Tribes’ Life Told Through ‘Story’ : Television: In a controversial move, ‘Millennium’ uses some dramatization to show tribal rituals.

In a tiny village in Mexico, a young couple of the Huichol tribe prepare to join their people on the annual pilgrimage to the desert, where they will collect peyote for religious ceremonies and participate in a sacred blessing that the people believe will save the world from destruction.

The cameras of PBS’ “Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World” are there, capturing scenes of the couple packing for the trip, translating their discussions by use of subtitles and telling their tale through a heavily accented voice-over that accompanies the filmed images.

Except that the producers didn’t really capture the couple’s conversation at all. The pair reconstructed the entire scene for PBS’ cameras. And the voice-over isn’t really translated from interviews--it was based on interviews but written by executive producer Adrian Malone and performed by actors.

“Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World” is a 10-hour series co-produced by Los Angeles public-television station KCET Channel 28 and airing in two-hour segments on Mondays at 8 p.m. Using storytelling as its main motif, the series explores the lives and beliefs of both tribal people and city dwellers from places as diverse as Nepal and New York City.

“Millennium” represents a major departure from the standard documentary-style approach to anthropology. For the first time, the producers of a major public-television series have departed from the style typical of most American news and documentaries, and have adopted the technique of dramatization.

This blurring of the lines between documented and staged events has a precedent in such movies as Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool,” in which a detective story is melded with actual footage of the bloody Chicago demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Party convention. Filmmaker Errol Morris restaged events for his stylized documentary “The Thin Blue Line” and, most recently, director Oliver Stone intercut documentary and staged footage during key sequences of “JFK.”

But the technique has been very controversial on television, where it has been associated mostly with tabloid television programs such as the syndicated “Hard Copy” and so-called “reality” shows such as CBS’ “Rescue 911” and “Top Cops.”

When re-enactments of crime scenes in these programs caught on in the mid-’80s, the network news divisions began experimenting with the technique. But critics said that it was too confusing, that viewers would not be able to tell what was real and what was not, and the dramatizations were soon abandoned to producers working for the entertainment divisions.

“Millennium” producer Michael Grant defended the technique, saying that dramatization made it easier for the stories of tribal peoples to come alive.

Grant, whose background is in drama and feature film, said that the well-rounded picture of the life and philosophy of the people in the film would not have been possible using simply a news-style approach.

“Tell me the focal length of the lens that records reality,” Grant said. “Dramatization was part of the plan from the beginning.”

Essentially, the dramatizations worked like this: When people told the series’s producers an interesting story about something that had happened in their lives, the producers asked the people to re-enact the experience in front of the cameras.

For example, the second hour of the series, which aired May 11, involved a couple from Nepal who split up after the wife met a new man during a tribal dance the previous year. The couple was filmed demonstrating the dance and how the flirtation took place, and then footage of the demonstration was intercut with scenes of a real dance that occurred while the cameras were present.

At KCET, which presented the series to PBS, there was considerable nervousness about using the dramatizations, according to both Grant and Phylis Geller, the station’s vice president for national programming and executive in charge of “Millennium.”

“There were definitely points where we had some very intense discussions about it,” Geller said. “I just had to warn them that we had to set these ‘dramas’ up in such a way that the audience believed that they were credible.”

To that end, the producers agreed to signal the onset of a dramatization by having host David Maybury-Lewis call the upcoming scenes “a story,” according to Grant. In addition, re-enacted segments conducted in tribal languages would carry subtitles, he said.

“Everyone agreed from the beginning that we didn’t want to do the traditional documentary with the narrator standing up in front of a hut,” Geller said. “We wanted it to be tribal people in their own voices.”

Contributing to this story was free-lance writer Robert Koehler.