American Magazine Fall 05

American Magazine | Fall 2006

Keeping It Reel: Ethics in Media

SOC explores the fertile and controversial borderland between documentary and narrative film

SOC professor Larry Engel is about to become one of the big screen’s most experienced first-time producers. He’s made more than 100 documentaries over his 30-year career, but he’ll be stepping into new territory this winter when he goes behind the camera as coproducer and director of photography on Apology, his first narrative film.

That is, unless you ask him.

“Narrative film . . . What’s narrative film?” he says with a chuckle. “In a way, I feel like I’ve been doing narrative film for my whole career.”

There’s more to this statement than bravado. The Emmy-award winning documentarian’s words actually raise a key question for both film genres. Namely, as audiences increasingly seek entertainment from reality and reality from entertainment, how different is documentary filmmaking from narrative filmmaking anyway?

Engel and his former student Leah Yananton, Apology’s writer, director, and other coproducer, have raised $360,000 for the dark comedy now in preproduction, a stage that includes location scouting, casting, and rehearsals. Such tasks might seem unique to fiction film, but they’re not all that new to Engel. “Documentaries have their own form of auditions, casting, and rehearsal,” he explains. “When I’ve researched films in the past, I’ve always been looking for good characters. When I interviewed people, I would try to see who felt comfortable on camera and who did the camera like.”

SOC professor Pat Aufderheide agrees. “Documentarians have always used the same toolkit as fiction filmmakers,” says Aufderheide, who directs the school’s Center for Social Media.

Given that the last three years have produced the three highest grossing documentaries of all time (Fahrenheit 911, March of the Penguins, and An Inconvenient Truth), this issue has recently received more attention, but Aufderheide traces the intersection between narrative and documentary techniques back to the genre’s birth. Nanook of the North, a “founding documentary” in 1922, she points out, took many liberties with reality. The title character’s name was changed, and his wife and baby were replaced with more photogenic stand-ins.

“You’re always representing reality; you’re never just showing it,” Aufderheide explains. “The challenge is to take all of the techniques of representation and fulfill documentary’s good-faith promise to show the viewer something real.”

Reality on film then has less to do with any technique and more to do with its result. Take, for instance, visual metonymy, a common fiction and documentary film device that uses one image to stand for a related image, experience, or concept. If documentarians use the device without disguising it, Aufderheide says, no ethical lines have been crossed. “If a family in a documentary goes to Italy, and you show a picture of the Colosseum to represent that trip, you haven’t led the viewers astray,” she explains. “They understand that the family may not have literally visited the Colosseum. The point is that they went to Italy.”

If the device is unclear and audiences can’t tell representation from the reality, however, there’s a problem. In the 2005 Oscar-winning civil rights documentary Mighty Times, for example, filmmakers courted controversy by using actual footage of the 1965 Watts riots to represent a riot in another city. “That’s going too far,” says Aufderheide. “If you’re using historical footage, it should really be historical footage . . . because the viewer is going to think they’re seeing something that really happened.”

Natural Reality

SOC’s distinguished film producer in residence Chris Palmer agrees with Aufderheide but notes that there are times in documentary when a small lie serves a larger truth. For instance, his IMAX film Wolves, which details the lives of wild North American wolf packs, begins with what some might see as a troubling bit of metonymy. “It opens with this fantastic shot of a pack of wolves racing across the tundra,” he explains. “You can see their legs pumping, their muscles moving, and the music swells, and people think, ‘My God, these animals are amazing.’ But those were captive wolves.”

Though Palmer included a note in the credits stating this, he admits that not including the note over the shot itself is somewhat deceptive. “But if we said this is a captive pack of wolves right there, it wouldn’t have the same impact,” he explains. And for Palmer, who sees wildlife film as a tool for environmental protection, that’s where the larger truth comes in. According to him, the problem isn’t using a bit of Hollywood magic to engage more people in environmental protection; it’s ignoring environmental protection to create Hollywood fantasy.

“I think a film crosses the line in deceiving the audience when it causes them to just completely get the wrong idea about nature,” he explains, recalling an experience his friend and fellow wildlife filmmaker Hardy Jones had at a conservation fund raiser. “One of the guests came up to him and said, ‘Why are we here? I’ve just been watching Blue Planet on Discovery, and there’s nothing wrong with the oceans’ . . . Blue Planet is beautifully photographed, but it doesn’t mention anything about pollution or about the miles of netting catching huge numbers of underwater mammals.”

Another way wildlife documentaries sometimes give audiences the wrong idea about nature is what SOC professor and former National Geographic documentary program senior producer Maggie Stogner calls the “Killer Bunny” syndrome. “There is a push among certain broadcasters to amp up how dangerous animals are to the point where everything seems dangerous—even little bunnies,” she says, pointing to programming like “Shark Week” and the late Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter.

For Palmer, Stogner, and Engel, Irwin’s death itself brings up another reason to opt for the slightly deceptive shot of captive wolves rather than getting just as close to a wild pack. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for what Steve Irwin did for conservation, but I think there’s a problem when people like him, Timothy Treadwell, or Jeff Corwin get too close to animals,” says Palmer, who sees Irwin’s stingray attack death as an opportunity for the industry to reconsider whether wrestling with alligators or chumming shark-infested waters truly serves conservation. “It’s dangerous not just for them, but also for the animals they’re trying to protect.” In the weeks after Irwin’s death, says Engel, there were reports of people killing stingrays in Australia. “This is the way people think when they see this stuff,” he explains. “Revenge.”

To give viewers the up-close experience with wild animals that defined Irwin’s show, Engel says, filmmakers should rely on patience rather than daring. His best shots of emperor penguins in Antarctica or African elephants, Engel says, came from “sitting and waiting” for them to come to him rather than recklessly invading their territory. But this simple practice, he says, has become increasingly difficult because cash-strapped producers often pressure crews to get footage that should take months in only a few days.

Keep your distance

This hands-off shooting style applies not only to penguins and elephants, but to humans as well. Though casting for Engel’s documentaries may have been similar to casting for Apology, once shooting begins, he admits, the documentarian has little control over that cast. In long-form vérité or observational documentaries, Aufderheide and Engel agree, there may be a place for white lies—like standing your subjects in front of a more compelling backdrop than where you happened to find them. But the larger truth—what the subjects say and do on film—can’t be touched. “Even just asking people to say something or do something again because you missed it is regarded as inappropriate,” says Aufderheide.

Yet reality TV—whose popularity may also be why truth in documentary film is discussed more today than it was in Nanook of the North’s time—plays by its own rules. “Reality television has danced all over the line,” says SOC professor and documentarian Charlene Gilbert.

Producers of popular shows like The Simple Life, America’s Top Model, and Fear Factor defend their practice of coaching subjects or constructing conflicts to craft drama by arguing that their shows are entertainment, not documentaries. But Aufderheide isn’t willing to let them off so easy. “I think a lot of viewers might know that these shows have been creatively produced, but they will still use them to draw real-world conclusions about large categories of people they don’t usually meet—like certain minority groups,” she says. “What reality shows do is capitalize on the thrill of showing you something real to get ratings while ignoring the responsibility that comes with that thrill.”

Rather than shaping their subjects to suit their stories then, ethical documentary filmmakers must shape their stories to suit their subjects. Gilbert wrestled with this in Homecoming, her award-winning documentary about African American farmers in the South. When she discovered her main subject wasn’t comfortable saying more than five words at a time on camera, she revised her film on the fly. “I had to make the movie based on who he was, not based on how I envisioned it,” she explains, noting that she used more off-camera interviews and dubbed the farmer’s voice over shots of him at work. “In the end it made for a much more interesting film.”

However, such adjustments aren’t limited to documentaries. “In fiction you also make discoveries on set in terms of what the actor is doing or whether a line works,” Engel explains, referencing the improvisational work of Robert Altman and John Cassavetes. “You make adjustments, and you flow with those adjustments as well.”

SOC student Daniel Jones, whose improv-based mockumentary Comic Evangelists won a slot at the prestigious American Film Institute festival this November, knows this well. By shooting his fictional film in a documentary style, he gave it the heightened sense of realism that contributes to the mockumentary’s humor, but he also created the embarrassment of riches problem that documentary editors often face. “The hardest part about improv is that there’s hours and hours of incredibly funny stuff,” he explains. “The outtakes, alone, could be three hours.”

Reenactment Reaction

Nowhere does documentary filmmaking more resemble narrative filmmaking than in reenactments, says Engel, whose reenactment-laden PBS documentary Gangland Graveyard has already prepared him for working with the set designers and gaffers he’ll encounter on Apology. Reenactments have stirred much of the controversy surrounding documentaries, possibly, Stogner says, because in the last five years many films have stopped labeling reenactments. ABC’s docudrama The Path to 9/11, she argues, irresponsibly intercuts news and performance footage. A new British TV movie, The Assassination of a President, she notes, goes even further, superimposing footage of George Bush’s head on an actor’s body.

“We’re on the precipice of a huge new world in terms of ethics in media,” Stogner says. “I’m all for great storytelling, and I think we live in an exciting age in terms of what we can do with digital media, but that’s all the more reason we have to make a clear distinction between fantasy and reality.”

Engel agrees, but adds that audiences also shoulder some share of the responsibility. “I think the audience should be skeptical of everything it sees,” he says. “Everybody’s a storyteller. Any act of communication is really interpretation and narrative, so we should be training people to be better readers of the media.”

Two SOC centers have a keen eye on this controversy. The Center for Environmental Filmmaking, headed by Palmer, conducts classes and events on how to make wildlife documentaries as engaging as Hollywood blockbusters without crossing ethical lines. The Center for Social Media, says Aufderheide, recently launched a survey of documentary professors to begin assembling national guidelines for teaching documentary ethics.

“This kind of conversation—I’m sorry to say—happens most vigorously at the level of the filmmakers rather than the distributors,” says Aufderheide, who hopes the center’s efforts will lead to best practices filmmakers can reference when they are pressured to cross ethical lines. “It’s hard for one person alone under the pressure of a producer to say, ‘You know, this isn’t really the right thing to do.’ It would be a lot easier if they could say, ‘This just isn’t done in this field.”

As Aufderheide explores the ethical marshes of this borderland between narrative and documentary filmmaking, Engel will help SOC students mine its fertile valley. When shooting for Apology begins in a few months, SOC documentary and fiction film students will be behind some of the cameras, discovering firsthand with Engel the subtle similarities and differences between the two genres. A course tentatively named The Indie Film Start to Finish, Engel explains, will unite SOC students and faculty across several divisions to assist in the film’s production, editing, and promotion. So while Apology’s narrative bent may be old hat to Engel, he agrees that “It’s an exciting opportunity to use film as a model for learning.”

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