas when a fictional film comes to an end, the actors don't continue to play their characters".
In other words, the unfortunate passengers filmed on the Titanic in the first clip really boarded the passenger liner, whereas the actors in James Cameron's "Titanic" acted on studio sets and returned home after filming. Similarly, the dancers featured in "The Paris Opera" continued to live their lives as dancers, whereas the actors in "Black Swan" left their roles to play other characters in other films.
- The first ever documentary
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In documentaries, directors strive to depict the reality of a given subject, but it should be remembered that a film is always staged. Directors decide what they film by determining the position of the camera, and the framing of the image, etc. In other words, prior to filming, they must decide how to organise the scene, and so they stage the scene.
Directors have been staging scenes by making choices since the birth of cinema and the invention of the cinematograph in 1895 by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who shot the first ever films, which were referred to as "views".
When they filmed their first ever view, entitled "Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon" (France, 1895), the Lumière brothers filmed three versions of their workers leaving their factory. Why did they start again and why did they decide to publicly screen the third one?
The Lumière brothers no doubt filmed three consecutive views because the first two seemed too disorganised to them. And they chose the third view because it conveyed the image that they wanted to portray of their factory and staff the best: organised, disciplined and therefore more positive.
The Lumière brothers also managed to ensure that this third view tells a short story, which starts with the gates opening and ends with the gates closing. They also directed the workers by giving them instructions on how to behave, as almost all filmmakers who came after them would do. By imposing a point of view in this short film, which is considered to be the first ever documentary in the history of cinema, the Lumière brothers therefore staged it.
- A slightly retro Eskimo
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Considered to be one of the first feature-length documentaries in the history of cinema, "Nanook of the North" (USA, 1922) was directed by Robert J. Flaherty, an American explorer and cartographer, during his expeditions in the Arctic regions of North America, where the Inuit live.
The director asked them to re-enact typical scenes in front of the camera depicting their traditions, practices and customs, most of which no longer existed. For example, he asked them to hunt with harpoons, as they had in the past, although they were already using rifles. This shows that Flaherty had no qualms about staging scenes for the Inuit by giving them instructions as the Lumière brothers had done before him with their workers.
As this clip demonstrates, Flaherty even used special effects, such as freeze framing which was very popular in the early days of filmmaking. To present his protagonists one by one at the start of the film, the filmmaker simply stopped the camera during the time it took each of them to climb inside the kayak. What did the audience at the time make of this? Did they really believe that a kayak could hold that many passengers?
Robert Flaherty thought that the Inuit were more real and more authentic before they met white people. In order to convey his point of view as a filmmaker, he opted to recreate their ancestral customs.
In fact, a documentary film always expresses the director's point of view. That's why Jean-Stéphane Bron explains that he sometimes gets his protagonists to re-enact a scene or repeat certain sentences in order to achieve the result that best fits his point of view.
In his documentary "Cleveland Versus Wall Street" (France, 2010), Bron takes his approach even further by staging a trial which never actually took place. In 2008, the City of Cleveland in the USA filed a lawsuit against 21 Wall Street banks. It accused them of forcing numerous families to leave their homes because they could no longer afford to pay their debts.
Bron went to Cleveland with the intention of filming the trial brought against the banks, but it was cancelled. In order to right this wrong and give the protagonists the opportunity to be heard, the director decided to stage the trial himself, i.e. to recreate it in his film with the individuals who should have been involved in it.
Even though this trial never took place, it is based on real facts and features protagonists giving testimonies of their real experiences. But can something be referred to as a documentary film if the filmmaker completely recreates reality? Nevertheless, these two examples demonstrate the real importance of staging, points of view and the choices made by directors when they film documentaries.
- The defence of ethics
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Documentary filmmakers must respect certain ethics, i.e. respect certain principles in order to remain faithful to the reality that they wish to portray. They must not betray their protagonists or allow the images to depict an untruth.
For example, Jean-Stéphane Bron avoids asking his protagonists questions which do not respect their integrity and depicting them in a way which would distort reality. In other words, the ethics of documentary filmmaking involve representing reality by respecting the truth of the individuals and events being filmed as much as possible.
In this clip from the documentary "On the Way to School" (France, 2013), has the director Pascal Plisson respected the ethics of documentary filmmaking described above?
The answer is a resounding "no"! In order to get the audience to believe that the children felt threatened by the presence of a herd of elephants, the filmmaker intentionally dramatised the scene. Plisson clearly achieved this result by asking the two children to run as if they were being chased by the elephants, which wasn't the case. By adding trumpeting sounds and harrowing music to the soundtrack, he makes you believe that this is really what happened. This manipulation results in a film which represents a reality which didn't exist at the time of filming. Doing this without informing the audience breaches documentary ethics, even if the two children may at some point or other have been chased by elephants. Any filmmaker who respects these ethics would instead have asked them to recount their "encounter" with the elephants.
Fortunately, most documentary filmmakers don't behave like that. For example, a director like Nicolas Philibert films without intervening in or manipulating scenes during filming and refrains from making any kind of commentary. This is evident from the following clip from "To Be and to Have" (France, 2002), in which he plunges us into a class of mixed age groups at a rural school.
Thanks to this approach, the film gives the audience the impression that the reality of what takes place in the classroom is being faithfully portrayed. This is what is known as an immersive documentary because there is no intervention during filming, and a small team and lightweight, unobtrusive technical equipment are used in order to minimise disruptions to real events. However, it is worth remembering that filmmakers always give their point of view. Here, the director does so at the editing stage, by choosing to show one scene rather than another.
This approach is rooted in direct cinema, a documentary genre that originated at the end of the 1950s in the USA. It is linked to the invention of more lightweight and shoulder-mounted cameras which made filmmakers more mobile and responsive. Another innovative development dating back to that era involved the ability to capture sound at the same time as images thanks to recorders, which were also very lightweight and which made it possible to film "directly" and on the fly, trying to stay as close to the events as possible.
Pioneers of direct cinema, which has also been referred to as "cinéma-vérité", the directors David and Albert Maysles filmed "Gimme Shelter" (USA, 1970), in which they followed The Rolling Stones around on their American tour without ever intervening…
Fights broke out during performances but the directors refrained from intervening, in line with the requirements of their documentary approach. For some specialists, direct cinema or cinéma-vérité is a utopia. According to them, as soon as someone knows that they are being filmed by a camera, they tend to change their attitude. To ensure that people behave more naturally, they have to be filmed without knowing, by filming secretly shot "stolen images", but this flies in the face of documentary ethics.
Jean-Stéphane Bron respects very different documentary ethics to those of direct cinema. He doesn't consider himself to be a neutral observer and tends to intervene during filming. There are therefore different degrees of documentary staging which correspond to different ethics and approaches. However, the challenge is to always remain as close to the truth as possible.
Jean-Stéphane Bron explains this challenge by stating that you can ask a protagonist all the questions that you want provided that they don't betray the sentiments of the film or the individual being interviewed, i.e the truth. Conversely, if intervening means that the images will depict an untruth, then no intervention should be carried out.
Some documentary filmmakers intervene a lot during filming and sometimes even place themselves in scenes in order to achieve a very specific outcome. Such is the case with the American director Michael Moore.
In "Bowling for Columbine" (USA, 2002), he asks the actor Charlton Heston, who defends people's rights to freely own firearms, why he came to give a speech on the "benefits of firearms" in a town where a little girl was shot dead just days before.
As this clip demonstrates, Michael Moore uses a different method to that of Jean-Stéphane Bron: he interviews his protagonists in an insistent, pushy manner in order to make them feel uncomfortable and thus reveal their contradictions.
The filmmaker wants to ensure that the audience adopts his own point of view. In this case, he wants to demonstrate that the free sale of firearms is one of the main causes of the alarming number of deaths in the USA. Though his arguments may be very valid, his film is more of a propaganda film than a documentary.
- About Jean-Stéphane Bron
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Jean-Stéphane Bron became famous with "Corn in Parliament" (2003), which was shot behind the scenes of the Swiss Parliament, but started his career as a documentary filmmaker in 1997 with "Connu de nos services", which focused on the files that the police keep on citizens.
Since then, Jean-Stéphane Bron has filmed several documentaries, including "La Bonne Conduite" (1999), filmed inside a driving school car, "The Blocher Experience" (2013), a face-to-face encounter with a Swiss politician with extremely closed-minded views, "Cleveland Versus Wall Street" (2010), which denounces the injustices of the financial system through a real mock trial, and "The Paris Opera" (2017), in which he describes how this highly complex institution works.
Jean-Stéphane Bron demonstrates a deep respect for ethics in all his films. His rigorous and coherent approach to filmmaking make him one of the best representatives of current documentary filmmaking.
