Julie Laing
Documentary film has connotations of veracity, but does this mean that films that use a documentary style tell us the truth about the society they present? In this essay I will argue that filmmakers use the documentary style to suggest that the view of society presented by them is truthful even when their work is a subjective and selective record of the events portrayed. To examine this issue I will focus on the turbulent period of the 1930s to the 1960s in Europe, which politicised populations and exposed them to mass uncertainty. Here some filmmakers chose to create worlds to which audiences could escape, while others sought to bring about change and reconfigure society through the presentation of images and ideas. I will argue that many filmmakers were motivated by their social conscience to deploy their directorial skills for the greater good; that is, to promote contemporary political ideas which they believed would improve the world for themselves and for others. I’ll suggest that the perception of documentary style as truthful made it particularly appropriate as it enabled audiences to understand their war-torn world and conceive a pathway to the future through the turmoil.
To approach and answer the question I will demonstrate how Leni Riefenstahl, Roberto Rossellini and Jean-Luc Godard manipulated documentary techniques to stimulate support for social change, for both good and for ill. I will show that while these directors integrated documentary techniques in very different ways, all three constructed their narratives to stimulate a political response in real people. Through reference to a renowned film of each director, I’ll demonstrate how documentary language has been used to inscribe a particular ideology. I’ll argue that: Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will uses a combination of real footage and staged opportunities to consolidate Nazi power at a turning point in German modern history (Riefenstahl, 1934); much of the impact of Roberto Rossellini’s dispassionate feature film Germany: Year Zero derives from his exploitation of the ruins of post-War Berlin as a location and the Neo-realist style to drive home the consequences of the regime supported by Riefenstahl (Rossellini, 1947); and in his black comedy Week-end Jean-Luc Godard’s crashes the monotonous recitation of real political texts into bizarre, realistically shot fictional episodes to ridicule post-war capitalist excesses and jolt viewers out of passive consumption and into active engagement (Godard, 1967). I’ll demonstrate that the style and content of these films was shaped by their times and that the selection of documentary elements was necessary to appeal to societies that had witnessed horror. I’ll conclude that the worlds constructed Riefenstahl, Rossellini and Godard are, despite their claim to a kind of documentary truth, mediated and subjective representations of their personal response to the political events that shaped them and their contemporaries.
Documentary style and the greater good
In periods of social upheaval, such as war and its aftermath, filmmakers come under pressure to apply their skills to politically motivated causes for the ‘greater good’ of society. They are mobilised to support or challenge the dominant morality, choosing to mediate the legacy and construct and reconstruct the past, present and future based on their subjective world view and propose new identities. Philosophers over the centuries have defined conscience and highlighted its importance to social order and morality (Bahm, 1965: 131; Thilly, 1900: 22; Rosenblum, 1981: 105).
Documentary style is particularly appealing to any individual or cause seeking to influence the social order as there is a common perception that inherent in it is the ‘truth’. As a film form it was established in the early 20th century and the earliest examples were travelogues. John Grierson is credited with coining the term in relation to film and in several essays outlined what he sees as its fundamental principles. He is clear that the form is non-fiction, presents reality and should show that society is essentially cooperative and directed towards the betterment of society for its citizens (Grierson, 1976: 25). Over the decades following his definition, the use of handheld cameras, natural lighting and sound, talking heads, reconstructions and exclusion of non-diegetic music became shorthand for the truth and were perceived to encoded reality; the documentary medium became the message and the massage (McLuhan, 1968: track 1).
The truth as propaganda in Triumph of the Will
So what form of conscience drove my chosen directors? Jean-Jacques Rousseau characterised demonstrated how humans can be taught how to progress from wilful self-love, to gratitude, to duty (Marks, 2006: 578-79). Manipulation of this process can be discerned in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1934). Self-love was in short supply in post-Versailles Germany, and Riefenstahl collaborated with Goebbels to construct using documentary tropes a pseudo-religious image of a benevolent leader who could restore their national pride and self-esteem. The opening voiceover of Triumph of the Will describes the broken state of the nation and leads into the solution—the political religion of Nazism as embodied by the Fuhrer. During an ethereal opening sequence he descends towards Nuremberg in his plane. Hitler himself is not yet visible in the frame, but his presence is suggested in every note and shot. He soars above the clouds accompanied by a heavenly non-diegetic score which implies his benign, omnipotent gaze (Riefenstahl, 1934). Reifenstahl herself acknowledged that she was initially impressed by Hitler, and along with those Germans who had not suffered yet from persecution, appeared to welcome the promise of German strength (Riefenstahl, 1992: 103).
The restored self-love described by Rousseau perhaps translated into genuine sense of duty. Reifenstahl described her style as film-verite and the use of real footage and events, apparently natural lighting and sound and minimal voiceover suggest this (Thomson, 2010: 822). She is, however, regarded by most commentators now as a propagandist and accused of contriving a spectacle through staging elements of the rallies (Sontag, 1976). Her omission of Hitler’s diatribes about the Jewish people and her selective footage of the military at play are cited. Shirtless and democratic, the rank and file relax before parading through Nuremberg (Ebert, 1994). This ‘insight’ to the lives of the troops constructs an unreal reality. Later footage of them, performing precisely in full uniform at magical night rallies, gazing with gratitude and loyalty towards their leader as if before a pulpit, drives home the message to follow. These scenes were real, but staged with film in mind to construct the myth of a nation that could last a thousand years. The pseudo-religious appeal spread to the German people who were directed to be loyal to their leader. Actual footage of spontaneous joyful reaction is interspersed with more phoney shots of smiling children, the future, and both are given equal value. Subjective shots from Hitler’s point of view reveal their gratitude. As his motorcade progresses through the real streets of Nuremberg, a young woman breaks free of the crowd and runs towards him, her face full of adoration. He engages benevolently and moves on.
Was this the truth? One million actual citizens voluntarily attended the 1934 Nuremberg rally, asking to be led out of recession and national despondency. Their truth, however, was very different from countless other Germans whose only solution was to hide or flee from the future. The lie they were sold by Hitler, Goebbels and Riefenstahl was Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer. Reifenstahl’s own conscience, however, was not concerned with them, and despite her protestations that she was serving her country, was perhaps more motivated by personal gratification than duty (Riefenstahl, 1992: 257). Triumph of the Will brought her critical acclaim, prestigious awards and personal safety at a dangerous time. In the end, the reputation she craved was tainted by her inability to shake off her image as a key agent in the selling of the Nazi brand (Sontag, 1975). She died, though, apparently with a clear conscience, calling herself a documentary maker and having persistently refused to take any responsibility for the brutal reality of the Nazi legacy (Riefenstahl, 1992: 631).
Neorealist truth in Germany: Year Zero
Social conscience can also be motivated by emotions other than ‘duty’. It can also be a response to systemic injustice and an altruistic desire to ease suffering of others, a sense of ‘oughtness’ (Thilly, 1900: 20). Riefenstahl maintained that her ‘oughtness’ was driven by fear of the consequences of refusing Goebbels (Riefenstahl, 1992: 157). In contrast, Roberto Rossellini’s war effort suggests that his ‘oughtness’ stemmed from a concern about the legacy future generations would be left. His trilogy—Paisa (1946), Rome, Open City (1946) and Germany: Year Zero (1947)—employs the Neorealist style to condemn the social wreckage caused by the war. Through the eyes of a twelve-year old Berliner, Edmund, he demonstrates that society has broken down and citizens, young and old are being exploited and starved. Inherent is the message that this should not continue to be the state of affairs. Germany: Year Zero culminates in Edmund’s suicide after he concludes that he and his older siblings cannot support their dying father.
He endures daily the search for food, negotiating his way through a black market populated by paedophiles and SS officers in limbo. The political irony of Hitler’s failure to secure victory for his people is dramatized by the juxtaposition of reality and fiction. Edmund is sent to sell a rare recording of one of Hitler’s speeches to Allied soldiers. He plays it to them among the ruins of a public building. Hitler’s real-life promise to give ‘strength, confidence and comfort’ to the German people echoes round the rubble (Rossellini, 1947). But the irony is not constructed to inspire triumphalism; it is saying to audiences, this is a document of the lives our children are leading now as a consequence of fascism. Edmund symbolises the real-life children who are faced daily with impossible choices; in order to end his father’s suffering and inevitable starvation, he euthanases him. Days later we observe him as he kicks around the stones in a destroyed fountain close to his home. Rossellini said that he conceived the whole film—‘an objective and faithful portrait’—for this sequence (Rosenbaum, 2010). The distant, observational, documentary style, lack of dialogue or close-ups in this scene do not externalise the turmoil the boy is experiencing, but shortly after, we watch him ascend to the top floor of a building opposite his overcrowded flat. He watches his family and neighbours search for him and leave go to his father’s funeral. Presumably guilt-ridden, he takes his own life by jumping to his death.
A society where traumatised children escape life through suicide has failed, and this is the Europe Rossellini inhabited. A filmmaker cannot be poised, hand-held camera in hand, to capture such moments in real-life, so the fictional form is used to expose to war-weary audiences the bottom of the chasm they had fallen into. The unobtrusive use of neorealist style allows the film to avoid descent into melodrama or emotional manipulation. This was no set. Berlin lay in ruins, as did Cinecitta studios in Rome; shooting contemporaneously in the actual location was expedient, but succeeds in implying that the boy’s death is an event that represents the truth where reality itself cannot be caught on camera. The use of black and white film, at a time when Technicolor was exploding onto screens, calls to mind photojournalism and further encodes it. The camera remains distant; no Chaplinesque soft focus close-ups are required to reveal the boy’s misery. The space between the viewer and Edmund leaves sufficient emotional distance to stimulate an active audience response to prevent future children from enduring this fate.
‘Presentation, not representation’ in Week-end
Twenty years later Jean-Luc Godard was rolling his critical camera across French society and culture. As a result of the post-war boom, France’s economy had taken a turn for the better and consumerism had taken hold, conspicuously revealing the dedication of many citizens to the capitalist structure that ordered their lives. Godard is explicit about his intentions in making films. He was interested in ‘presentation, not representation’ and by implication, the truth (The Sun-Herald, 1968). He was vocal on the role of directors and stated that they should contribute to freedom, egalitarianism and comradeship and seek to expose the failings of society (Godard, 1950:17).
Godard combined documentary and fiction techniques to convey his political ideals. His public persona and activities coincide with the values he espouses and make it easier for audiences to believe him. In his black comedy Week-end (Godard, 1967) documentary is suggested through seemingly unfiltered recitation of actual political tracts and cinema verite camera techniques. But did Godard intend that we dutifully accept what he shows us at face value? In fact, he gives us little chance to be complacent. He disrupts our viewing to the extent that we are unable to become immersed in characterisation or narrative and have to engage with the anti-capitalist rhetoric expressed by Napoleon and hippy revolutionaries. We are invited to analyse—not simply observe—the casual cruelty of bourgeois characters that plot each other’s deaths for financial gain and end up literally consuming each other. We are unsettled by surreal encounters, ironic intertitles and made conscious of the camerawork. The famous nine-minute tracking shot of a weekend traffic jam suggests a documentary lens but the mundane detail of a traffic jam—picnics and squabbles—is casually juxtaposed with dead bodies, and ignored by characters desensitised to their world. The bourgeois protagonists in the end escape the jam by skipping the queue and speeding off, their careless attitude to the carnage around them serving as a metaphor for the real-life corruption in materialistic French society. One character asks another, “Are you in a film or in reality?” and the audience is prompted to consider if real life society is as messed up as that one presented by Godard.
This process of active negotiation is crucial in politically-motivated film. The simple ‘looking’ at a spectacle will not stimulate the desired response. Godard would have been influenced by the work of phenomenologists and theorists such as Bertolt Brecht Walter Benjamin who examined how humans engage subjectively with the reality through cultural texts and suggest that meaning is negotiated between the film/object and the subject/audience in an active viewing process that leads to action (Frampton, 2006: 39). He, in turn, may have influenced, Jacques Ranciere and Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle takes polemic perhaps as far as it can go in film while still retaining an audience (Ranciere, 2007: 3, 11; Debord, 1973: 73). Godard, however, does not let his experimental style overpower his message. Week-end is not real, but corruption is, and his manipulation of documentary techniques combines with black humour to stimulate a response that a more conventional narrative might not achieve. Godard warns his audience, shaped by World War Two and Vietnam, that the real world excesses of capitalism must be challenged to prevent the future, like the past, being scarred by destruction and inequality. Week-end was screened one year before the 1968 uprisings. Perhaps they listened to him.
Conclusion
The style and content of these films was shaped by the periods in which they were made. Documentary techniques were manipulated to both suppress and expose the truth about war. The people of Europe had witnessed horrors that they could not easily shake off, and, eyes wide open, were receptive to images of reality which could help them interpret why and how they had come to this point, and where they should be going. The documentary style fitted the times and reflected the social conscience of the individual filmmakers referenced here. All three constructed for their fellow citizens a version of the society. Riefenstahl used the reality to mask reality; the plight of the Jews and others was untold, hidden behind aesthetically beautiful shots of idealised Aryans. Rossellini’s humanity is seen in his refusal to distort the truth and caricature the German people as monstrous Nazis. Instead he demonstrated the reality of their ruined lives and portrayed their plight as a humanitarian disaster that touches us all. Godard, referencing real events and politics—used satire to highlight the continuing systemic resort to conflict (Vietnam, class war) in the capitalist system. They all knew that the documentary lens projected towards a better future was an effective weapon in cinema’s fight against political apathy and a key cultural influence on the collective conscience. By grounding their narratives in real events, locations and ideologies, these filmmakers produced documents that have enabled past and contemporary audiences to question what we are told about our society. Today, on small screens, a jumble of consumerist trivia and cruelty on demand streams before our eyes. Directors like Godard and Rossellini are still needed to help us see the truth behind the reality.
References
Bahm, Archie (1965) ‘Theories of Conscience’, Ethics, Vol. 75, pp. 128-131.
Debord, Guy (1973) The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Rebel Press.
Ebert, Roger (1994), The wonderful horrible life of Leni Riefenstahl, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-wonderful-horrible-life-of-leni-riefenstahl-1994
Frampton, Daniel (2006) Filmosophy, London: Wallflower Press.
Godard, Jean-Luc (1972) Godard on Godard, Narboni, Jean & Milne, Tom (eds.), New York: Da Capo Press.
Grierson, John (1976) ‘First Principles of Documentary (1932-1934)’, in Barsam, Richard Meran (ed.) Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 19-30, New York: Dutton.
Marks, Jonathan (2006), ‘The Divine Instinct’ Rousseau and Conscience’ in The Review of Politics, Vol. 68, No. 4, pp. 564-585.
McLuhan, Marshall & Fiore, Quentin, (1968) The Medium is the Massage, track 1. Columbia Records, http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/mcluhan_marshall/Mcluhan-Marshall_The-Medium-Is-The-Massage_01-Stereo.mp3
Ranciere, Jacques (2007) The Emancipated Spectator, http://members.efn.org/~heroux /The-Emancipated-Spectator-.pdf
Riefenstahl, Leni (1992) The Sieve of Time, London: Quartet Books Ltd.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, Germany: Year Zero: The humanity of the defeated. http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1358-germany-year-zero-the-humanity-of-the-defeated
Rosenblum, Nancy (1981), ‘Thoreau’s Militant Conscience’ in Political Theory, Vol. 9. No 1 pp. 81-110.
Rossellini, Roberto (dir.) (1947) Germany: Year Zero, Italy: Criterion.
Sontag, Susan (1975), ‘Fascinating Fascism’ in New York Review of Books. New York http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/
The Sun-Herald (1968) Husband Eaten in Banned Paris Film
Thilly, Frank (1900), ‘Conscience’ in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 9, pp.18-29
Thomson, David (2010). The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 5th Ed. New York: Knopf
Triumph of the Will (1934), Directed by Leni Riefenstahl, Germany: Riefenstahl-Produktion
Week-end (1967), Directed by Godard, Jean-Luc. France: Ascot Cineraid