Cal Pryluck's point is well taken, as usual. Until the development of
portable camera and sound technologies that enabled direct cinema,
cinema verite, and observational cinema (choose one or more), the mode
for documentary film production was the scripted film, in which for the
most part, attempts were made to tell real stories using the people who
lived them. Humphrey Jennings' FIRES WERE STARTED, or Pat Jackson's
RAIDER (a.k.a. WESTERN APPROACHES) are good examples, but if one goes
back to Flaherty and NANOOK OF THE NORTH, Nanook re-enacts certain parts
of what was either his life or Flaherty's imagining of an ideal type.
George Stoney's film on the making of MAN OF ARAN demonstrates similar
strategy on Flaherty's part.
 
Remember, it was John Grierson who first noted that Flaherty's MOANA,
also reorganized for camera, had "a certain documentary quality" thus
bringing the term into use as a way of describing a certain kind of
film. With the possible exception of DRIFTERS, there is no evidence that
any of the Grierson-produced films lacked some renactment. The single
obvious exception is HOUSING PROBLEMS, but the 35mm cameras, lights, and
recording apparatus necessary to do talk-to-camera in location interiors
in the mid-1930's certainly meant that this was no fly-on-the-wall
observational film.
 
I think that the seminal difference between this kind of documentary and
the post-moderns to whom Jay Ruby refers is that these film makers
assumed that there was an objective reality, and that the truth of that
reality was to be found by means of empirical verifiability, and not
ascribed to a social construct that varied radically from observer to
observer. The line between fact and fiction seemed to be drawn to
distinguish the empirically verifiable from the imagined, and truth
claims derived from observation as opposed to theoretical elegance or
internal consistency.
 
Put plainly, there's a world of difference between Humphrey Jennings
organizing men from the London Fire Brigade to re-enact for the camera
their experiences in dealing with the result of an incendiary air raid,
observed and scripted by Jennings, and, say Michael Moore, constructing
a film about General Motors and the decline of Flint, Michigan by
rearranging history and confecting a fictional story line about his inability
to see Roger Smith, as a way of putting structure and stamping his
personality onto the film.
 
(Please note that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a friend or
admirer of Mr. Smith, GM, or the management philosophy they represent.)
 
It would seem to me that while the means of re-enactment seem similar
in classical documentary and "post-modern" "documentary" (couldn't resist the
second set of quotation marks) the fundamental difference is that the
latter mode assumes that the line between fact and fiction is not just
fuzzy, but rather is negotiable, depending on the ends.
 
Henry Breitrose
([log in to unmask])
Stanford University