SCREENED REALITY AND A TALE OF THREE FAMILIES BY JON WILKMAN
SCREENED REALITY AND A TALE OF THREE FAMILIES
BY JON WILKMAN
Author, Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America
(Bloomsbury Press. 2020)
Today, documentaries -- screened, broadcast and streamed – are seen, appreciated and more influential than ever. At the same time, debates over facts and a “post truth” era generate controversy, while the mutant truth of Reality TV amuses millions,
So, how did we get here? The history of documentary filmmaking offers insights. Since the first movies in the 1890s, nonfiction filmmakers were driven by curiosity about the real world and changing times -- enabled by new technology; and shaped by interactions with their audiences. Three documentaries focused on families suggest the successes, failures, and compromises along the way toward today’s fact-challenging times, and inform points of view for the future.
By 1922, the first Dream Factories of Hollywood dominated international movie production, but a story about an Inuit family of seal hunters in the Canadian arctic was a surprise box office hit. Shot on location with real people, not actors, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, is considered the first documentary narrative. With moments of drama, suspense, humor, and poignancy, unlike previous travelogues, Flaherty portrays Inuit people as relatable human beings, not primitive sources of detached curiosity.
At a time when distinctions between fiction and nonfiction films were yet to be defined, he cast his characters. Flaherty’s “star” is a respected seal hunter. Not known as Nanook (Bear), his real name would be unpronounceable to English-speakers. The woman who plays “Nyla,” (Smiling One) Nanook’s wife, isn’t his spouse, but chosen for her beauty.
Flaherty admitted that “sometime it is necessary to lie to tell the truth, but his idealized vision of reality wasn’t a deliberate attempt to deceive. Despite his creative liberties, the Inuit family life portrayed in Nanook was set in the reality of a forbidding arctic environment where starvation was a true threat to survival.
During the 1960s, the technical limitations that restricted the screened reality of Robert Flaherty were dramatically unfettered by the invention of light, portable cameras, more sensitive film stock, and easily synchronized sound. The result was cinéma vérité, a new style and philosophy of nonfiction movie-making The goal of vérité pioneers like Bob Drew, Ricky Leacock, Al and David Maysles, D.A Pennebaker, and Fred Wiseman, was to capture experience and environment, not communicate factual information -- to give viewers a sense of “being there.”
The 1973 PBS series An American Family, closely observed the lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara California. As it turned out, along with familiar upper middleclass activities, life with the Louds unexpectedly included adultery, frequent shots of vodka, and the uninhibited lifestyle of a son who was proudly gay. During the process of editing, the twelve-part series morphed into a kind of real life soap opera. As a portent for Reality TV to come, the Louds became celebrities for playing themselves
Cinéma vérité purists scorn curated visual evidence, “voice of god” narration, and formal interviews. Ken Burns, perhaps the best known and successful American documentarian, is proudly old-fashioned. His 2014 seven-part, fourteen-hour, PBS family portrait, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, engagingly traces the intertwined lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor, based on deep and careful archival research, informative narration, and the on-camera guidance of interviews with authority figures and eye-witnesses.
Despite his popularity and success, Burns has been criticized for a tendency to view stories like The Roosevelts in terms of an ultimately uplifting triumph over adversity. While not avoiding injustices, the results can be reassuring, with little unfinished business to disturb or challenge viewers today, contributing to competing views about America’s past.
The idealized vision of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook, the voyeuristic vérité of An American Family, and Ken Burns’ fact-based, ultimately uplifting histories, can enrich our understanding of the real world, but a search for popular appeal, can lead documentarians to emphasize innovation and entertainment value over a commitment to a more disturbing and complex reality, losing credibility in the process.
As half of the film experience equation, audiences can be losers too. If they what they believe is reduced to a choice based on personal preference rather than thoughtful evaluation, even a Golden Age of documentaries can become counterfeit and American democracy the worse for it.
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Jon Wilkman
Jon Wilkman
A native of Los Angeles and graduate of Oberlin College, Jon is a documentary filmmaker and author. His films have won numerous national and international awards, including three television Emmys. Recent documentaries include Chicano Rock! The Sounds of East Los Angeles, the winner of The Reel Rasquache Festival of The U.S. Latino Experience in Film & Art, and the four-part Port of Los Angeles: A History for PBS. His seven-part series for Turner Classic Movies, Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, was nominated for three Emmys, including writing.
Jon’s books include Black Americans: From Colonial Days to the Present (Universal Publishing, 1969), Picturing Los Angeles (Gibbs Smith, 2010), co-written with his late wife, Nancy, and Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles (Bloomsbury, 2016). Floodpath was a 2016 Amazon Non-Fiction Book of the Year and winner of the Martin Ridge Award from the Historical Society of Southern California. Jon’s most recent book is Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America (Bloomsbury, 2020), an exploration of the role played by non-fiction filmmakers in the history of the United States, from the 1890s to the present.
A founding member of the International Documentary Association and three-term IDA president, Jon established the first International Documentary Congress, in association with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has lectured on documentary film writing and production at Fordham University and the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, and taught the history of Los Angeles at UCLA. Jon is an emeritus member of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of Southern California and a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America, West