It’s tempting to wonder if the golden age of British documentary is long past.
The celebrated television strands that nourished documentary film-making
have been killed off, one by one. Land of Promise, a new and deeply
rewarding four-disc box set of films from the British documentary movement
of 1930-50, begs the question of whether we’ll find as much to celebrate 50
years from now.
The collection is filled with memorable images: a young, sad-eyed soldier
listens intently to a lunchtime piano recital; in the sky a barrage balloon
bobs in the sunshine. Machines nearly drown out the singing of the factory
girls who operate them. These scenes come from Humphrey Jennings’s
profoundly affecting documentary Listen to Britain (1942). A few
years later came What A Life (1948), a surreal snap-shot of a
populace united in complaint, and the acclaimed A Diary for Timothy (1946),
which juxtaposed the beginning of a child’s life with the end of the war in
Europe.
These films, with their buttoned-up, Cholmondeley-Warner delivery and obvious
staging, became objects of affectionate ridicule. But the film-makers’
ability to stay true to an artistic vision while working under less than
ideal circumstances is a skill that contemporary British documentary
film-makers have recently had to re-learn, and quickly.
For the good news is that, after a bleak period when reality television
drained the life – and the money – out of the medium, the British
documentary is fighting back. Jess Search, chief executive of the Channel 4
British Documentary Film Foundation, has been instrumental in supporting the
industry and championing new talent through the tough times. Search, who is
also chief executive of the Britdoc film festival, had a hand in successes
such as In the Shadow of the Moon, Black Gold and We are Together.
“Television captured documentary and owned it for a while,” she says.
“Documentary became synonymous with television. But while our television is
still incredibly high-quality in terms of the craft skills, what has
happened to the whole TV industry means that there are much narrower
opportunities for expression. Our talent base is now turning to making
independent and feature-length documentaries because that’s where you can
give rein to creative expression.”
Film-makers are exploring new ways of shooting films, reaching audiences and
financing their projects, though the US trend of “filmanthro-py”, in which
rich benefactors sponsor socially aware films, has yet to take root here.
The concerns of the British documentary film-maker are no longer just on
their own doorstep, they are global.
The bounce back arguably started with Kevin MacDonald’s exhilarating
Oscar-winner Touching the Void in 2003. Its success was an incentive
for film-makers to start thinking about cinematic releases rather than just
television. Recent British triumphs include James Marsh’s film about the
tightrope walker Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, which scooped two
prizes at the Sundance Film Festival this year and David Sington’s account
of the Apollo space missions, In the Shadow of the Moon, which won
the Audience prize at Sundance last year.
There’s a trend towards campaigning cinema created to make a difference as
well as tell a story: all of the profits from Paul Taylor’s We are
Together, for example, have been donated to the film’s subject – a South
African Aids orphanage and children’s choir. And since the release of Mark
and Nick Francis’s Black Gold, an exposé of business practices
in the coffee industry, payments to the small farmers featured in the film
have trebled. No longer passive observers, these film-makers now demand a
reaction from their audience.
Here are four of the UK’s most interesting documentary-makers:
KIM LONGINOTTO
Probably the pre-eminent British documentary film-maker currently working,
Longinotto's emphatic, human stories can be both devastatingly moving and
joyfully uplifting, often at the same time. She coaxes an intimacy and trust
from her subjects; the camera is both confessor and friend. Longinotto’s
warmth as a person is reflected in the engagingly honest portraits she
captures; the end of filming each documentary, she says, results in a kind
of sadness like that at the end of a love affair.
She celebrates the extraordinary achievements of “ordinary” people. Her
subjects and themes have included women wrestlers in Japan (Gaea Girls);
female circumcision (The Day I Will Never Forget); Iranian women’s
domestic crises (Divorce Iranian Style) and a pair of fearsome female
judges partially redressing the patriarchal legal system in Cameroon (Sisters
in Law). All have an eye for detail and flashes of humour: Longinotto’s
lightness of touch prevents the films from being weighed down by the issues.
Her current project brings her together with Paul Taylor and Teddy Leifer,
whose company, Rise Films, was set up with the intention of using cinema as
a fundraising tool.
JAMIE KING
The writer, theorist, activist and academic Jamie King came to documentary as
the natural progression in a ten-year multidisciplinary body of work that
explores the politics of information. His two documentaries about aspects of
piracy, Steal this Film and Steal this Film II, are spirited,
amusing assaults on the ivory tower of “intellectual property”. Screened in
festivals around the world, but mainly, true to the spirit of the subject,
downloaded from the internet, the two films have between them been seen by
an estimated 4.2 million viewers.
“Steal this Film has had a lot of success, which made me realise
the power of the audio-visual medium at this moment,” says King of his
decision to embrace documentary. “The medium is the message, as McLuhan
said. We’ve got the distribution mechanism and this very cheap means of
production. We can do this without having to ask anybody.”
King, his collaborators and the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation
are developing an initiative that could revolutionise independent
film-making. VoDo (short for voluntary donation) is an online payment system
through which viewers would be able to donate directly to the artist whose
work they had downloaded.
RUPERT MURRAY
The maker of Unknown White Male (2005), a fascinating study of a man
who woke up on a subway train in Coney Island suffering from amnesia, cites
the great television documentary strands that were around when he was
growing up – Arena, Equinox, Modern Times, Cutting Edge – as
part of his inspiration to start making his own films. “But the moment I got
my first commission for Cutting Edge,” he says, “those strands seemed
to suddenly disappear.” Like many other film-makers, Murray turned to making
documentaries for theatrical release. The first was Unknown White Male.
Murray is now working on what promises to be one of the year’s highest-profile
British documentaries. Described as an “epic observational thriller”, The
End of the Line examines the destruction of the oceans and what it means
for all of us. So far, the picture has been funded entirely by foundations
and charitable donations.
XIAOLU GUO
The Chinese film-maker, novelist and poet Xiaolu Guo is based in the UK, but
turns her lens towards the country of her birth. Her highest-profile film to
date is the striking How is Your Fish Today? The film’s co-writer,
the Beijing-based Hui Rao, also appears in the film and acts as its
narrator. Meanwhile, excerpts from a fictional screenplay he is writing
unfold throughout the film.
Both Hui and his protagonist are drawn to the far northern town of Mohe.
Xiaolu says: “The idea started from two things – first Mohe, which is
legendary, like an Eden that no one ever goes to. The other reason is that
Hui wrote a script about a criminal on the run which was banned. So I
thought why don’t I use the story as a short film within the documentary?”
Xiaolu’s latest film, We Went to Wonderland, is a portrait of two
elderly Chinese communists (her own parents) visiting Europe. It was shot on
the movie function of Xiaolu’s digital stills camera and will have its UK
premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Land of Promise is released by the BFI. The Britdoc Festival
runs from July 23-25 2008 at Keble College, Oxford (britdoc.org)
