Last night I attended a panel discussion on “Infotainment” in which New York Times Hollywood correspondent Michael Cieply discussed documentary filmmaking as compared to traditional journalism. He made the following statement: “The camera is a tool to structure reality, not report a reality.” This is an idea that I would like to further meditate on.
I remember giving a lecture in which a student in the audience claimed that live action photography presented a “real” depiction of events, and animation could not replicate reality in a convincing manner. I agree that animation cannot replicate the effect of live action photography. What bothers me is this misconception of live action presenting a “truth”, or as I heard Annabelle Honess Roe put it during the Animated Realities conference, a “window to reality.”
I once discussed this idea with two colleagues of mine at USC who are documentary filmmakers, Jed Dannenbaum and Doe Mayer. They made the point that documentary filmmakers shoot hundreds of hours of footage and carefully select the few minutes they choose to include in their film. All documentary filmmakers understand that you can manipulate footage, editing, relationships of picture to audio, and a myriad of other cinematic techniques to match the point of view you hope to present. And yet, audiences often forget how manipulated they are when absorbing the information presented to them in a seamless fashion. There is still a pervasive idea that live action documentary is “real” and therefore animation cannot be an accurate depiction of reality. My argument has always been that live action cinema can be manipulative and often misconstrues what it claims is “reality”, whereas in animation it is actually more clear in that what is presented on the screen is constructed by the filmmaker. The construction is more visible and, I would argue, more honest. I have read this same point argued by Orly Yadin in her paper “But is it Documentary?”
Live action documentary can create a false construction of events that the audience assumes is true. I met the producers of “Spellbound”, a documentary about spelling bees, at a documentary film festival. The film follows several contestants preparing for a spelling bee competition and ultimately shows the final competition. I found it interesting that they admitted they did not originally shoot any footage of the spelling bee winner preparing for the competition, so they went back and shot additional material, which ultimately appeared to portray the contestant training for the spelling bee. This is only one example of how live action documentary can misdirect the audience. Of course, both live action or animated documentaries can be misleading. In my Documentary Animation Production class at USC I stress how important it is to me to present the content in the manner in which the subject intended. We discuss the ethics of documentary filmmaking and how easy it is to manipulate material. It is ultimately up to the integrity of the filmmaker to when it comes to honoring the subjects’ intent.
Sheila M. Sofian creates films that investigate social issues utilizing a unique hybrid of animation and documentary. She has produced, directed, and animated six independent animated films. Sofian has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, and the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, among others. Her award-winning films have been exhibited internationally and are distributed educationally as well as in home video markets. She is currently in production on a one-hour live action/animated documentary on wrongful conviction, “Truth Has Falen.”
Ms. Sofian is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, where she teaches animation production courses. In addition, she has designed and teaches Documentary Animation Production and Story Art Development courses. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.
I agree with everything you have said Midge. We are very skeptical of all news bulletins, and documentary programs. We are told what “they” want us to think.
Recently, i was watching the campaigns of one of the candidates in some African country, I got a new idea of how eroded human ethics have become. Blatant lies were being fabricated and these were both as animations and live action photography. Computer editing software was used to manipulate images, audio was changed to completely change the meanings of what was said and to an extent certain words were added to imply something totally different.
So in this regard I believe animation, just like live action has the potential to relay realities, embellishments and out right lies. It would fall down to the creator of such media animation or other wise. The fact that one may look less believable due to the visible attributes of it’s creation does not in my opinion make it more or less a reality. To kids for instance, animation represents a reality that they belive is existent some where.
The question of “reality” was long ago answered by documentary filmmakers. Are there many who still claim they’re presenting it? It seems to be a discussion founded on a faulty principle.
“Truth”, on the other hand, (or more generally “facts”) is typically the aim of these productions. A documentary is a chronicling of the documentation of that “truth”.
It’s a given that one person’s “truth” is another person’s “porridge”. The argument that “Roger & Me” or “Hoop Dreams” are fictionalizations have little merit if the author is using the footage to present the documentation of his “truth”.
And here is why animation -which is a process of film production -can not be the sole means production of a documentary film: the process of animation necessarily obfuscates the documentation of the material. It is a fundamental distortion, opposed to a secondary distortion.
That’s not to say that animation can’t be a technique used within a documentary (many of which are inherently mixed-technique), or even be a “non-fiction” film. It should go without saying that there are hundreds of examples of these over the last century.
I think I have to disagree with the idea that animation “can not be the sole means (of) production of a documentary film”. What makes the process of generating live action film/video imagery inherently more factual? Decisions are made in terms of positioning the camera and how long to record a particular event (not to mention the re-ordering of this documentation during the editing process). Also the digital technology that exists today could make it very easy to construct a false version of life action events.
Animation is less “factual” because it is fundamentally and categorically fabrication.
There is no possible way of ever creating animation that is not a fiction in its creation. This is the ontological truth of animation.
Yes, “decisions” are made in live action photography. Those decisions are not abstractions by necessity. They may be by design.
Of course editing, framing and the way a narrative unfurls happen in a documentary. That goes without question. If such things didn’t happen they wouldn’t be film. Documentary is a process of making this film, just as animation is wholly separate process of making a film.
I have to disagree Richard. It may be semantics but I think your use of ‘fiction’ and ‘fabrication’ are problematic. Just because animation is drawn, created digitally or by hand with stop motion doesnt make it fiction as such. yes it is created rather than ‘captured’ in the traditional photographic sense but if the subject is non fiction then it is surely it is representing the real just as much as a live action camera is? We know the extent of manipulation possible in photography these days as David points out above so it cant be said to be more real.
I would argue that anything which documents events, from photojournalism, court artists, animation or live action film could come under the broad umbrella of documentary. To me it is the truth of the subject which is being captured as much as the way in which it is captured.
The Cieply comment reminds me of (and maybe he was paraphrasing?) the quote from Bertholt Brecht: “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”.
I disagree sooooooo much with what Richard is saying up there…
For one thing there is not a single form of media construction in the widest sense that is not “fundamentally and categorically fabrication”. That goes for film, journalism, non fiction writing, or animation.
First of all equating “realism” or “truth” to how much of a caption of a real event you produce or how factual you produce is, is an idea that’s been made completely void about a 150 years ago with the advent of realism in literature and painting circa 1850.
Realism in both art and literature (and film and animation) can be a fictionnal construction so long as this construction shows the “reality” of the situation.
Give you an example. You have a pro gay marriage demonstration to wich some anti gay marriage go counter demonstrate. You have 35 000 pros and 100 anti. Basically you are claiming that a carricature showing a huge amount of pros as a wave about to submerge one sigle anti, would be less “factual” than a photograph that would show a close up of the 100 anti to make them look more numerous?
Well, I completely disagree. The truthfulness or factualness or realism of a film, being animated or not has, in my opinion absolutely nothing to do what so ever with the look of the film or how the image was produced but only to how faithful to the actual situation the author is, regardless of the medium.
Especially since some things are impossible to represent with just pictures and testimony. Somewhere on the AWNTV site there is a animated documentary about a woman telling her story of domestic violence. I think the chosen medium of animation gave the film a much stronger sense of what it felt like to be in her situation. Much stronger, and truer in a sense that a simple interview could’ve done. I’d say the same about “Ryan”, the distortion allowed by animation convey of much truer sense of the personality of Ryan Larkin which would have not transpired as much with just an interview. And I’m not going to go on with scientific documentaries using animation to illustrate facts that are impossible to show otherwise.
Live-action films labeled as documentary may not be any more truthful or factual than animation, but (if I may mash up Walter Benjamin and Stephen Colbert) they may project a ‘truthy aura’. I would also submit that most of us are capable of multiple kinds of ‘belief’, and that a given film usually tells us which kind of belief it’s asking for. This happens partly thru context (are we in a movie theater, or watching CNN, or watching stupid videos on funnyordie.com?) and partly thru signals embedded in the films themselves (genre conventions). A film presenting itself as documentary has a different texture than a narrative fiction feature, and most of us can usually tell the difference pretty fast, just like when you’re scanning the car radio and you can instantly distinguish ‘country’ from ‘pop’ from ‘classic rock’ etc, even though all the songs have the same three chords.
Clever filmmakers have figured out how to use those codes for various purposes. It may be a narrative fiction film using documentary techniques to enhance its sense of realism, such as Blair Witch Project. Or it may be documentary footage shot and soundtracked in ways that telegraph what sort of conclusion we are to draw from it — ie, slowing down footage and adding a menacing soundtrack to make someone look like a criminal. Sometimes these are interesting genre-disrupting tricks, and sometimes they result in dreadful schlock.
Most of us think of documentary production (rightly or not) as a relatively unscripted enterprise, in which the filmmaker arrives on the scene, turns on the camera and sees what happens. Certainly decisions are being made, but we’d at least like to think they’re being made on the fly & in reaction to what’s happening. Documentarians who ‘stage’ events risk being accused of propaganda-making.
Animation is different — it can only be ‘staged’. So while the finished product may illuminate some aspect of the original material (whatever that was) better than documentary footage, or provide a less literal, more poetic take, audiences are not going to bring that documentary-style mode of belief to bear on it. Imagine how boring the Hubleys’ ‘Windy Day’ would have been as a talking-head live action film.
Whether an audience’s willingness to ascribe factual truth to something shown in a documentary is a good or bad thing, is a whole other issue.
The examples you give may very well be good films -that has little bearing on their production process.
“Animation” or “Documentary” or “Fiction” are not qualitative terms. They quantify a process and a philosophy.
Or course there are always outliers and grey areas but most of these things fall firmly within the scope of a single field. “Ryan” is a great example. It’s a personal narrative, it’s somewhat revelatory but it’s no more a documentary than “Permanent Midnight”.
It comes down, again, ontology.
Animation is an ontologically simple thing. It is a process of film production.
Documentary, as well, is a process of film production.
Neither of these two -we can probably all agree -are “genres” per se (though documentary largely falls into a vague “non-fiction” category which also includes news, sports broadcasting, opinion, et cetera).
If you believe in complicating or obfuscating the ontology of animation/documentary or film one could easily make the leap and say they were forms in and of themselves. That would entail a unique definition -a first principle which allows for two distinct processes to in fact be one thing. At that point though, why bother with exploring different natures of film processes at all?
While Paul Ward is reminded of Brecht, I am reminded of Picasso’s ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth’.
Here my article ‘“The Borders of Our Lives”: Frederick Wiseman, Jean Baudrillard and the Question of the Documentary’, which I first presented in 1990 and finally got published fourteen years later(!) online at International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, July, 2004, and which article makes explicit the theoretical suppositions of my PhD on Wiseman, America’s most singular and prolific documentary filmmaker over the last half century, is, I believe, quite relevant.
For here after Wiseman and Baudrillard I articulate the notion of the documentary as ‘reality-fiction’, that is, both reality and fiction, neither simply reality nor simply fiction, at the same time.
In other words, for me a Derridean hybrid, making it impossible by definition to define documentary in either/or terms as either reality or fiction.
As Samuel Weber wrote, ‘We need to accept the reality of our fictions and the fiction of our reality’.
And, as I recall, I have that Derridean take at the beginning of my article on a documentary by cinéma vérité pioneer Jean Rouch, my article entitled ‘Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres fous: Documentary of Seduction, Seduction of Documentary’.
If anyone is interested, it is published in Three Documentary Filmmakers, edited by William Rothman, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2009.
(But take note: like my ‘“The Borders of Our Lives…”, this article on Rouch also takes documentary into its hyperreal form after Baudrillard: hyperdocumentary, which address seems to me not relevant to this present blog discussion.)
To return to Picasso: insofar as for me art is a form of animation, I would substitute for Picasso’s word ‘art’ that of ‘animation’ and his word ‘lie’ that of ‘fiction’, ‘illusion’, giving us the expression: animation is a fiction, an illusion, that fictions, illusions, indeed conjures, truth, reality, meaning, etc., which then seek to conjure away what conjures them: fiction, illusion.
Which is, of course, to turn documentary, with its privileging of truth, reality, meaning, into a form of animation, which for me it is.
One more way in which for me all film is a form of animation.
Here I am reminded of what I wrote in note 29 of my Introduction to The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (1991):
Insofar as Disneyland manifests itself in the animated cartoon, the animated cartoon acts analogously as a ‘deterrence machine’ for the live action film. Like the child, the animated cartoon is what is excluded to allow the live action film to be what it is. Certainly, we speak of the animated cartoon (as we do of the fiction film) to enable us to believe that there is an ‘outside’—both ‘within’ film and ‘outside’ film—that is not cartoon (or not fictional), that is, ‘within’ film—the documentary—and ‘outside’ film—what the documentary supposedly purchases—the real. The documentary is presumed to be where fantasy and fiction end, where one can gain a purchase on the real (and its correlates: the true, the meaningful, etc.), where the child is finally left behind for the adult. But there is a fatality to cartoon animation. In its defiance of the ‘documentary’ and its outbidding of the ‘fiction film’ [note: here I mean live action fiction film], it issues a challenge to live action, suggesting it is more live action than live action (and more fiction than fiction). This is to say that cartoon animation can be understood as seducing live action, seducing fiction, seducing reality, seducing the adult. The animated film—animation ‘as such’—animates and inanimates, frames and unframes the live action film.
In other words, animation at once produces and seduces all modes of live action, including documentary insofar as it is live action, for for me, as I have published in a number of places, live action is the special case, the reduced, conditional form, of animation.
But for those who would simply oppose illusion and reality, I refer you to these words of Baudrillard: ‘…illusion is not the opposite of reality but another more subtle reality which enwraps the former kind in the sign of its disappearance’.
Hope this is of some help.
All best,
Alan Cholodenko
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