Recently, documentary director Errol Morris—whose most recent film is Standard Operating Procedure—blogged at the New York Times site about the use of re-enactments in documentary filmmaking. (Morris often uses re-enactments in his documentaries.) In a post responding to Morris’ initial comments about re-enactments, Rick Shaw said,
Some things are quite simple. A reenactment, by its very nature, is not true. It cannot be because there was an actual event that was true, albeit so often without a camera present. I cringe at so much of what passes as documentary these days. Documentarians… must be humble enough to know what they do not and cannot know, and make no claims beyond what actual evidence provides. I believe Errol Morris deceives us all, and himself most profoundly to believe otherwise.” [emphasis mine]
This is not a new issue. In fact it goes back to the film considered to be the first feature-length documentary, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922. Much of that film was staged. More recently another documentary from the Arctic, Arctic Tale by Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, pieced together its story of a young polar bear and young walrus from footage of many animals. Both films may or may not reflect a certain reality. But since they are artificial constructs, do they really qualify as documentaries?
The question arises: how much truth do we expect from a documentary film? In a world filled with filmmakers like Morris, Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, and Werner Herzog—whose Encounters at the End of the World has just been released—can we expect the documentaries we watch to tell us the truth?
Of course, the real crux is the question Pontius Pilate asked of Jesus, “What is truth?”
July 20th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Excellent commentary. We search for truth among the facts, not realizing that truth is of a different order entirely. If the facts are what you see, then truth is more in the eye that sees, in the willingness to recognize the mad diversity of myriad valid viewpoints and interconnectedness of numberless untraceable causes behind every effect.
Thanks for this well-thought and well-written article about the variety of presenting takes on truth through the art of the documentary.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:08 am
“That was something-!!”..Darrel.