What we need are more ‘citizen’ documentary-makers, like Jo Wilding and Julia Guest, who are prepared to look in the mirror of our ‘civilised’ societies and film the long rivers of blood, and their ebbing truth. It took Peter Davis’s Oscar-winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds to make sense of the mass murder that was the invasion of Vietnam. Two sequences brilliantly achieved this. There was General William Westmoreland, the American commander, declaring: ‘The Oriental doesn’t put the same price on life as the Westerner,’ while a Vietnamese boy sobbed over the death of his father, murdered by GIs. And there was a naked Vietnamese girl, running from a Napalm attack, her body a patchwork of burns, and followed by a woman carrying a baby, the skin hanging off its body. Thanks to Hearts and Mind, they are now unforgettable evidence of the barbarity of that war.
There is a hunger among the public for documentaries because only only documentaries, at their best, are fearless and show the unpalatable and make sense of the news. The extraordinary films of Alan Francovich achieved this. Francovitch, who died in 1997, made The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie. This destroyed the official truth that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Instead, an unwitting ‘mule’, with links to the CIA, was alleged to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft. (Paul Foot’s parallel investigation for Private Eye came to a similar conclusion). The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in the United States. In this country, the threat of legal action from a US Government official prevented showings at the 1994 London Film Festival and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1995, defying threats, Tam Dalyell showed it in the House of Commons, and Channel 4 broadcast it in May 1995.
To make sense of the current colonial war in Afghanistan, I recommend Jamie Dorian’s Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death, which describes how the country’s liberators oversaw the secret killing of 3,000 Afghans – the number killed in the Twin Towers. To begin to make sense of the news, I recommend Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, and to understand one of the major reasons Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, I recommend Greenwald’s latest, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.
All are available on DVD. In these dangerous times, with countries about to be attacked and many innocent lives already condemned, we urgently need more documentaries like these, for the simple reason that the public has a right to know in order to act. John Pilger, article September 2006, ‘In Praise of the Subversive Documentary’
Of course Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value. John Grierson, re Robert Flaherty’s Moana, 1926
While children dance, tanks roll down the street ... In the 1930s and 1940s a small group of young British artists and film-makers were inspired by an extraordinary vision: they believed they could change the country with films about real life. Britain Through a Lens: The Documentary Film Mob, BBC 2011
Made in 1941 Listen to Britain is acknowledged as an early masterpiece of the British documentary industry. ibid.
These films also carry a message – they lift hearts. This was an art is had taken them years to learn. ibid.
A year later Grierson delivered Drifters. ibid.
It turns ordinary working men into screen heroes. ibid.
The film was called Night Mail – released in 1936 it’s a landmark in the history of the documentary. ibid.
Coalface of 1935 was a promotional firm for the British coal industry. (Documentary & Coal) ibid.
Documentarists had been trained to celebrate the lives of ordinary working people. ibid.
Housing Problems is a bit like a corporate video ... A new form of documentary bursts through: the interview. ibid.
The most influential documentary maker in Britain – Humphrey Jennings. ibid.
It’s an awkward country of small pleasures ... The movement got caught up in an argument about how to portray ordinary life. ibid.
With the country at war it was time for their message of unity to become explicit. ibid.
London Can Take It is a classic work of the British documentary. ibid.
Target for Tonight was a huge hit in cinemas. ibid.
Diary for Timothy was directed by Humphrey Jennings. ibid.
I’ve been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humour, and they’re loath to do that because they think if it’s a documentary it has to be deadly serious – it has to be like medicine that you’re supposed to take. And I think it’s what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries. Michael Moore
By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul. Theodore Bikel
I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn’t often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today. Steven Spielberg
Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can’t. Alex Gibney
The best documentaries are independent. They don’t exist to serve interests, philanthropic or otherwise. Nick Fraser
In January 2001 a BBC documentary crew filmed the everyday goings on in a typical workplace. Now, nearly three years later we return to find out what has happened to the employees of the office. The Office, Christmas Special I
I wanted to travel. To see world. To make documentary film. Storyville: The Notorious Mr Bout, Viktor the arms dealer, BBC 2014
You wanted to know the story of Fitzcarraldo. It’s a strange story, a little bit Sisyphus-like story, a story of challenge, of the impossible. Burden of Dreams, 1982
In November 1979 Herzog builds a camp for cast and crew in the dense tropical rain forest close to the Ecuadorian border … Peru and Ecuador are building up to a small border war. The jungle is full of soldiers and the Aguaruna Indians. ibid.
Mick Jagger plays Fitzcarraldo’s sidekick. ibid.
‘I live my life or I end my life with this project.’ ibid. Herzog
‘We have had enough trouble.’ ibid.
Despite Herzog’s high technology the jungle is winning. ibid.
Take the Money and Run was an early pseudo-documentary. The idea of doing a documentary, which I later finally perfected when I did Zelig was with me from the first day I started movies. I thought that was an ideal vehicle for doing comedy, because the documentary format was very serious, so you were immediately operating in an area where any little thing you did upset the seriousness and was thereby funny. And you could tell your story laugh by laugh by laugh … The object of the movie was for every inch of it to be a laugh. Woody Allen, cited Richard Schickel ‘Woody Allen: A Life in Film’
I’m just doing a little documentary thing. Trailer Park Boys s1e1: Take Your Little Gun and Get Out of My Trailer Park, Julian to Bubbles
The days of me being able to produce a documentary that will get seen millions of times is probably in the past at this point as they start cracking down on us. The Corbett Report, The Dinosaur Media Learns of Its Own Extinction, James Corbett online 2018
Almost as soon as the documentary was broadcast the Royal Family had second thoughts. Inside the Crown: Secrets of the Royals s1e2: Front Page News, ITV 2020
Having served his [TV] screen apprenticeship he went on from being documentary subject to documentary presenter. Fred Dibnah: A Tribute to Fred, BBC 2004