Well, well, well. Look who’s the most popular form of entertainment today. Look who’s always been associated with dryness, unbearable didacticism, and anything but excitement, and is now associated with action, adventure, and the irresistible lure of the spectacle. Look who’s arrived, after toiling in obscurity since the very dawn of the cinematic age. Recorded reality. Actuality footage. The non-fiction form. The documentary film.
"Nanook of the North" (1922) by Robert Flaherty
Yes ladies and gentlemen, the classic discourse of sobriety is finally having its day in the sun. Step right up, and witness the glory of life as it is lived without (much of) an intermediary. After all, the fiction film is no more than reality filtered through the subjectivity of artistic choice. And to be fair, the documentary has never been able to lay claims to absolute purity and independence of artificiality. A thin line separates the two disciplines. Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Moana), the first acknowledged practitioner of the documentary style, frequently staged “scenes” in his efforts to represent reality. John Grierson (Drifters) did too (because an interview, no matter how spontaneous, always has an element of performance lurking in the shadows). But I digress. The documentary work of art is the flavor of the month. Why?
Tracing this cause and effect pattern takes us back to a time when MTV was the arbiter of everything cool in popular culture. Back to a time when they first aired a program that immediately announced its novel claim to a curious merging of everyday life and entertainment – The Real World. I think it’s fair to say that this show gave the public its first taste of the documentary as mass entertainment. Or rather, as popular entertainment. It did so mainly through the spectacle. Or, the public’s eagerness to witness a spectacle in the making. For this, more than anything, is what The Real World offered: a chance to see something spontaneous, wild, exciting, and possibly scandalous, occur to one of the twenty-something participants on the show. The same reason people tuned in to The Real World is the same reason they tune in to programs as diverse as Survivor and The Bachelor.
People want what’s real. Or, at the very least, what appears to be real. The documentary satisfies this desire. Of course, you’ll never hear network executives refer to these programs in this manner. They’re “reality series”. That’s better, because it doesn’t sound like something your grandfather would watch on PBS. But short documentaries are what these shows really are, no matter what sort of tag you want to put on them. They’re infectious, and their popularity is spreading.
On the big screen, they rarely take the same form as their counterparts on the ol’ idiot box. They don’t experience the same level of fanfare either. They’re much more traditional on the cinema rectangle, but they’re still undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Recognizing that they have the eyes and ears of a notoriously fickle nation, filmmakers are turning to them in a continuing effort to express themselves. A director like Spike Lee has always been a staunch polemicist, so it’s no surprise to see that some of his more interesting and affecting recent works are documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts). But it is a surprise to see people pay attention to them. That’s partly because the documentary aesthetic isn’t the spoonful of castor oil that it once was. Thanks to the advent of digital video, among other things, the public is used to actuality footage. They’re used to on-camera interviews. And they’re now used to waiting patiently for reality to take shape and expose its true beauty before their very eyes.
Of course, the purists might have a problem with this newfound attention. They may point to the fact that television reality shows are no more than voyeuristic peep shows. They may have a point. After all, the original intent of the non-fiction film was to transmit ideas. Typically, ideas of an educational nature. There isn’t too much educating going on in shows like Cops or The Flavor of Love. Grierson and Flaherty are probably rolling over in their graves when they look down on programs like that. Vertov, Wiseman, and the Maysles would probably react in the opposite manner though. That’s because supporters of the documentary film have traditionally splintered off into factions with regards to approach, form, and content. Some favor experimentation, some favor regimentation. Some like to observe, some like to provoke. Some like to teach. But what they all have in common is a love for, and an urge to explore, reality. That’s what’s popular today. Keeping it real.
Back to my original question: why is it popular? Maybe because in an increasingly strange world, people are finding beauty in small moments. Maybe because the stakes are higher when you watch drama unfold in front of real people, not characters. In a world where the spectacular and the unbelievable are commonplace everyday occurrences, maybe commonplace everyday occurrences are now spectacular in and of themselves. Or maybe the times are just changing. We’ve all heard the maxim that reality is stranger than fiction. Now, more than ever before, it’s much more interesting too.
*Originally published in Urban Film Journal (2003)