Let's begin at the beginning.
What is a documentary film? Exactly what characterizes a documentary? There are three criteria:
1. Julia Roberts is not in it.
2. If you enter a movie theatre and it is completely empty, then you can be sure that they are showing a documentary.
3. If there is one person in the audience and he or she isn't laughing, you can be equally certain that it is a documentary.
Joking aside, one generally associates documentaries with cinéma vérité. Cinema vérité is defined as a movie that is both objective and accurate. What we see is the truth, filmed by the filmmaker in a certain sequence. The scenes flash before our eyes, objectively put together, as close to the actual sequence of events as possible. That is how filmmakers love to perceive the situation; they see the filmmaker as a so-called True Witness.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no such thing as an accurate and objective documentary. The filmmaker affects the situation when he or she enters a room with a camera. An immediate psychological transformation takes place. Someone objects to being filmed and someone else thinks, "Why didn't I wash my hair?" Another person is in the midst of planning his or her Hollywood career, just waiting to be discovered, and so forth. None of these things would have happened if the filmmaker and a camera had not been in the room at the time.
The intelligent spectator is aware of all this. Movie scenes are never shown in the order they were filmed. They are always rearranged to suit the filmmaker's purpose. A filmmaker is a manipulator. He or she arranges the scenes in the manner thought best. That's why the audience is there in the first place. An audience is meant to be manipulated. The mare manipulation the better. "I don't make objective and accurate documentaries, I make feature films," says American Robert Wiseman, who has probably been more closely associated with cinema vérité than anyone else in modern times.
There is no difference between a documentary and a feature film. However, the nature of each is different. They both came into being so that filmmakers could express themselves. There is always a person behind the images on the silver screen, and the easier it is to discern that person the better.
The Swedish national television company rule book states that television documentaries must be objective and accurate. If they are not, the Swedish national television company will not broadcast them. I detest television and never watch it. I have never made a television film for one simple reason; I hate objectivity and truth. My movies are subjective; they express my truth. The world and how it is presented is directly related to how I experience it. Other people and their experiences have nothing to do with it. My perception consists of the things I see and what I consider important, not what other people see and think. Furthermore, I want to influence others using what I have seen.
What I have seen is important to see and what is more, my vision of what I have seen is more valid than the perceptions of others in this respect. To tell you the truth, I want everyone else to see things as I see them.
I make movies because I want to influence others.
The filmmaker who implies that he or she is making an objective and accurate movie, in other words the television filmmaker, is deceitful and two-faced. Such filmmakers want us to believe that they portray the only true image of reality. That is not true. They are, in fact, being untruthful. The truth is that they are playing the client's game. They do as they are told and ding to objectivity and truth. The worst thing of all is that the orderer, the state-owned Swedish television company, in actuality the Swedish government, holds all the power. The objective and truthful filmmaker carries out the will of the powers that be.
Who wants to watch movies that express the values and hierarchies of the powers that be? My movies are not part of a world of false suppositions and agreements. They belong to the proud European tradition of rebellion; my movies represent another way of looking at and perceiving reality. They are on the side of the common man. Not only that, they profess to be the voice of ordinary people, the people whose voices we seldom hear. That's why the man in the street is my protagonist.
A good documentary is only as good as the rapport between the people in front of the camera and the people behind it. Bad relationships make bad films. Every person has his or her own story that deserves to be made into a movie, but few movies touch on such matters.
In 1922, Flaherty's movie Nanook opened in Sweden. It was a big success. More than seventy-five years later I was fortunate to have a similar experience with my film A Respectable Life. It became one of the most successful films in the history of Swedish documentaries. Like Nanook, it deals with ordinary people and that is exactly why it is so unique. After his success, Flaherty received many offers to make more Nanooktype films. Someone told him about an island called Aran in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The people there were said to lead a harsh existence that was primarily dependent upon fishing. Flaherty went to the island to make a documentary about these poor but industrious people. When he got to the island, he realized that the things he had heard about the inhabitants were completely untrue. The people had put their narrow wooden boats on land and not used them for many years. Be had been told tales of a bygone era. What should he do now? Should he return home? Flaherty shed a tear and went for a walk. Be had come a long way and might as well make a movie after all. Although becoming leaky, the old boats were not yet completely rotted. Be managed to find a couple of old fishermen at the retirement home who hadn't completely forgotten how to row the old boats. So, why not continue as planned? The old men out in the huge waves would make great footage! It would look as if they were endangering their lives to earn a living. Take it from me, it was a great documentary, full of action and breathtaking scenes. Eat your heart out, Arnold Schwarzenegger; Man of Aran has it all! There's nothing that Flaherty hasn't done. Be is the father of the creative documentary, and I carry on in the same tradition.
I make my movies for the silver screen using 35-millimeter film and Dolby Stereo Sound. In my native country of Sweden, 85 percent of the movies are American in origin. I am fully aware of this fact and I know that I have to compete against such films for my audience. I have to be just as adept at captivating audiences as the American filmmakers are. I have nothing against competition; I've seen the beginning of Jurassic Park forty times.
I cannot deny that competing with American movies is hard, especially if you are outside the sphere of the commercial filmmaking business and the giant television monopolies. It's not easy to get production capital. You have to finance the movies you want to make with the' money you can get your hands on, primarily from your audience. I call this my Robin Hood strategy. I take from the rich and give to the poor ones closest to my heart, namely me. My strategy works something like this: I court government agencies and similar bodies that control vast sums of money. I tell them that I want to make a movie about the activities of their government agency, showing their work in the best possible light. I offer my services to them as a commercial filmmaker' and I convince them that r am the one who can portray their agency or similar body in an outstanding way. This is music to an agency director's ears. Later, I use the money I get to make movies of my own. For example, if I receive funds from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency I use them to make a movie criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency in Sweden. Making a good film is very important. Otherwise, a government agency might turn the matter over to the police and claim that I swindled them. They could even send me to jail. However, if you make an outstanding movie that a150 happens to win a prize at a renowned international film festival, the authorities tend not to bother you. Everybody loves a winner, don't they? Robin Hood was not at all worried about being wanted by the government of his day, and neither am I.
This kind of strategy only works if you are your own producer, scriptwriter, director, distributor, and movie theatre owner. I am all these things. I have been involved in establishing a non-commercial distribution company called Film-Centrum and a commercial chain of movie theatres known as Folkets Bio in my country. For example, Misfits to Yuppies is playing at one of our movie theatres in Stockholm at the time of writing. It's now in its third year. I received the European Academy Award for Misfits to Yuppies in 1993.
There are many more subtle problems in making documentaries today. . One is that no one wants to be considered a documentary filmmaker. Everyone wants to be thought of as a creator of feature films. Nowadays, filmmakers make documentaries while they are waiting for a chance to make their first feature film. Film schools start with documentaries as exercises before students move onto the real thing, namely feature films. The Swedish government subsidizes feature films at a rate ten times greater than the amount allocated for documentary film productions. Documentaries are rarely reviewed on opening night, and a documentary may never be reviewed at all. Books on the subject of film history almost never mention documentary films. People tend to think of them as second-class films akin to the lumpenproletariat of the art of film.
The idea that the documentary belongs in the gutter is common among the elite in society, and it can drive the most insensitive person crazy. Depicting reality is not fashionable. Perhaps it's because we are so saturated with information nowadays that we are unable to absorb more reality. People are looking for relaxation, escapism, antireality and fiction. What happens to a society that is unwilling to see any longer?
In my opinion, it's a blessing that documentaries are in the gutter. That's where they belong; documentaries should be in places like dirty factories, retirement homes, Sarajevo, mining galleries, culverts, and hospital corridors. Documentaries should also be in the homes of the hungry and the unemployed, with vagrants and the outcasts, in the dark passages and neighbourhoods, on the park benches, in prisons, with the downtrodden and the oppressed, the abused, the unjustly rewarded, and with those whom we have deprived of everything and alongside people without a voice the unseen and the unheard. In short, documentaries should cover the backyard of society, the home of the guttersnipe.
This is the historical mission and fate of the documentary film. Such films cannot expect to captivate audiences at the finer movie theatres around town.
It is becoming harder for documentaries to survive at movie theatres. Television companies turn their backs on them more often than .not. The same calls for entertainment and diversion are echoing throughout Europe.
A fear of being earnest and of speaking in real earnest too. We must not allow the documentary film to disappear. If it does, how can we protect ourselves against prejudice, misconceptions, myths and disinformation?
Stefan Jarl received a Silver Medallion at the Telluride Film Festival in 1993 for his work as a European documentarian. His credits include Threat (IDA Award, 1987; L.A. Critics Award, 1992); Time Has No Name and Jåvna, Reindeer Herdsman in the år 2000, both IDA Award nominees; A Respectable Life (Silver Plaque), Chicago Film Festival; and Misfits to Yuppies (Felix Award, 1993).
/Stefan Jarl
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