Facts and fantasies
Tony Palmer
The cinema as documentary is usually relegated to secondary consideration. The documentary maker is thought to graduate to the big feature; and because the feature film is assumed to be more complex and costly, the number of successful graduates is few. The dramatised documentary, therefore, in which real or fictitious people (more often than not from the arts) are apparently brought back to life as a means by which to understand their work, has been much exploited as a bridge between the two forms.
Ken Russell developed this technique With such outrageous sophistication that it has generally become foolish to follow Where he has been, although many have. Yet Ken Loach preferred to treat social Phenomena in this manner indicating that, With only a little help, fact was frequently more uncomfortable than fiction. Both directors have suffered, however, from the further stigma of having begun in television — a medium sometimes thought to be totally unrelated to the cinema, and Whose craftsmen, consequently, are reckoned inferior. Luckily, directors like Russell and Loach have proved this suspicion untrue. You could argue that Russell's last two cinema films are more documentary than feature, one about the life and times of seventeenth-century France, the other about the life and times Of Tchaikovsky. But to do so would be to demonstrate the inadequacy of film terminOlogy and little else.
Consider The Hellstrom Chronicle (' A ' Prince Charles), for example, which began life as a television documentary made for the National Geographical Society six Years ago. Its subject matter is the Ultimate domination of the Insect over Man. The film argues that not only was the insect first to arrive on the planet, but because of its extraordinary adaptability, Will probably be the last to leave. In it Nils Hellstrom, a Californian entomologist and leading spokesman for the insect domination theory, appears on camera. His Purpose, he explains, is to hold the audience's hand through an amazing Journey of, among other things, flies in s,low motion, driver ants demolishing a lizard a thousand times their size, the Interior workings of a termite hill and a lack widow spider devouring its mate. All truly spectacular and all frighteningly real.' Which of course it is, being documentary, except for one minor fact. Hellstrom is an actor and a pretty bad one at :that, and what he says has been scripted for him by — whom? A scientist? e do not know. Thus, the credibility of the whole enterprise is thrown into doubt. rruth, of course, is not the foremost virtue of any documentary. The devices whereby even the most indisputable facts can be rearranged and coloured so as to make them unrecognisable are manifold. The documentary as practised by television trendies has perfected them with purposeful dishonesty. Yet even when these techniques are translated into the cinema, as in Cuba Va! (' A ' Venus, Kentish Town), a film which purports to document post-revolution Cuba, one is tempted into believing that it is the truth, or at least an approximation of it, that one is watching. One knows, instinctively, that it is not. Cuba Va! seems to me even more suspect than The Helistrom Chronicle. It contrasts the bad old days of Batista with the good new days of Castro. But hadn't the director, Felix Greene, heard of Castro's secret police and the brutal suppression by them of unruly peasants? Didn't he think there was something vaguely odd about the jingoistic clichés which everyone mouthed, presumably at the drop of a ten dollar bill? I'm not saying that Cuba now is not a distinct improvement on Cuba then. But this particular film pursues its dogmatic line unquestioningly. Like Nils Hellstrom, it is fiction posing as fact, although again like Hellstrom it is using seemingly 'real ' evidence to justify its contentions.
There is another consideration. Compared with the other films I have seen this week, Catch me a Spy (' A ' Odeon, Leicester Square) and Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (` AA ' Plaza), each of the ' documentaries ' presented a picture of the world about us ultimately less recognisable than that presented by these purely fictional feature films. Catch me a Spy, with its gratuitous violence, cheap sex and false glamour, says more about 1971 than a dozen Nils Hellstroms. And Fonda plodding mindlessly through the Mid-West in search of what he didn't find in Easy Rider (whatever that was) assumes a moral emptiness which again is a characteristic pose of his generation. "Here is what is happening in Cuba now!" Felix Greene portentously declares. Maybe. But his film and the techniques that he employs persuade one that it is not. Peter Fonda, on the other hand, although dealing with a story removed from everyday experience, portrays, in allegorical form, fa l more ' real ' situations. It's not that fiction is, after all, stranger and stronger than fact. More probably, it is that facts are less part of our way of life than fiction. James Bond is a more acceptable r nd accepted hero figure than a Cuban doctor patiently explaining what advances have been made in the care of the mentally ill. Thus we observe our dilemmas more acutely through the fantasies which dominate our escapist entertainments than through the discredited medium of the documentary.
The documentary deals in generalisations. Even when it begins with the particular, its method is to proceed inductively. One driver ant is a killer. Therefore, all insects are killers. We do not know that, since we lack sufficient information. But we are expected to assume it, otherwise the basis of the film is destroyed. Accordingly, our incredibility increases in proportion to the number of such assumptions we are expected to make. A piece of fiction, on the other hand, defines its own perimeters. We have no information over and above what we are given. All conclusions must be based upon and rooted in the evidence available. How we interpret this evidence, therefore, will reveal to us our own preoccupations and our own prejudices. If we go along with The Hetlstrom Chronicle, it is because we are lazy and unwilling to question further. If we go along with the hero of The Hired Hand, however, it is because we see in him and his predicament our own inadequacies. It's not simply a matter of identification. It is more subtle than that. We recognise in his view of the world, horizons which correspond to our own. A successful piece of cinema fiction is that which delineates those horizons for us more clearly than hitherto had been possible from our restricted viewpoint.
It is often argued that Russell and Loach have trodden dangerous ground in that they deceive themselves, the audience and the truth with their bastardised form of movie-making. It seems to me quite the reverse. Accidentally, by indicating the severe limitations of the ' real ' documentary and by easing the ' feature ' film away from the embarrassment of being thought merely fiction,' they have opened up a new acceptance and understanding of the possibilities of film. Lenin observed that "of all the arts, the cinema is the most important to us." It's odd, although not perhaps surprising, that few have stopped to ask how or why.
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