The Truth of the Matter Isn’t Clear

Documentary filmmakers are a cantankerous lot. Lock two of them in a room and chances are you’ll get two different views on what makes a documentary a documentary, or at least what makes a good one good. Bring 1,000 of them together, which is what happens here this week, and . . . Watch out!

“Documentary films are a fragmented industry,” said Bobby Houston, who only recently made his first documentary feature but can already see the fissures. What, after all, is the similarity between the academic approach of Ken Burns and the hectoring advocacy of Michael Moore? Between the stylized cinema of Errol Morris and Albert Maysles’ unadorned art?

What links them is the “documentary” grouping and a presumed allegiance to the truth. But is it any wonder that any one of these filmmakers might blanch at being lumped with such disparate mates?

“People are always looking for some way to define [documentary],” said David Haugland, a filmmaker and current president of the International Documentary Assn. It’s a safe bet that when the International Documentary Congress convenes here today the issue of definition, and perhaps fractionalization, will come up.

However you define it documentaries are booming. Entire TV channels are dedicated to the form. And the increased production brought about by the growth of cable television and the phenomenal popularity of “reality” programming has boosted the role Los Angeles plays in an industry traditionally based in New York.

Even so, there are questions about what effect television ultimately will have: Will young viewers weaned on TV documentaries grow up to love the form and embrace theatrical films, or is TV lowering audience expectations and diluting the field?

David Wolper, a pioneering maker of television documentaries who also has produced such miniseries as “Roots” and “The Thorn Birds,” jokes that with all the celebrity profiles on TV such as A&E;’s “Biography” series, “one of these days they’re going to be doing my postman.” Nevertheless, citing increased opportunities for filmmakers, he said the state of documentaries is “great” today compared to when he started.

One sign of change within the industry--the breaking down of the barriers--is the awarding of the IDA’s career achievement award this year to Sheila Nevins, senior vice president of original programming at HBO. Television provides the funding for most of the documentaries made in this country--and individual filmmakers praise her for the support she gives the industry. Still, she says it’s rare for the medium to get any respect.

The industry traditionally has been dominated by people who make serious films on “lofty” subjects, she said. Commercial documentaries that hope to attract a wide audience have been marginalized. “The high-brow group tends to look down on the low-brow group, and the low-brow group tends to yawn at the high-brows,” she said.

Houston, the first-time documentary maker, was more blunt in his assessment. The field has been filled in the past with intellectuals who make boring “animated slide shows” for one another’s enjoyment, he said. “That is why documentaries don’t get into theaters--because they’re dull to the general public.”

He cites as inspiration for his film the decidedly low-brow MTV series “Real People,” which chronicles the lives of a group of young people living in the same house. His movie, “Rock the Boat,” which recently was picked up by HBO, follows 10 HIV-positive men on a grueling 10-day yacht race across the Pacific.

“The creative interpretation of reality” is the definition attached by John Grierson, the British filmmaker who coined the term “documentary” in the 1920s. “That allows for a lot of freedom,” Haugland said. It also allows for contentious debate within the field and controversies such as those that erupted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the process was changed, when popular and highly regarded examples of the art--for example, Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line” in 1988 and the 1994 film “Hoop Dreams”--were passed over for Academy Award nominations.

Juxtaposing High, Low Realms of the Genre

But Haugland said the divisions within the field are diminishing. Increasingly filmmakers are moving back and forth between traditional documentary forms and more commercial work or, like Spike Lee, Michael Apted and Jonathan Demme, between documentaries and fictional features.

At the IDA’s gathering this week at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the high and low realms of documentary filmmaking will be juxtaposed as never before. On Thursday, in one of two nighttime public programs, a distinguished panel will discuss and show clips from “Docs That Shook the World”--serious films that changed public attitudes when they were first shown, such as “Triumph of the Will” and “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt.” Also open to the public will be a program tonight on music documentaries called “Doc Rocks.” Among clips shown will be “Stop Making Sense,” Demme’s film of a Talking Heads concert, and “Rattle and Hum,” Phil Joanou’s movie on U2.

The Congress, which is held every three years and attracts top filmmakers from around the world, never would have shown such work a few years ago.

Cross-fertilization between different types of film work has resulted in documentaries that freely employ fictional film techniques and that appeal to audiences who otherwise may never venture into a theater to see a nonfiction film.

Debating the Various Techniques

But pioneering filmmaker Maysles, for one, doesn’t like the trend. He speaks disdainfully of filmmakers who use “quick cuts and fancy cinematography signifying nothing. . . . I’m interested in the beauty that comes not from fancy lighting,” he said, “but from the glitter in somebody’s eye.”

Maysles once described his own austere, cinema verite works (“Grey Gardens,” “Gimme Shelter” among others) as life “as it is, with nothing edited out and nothing enhanced.” For him, off-screen narration, intrusive flourishes and any evidence of the filmmaker’s point of view is anathema. He calls Moore, the opinionated director of such works as “Roger & Me” and “The Big One,” “the most evil man in the business. He targets people for his own purpose,” Maysles said. “His point of view is everything.”

Nevins’ own definition of documentaries ranges from a film presented on Cinemax about rape in Bosnia, with subtitles, to a film she commissioned from Maysles on poverty in Mississippi to one often sneered-at HBO series that eavesdrops on real people as they chat with taxi drivers in a moving New York cab.

“To me ‘Taxicab Diaries’ is a brilliant documentary,” she said. “I would say that it goes from the profound to the profane.”

At HBO she programs 15-17 hours of documentaries a year, not counting the magazine-style show “Real Sex,” which contributes three hours a year. Of those 15-17 hours, she considers only three to be popular-interest fare such as “Taxicab Diaries.” The rest are serious works in her view. In addition, HBO-owned Cinemax--HBO’s “art house”--shows 12 documentaries a year.

“Forty years ago if you looked at documentaries that were being made you’d see all the war documentaries--that’s what a documentary was,” said Haugland, addressing the evolution of the form. “This genre oddly enough has an amazing ability to evolve and flow and change based on the viewpoint and mind-set of the maker.”

Technological evolutions have further affected the field, he said, noting that the advent of smaller, more portable cameras and the use of video made possible the personal diary films that became popular a few years ago.

* International Documentary Congress Three, evening programs open to the public today and Thursday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd. “Docs Rocks,” 8 p.m. today; “Docs That Shook the World,” 8 p.m. Thursday. Tickets are $7 for the general public; $5 for students, academy and IDA members. (310) 247-3000, Ext. 176, or e-mail: idc3@oscars.org