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“One of the great things about documentary is that like the novel everyone is predicting its demise, yet it keeps on coming up fresh again and is as exciting a format, in its way, as the novel is.”
The Grierson Awards 2002 will be presented at BAFTA on November 12
offers a stark view of the brutal realities of modern film making.
“We were making a film about pre-production,” says Darwin, “an independently financed docu- mentary to show how films get off the ground. What we didn’t expect was for things to go so wrong.”
As disaster was heaped upon disaster – acts of God combine with more prosaic human frailties – audiences will share Gilliam’s pain. But they will also share the thrill of uncovering a good story.
“In our initial pitch we empha- sised the Quixotic nature of Terry as a director,” Darwin adds. “That was one of the things that made it attractive, he’s somebody who’s not afraid to battle against gargantuan forces.”
The same might be true of anyone who makes a documen- tary film.
between sometimes conflicting source material and decide for themselves upon some kind of objective truth, the nature of ulti- mate reality which, writer Arthur Koestler described as ‘a text writ- ten in invisible ink’.
“We all tend to take things at face value,” adds Edward Mirzoeff, “television and docu- mentary makers are no differ- ent. If you find an archive you’re inclined to think that’s it. I can remember a documen- tary about the Second World War, depicting battleships, which was illustrated with footage of First World War bat- tleships, which nobody noticed. It didn’t actually matter.
“There was a ship firing, and the fact that it was something filmed in 1916 used to illustrate something that was happening in 1944 was neither here nor there. You didn’t know the difference anyway.
“The image is so persuasive that you accept it in the first instance, and it takes quite a lot of discipline to question it. But there is an emotional truth through artifice sometimes, that’s what Grierson was about after all. Not that he was the be-all and end-all of documentaries, but at least he set us thinking in the right kind of way.”
The delight in documentaries is surely in making the audience think long and hard about things they would not otherwise have given a second thought to. It’s about introducing a whole new view of the world to our cynical and jaded eyes.
And cynicism is good, a healthy attribute when separat- ing the puff pieces and the hagiographies from the warts and all, stripped down tales. When We Were Kings was a fasci- nating view of a particular type of greatness, the sporting heights achieved by Muhammad Ali. But Hoop Dreams arguably said more about the indefatigability of the human spirit.
Kevin Macdonald’s One Day In September held rapt the attention of audiences watching the unbelievable real life tragedy of the 1972 Munich Olympics, while Nobody Someday some- how didn’t. Entertaining enough, it preached to the converted. But this sort of documentary is more likely to secure a cinema release, having ‘brand appeal’ – in this
case Robbie Williams – which promises to have a life beyond its initial cinema run.
“If you look at a list of the highest grossing documentaries the biggest, without exception, are the music documentaries,” explains Kathy Loizou, until this year Director of the prestigious Sheffield International Documentary Festival. “In fact Michael Moore’s Roger & Me is the highest placed documentary that is not music based.”
It might be argued that Moore is himself the star of his films these days, a kind of abrasive American version of Broomfield who is not shy to share his opinion about on screen developments.
And he is very much a man with a social conscience – Grierson would have loved Moore’s sentiment if not neces- sarily his methods – with Roger & Me depicting the industrial wasteland of his hometown, and his new film Bowling For Columbine challenging America’s gun culture head-on.
While Moore and Broomfield are the stars of their own particu- lar shows, a few other films are managing to get a look in. Lost In La Mancha is a fascinating account of the circumstances surrounding the demise of Terry Gilliam’s film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Dogtown & the Z-Boys
recounts the California skate- boarding boom of the 70s that eventually took over the world. The Kid Stays In The Picture is a screen version of Robert Evans’ bestselling autobiography, while Scratch recounts the rise in hip-hop music in the 1980s. And the list goes on.
“One of the great things about documentary is that like the novel everyone is predicting its demise,” adds Mirzoeff, “yet it keeps on coming up fresh again and is as exciting a for- mat, in its way, as the novel is. Of course it evolves.
“One effect of budgetary cut- backs is a new style of documen- tary in which directors equipped with little tiny cameras are doing the filming themselves. Sometimes that can lead to astonishingly wonderful results.
“While we deplore the loss of the highly crafted documentary that is beautifully filmed and wonderfully lit and exquisitely crafted, you can sometimes get
a whole new form that couldn’t have been done any other way.
“The tapes submitted to the Grierson Awards has doubled this year, and that’s one of the most hopeful signs that we’ve come across after a slight period of dol- drums for factual filmmaking in the last year or two it’s really flowered again.”
WTindmill tilting
he joy of documentary is the journey it takes into the unknown. This can be true for the filmmakers as well as the audience, as circumstance pre- scribes a film quite different from the one originally envisioned.
Lost In La Mancha charts the coming together and eventual falling apart of Terry Gilliam’s aborted movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe and produced by Lucy Darwin, it
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