Story and Image Part 1

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Story and Image Part 1
By
Ron Steinman

An earlier version of this article appeared online at The Digital Filmmaker — http://digitalfilmmaker.net. With the documentary film now so much a part of our life I rewrote Story and Image Part I and Story and Image Part II. I will post Part II in a few days.
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For the film critic and the casual viewer, the style, execution and the presentation of the documentary film often are important than the story. In this age of up-to-date technique it is easy to achieve a film that “looks” good but misses essential story telling. Technique does not always rule, nor should it, but without it, the film could fail. Consider that knowing how to use a camera does not mean that the result will satisfy the viewer. In fact, proper or advanced technique is a poor substitute for a good story.
Many who make independent narrative films, meaning fiction films, spend more time honing the look and feel of the work, the color and sound, the cuts, dissolves and effects, better than one would think considering an often paucity of money. Creating and using applications is second nature to many people, even those not involved in making a film. Filmmakers have become more adept at using the new software that seems to appear with regularity. In making an independent narrative film, you usually have nothing but time because the time is your own. Typically, there is not much money to support your endeavor. There is no scheduler for a cable network breathing down your back to finish your project so it can have a slot on the schedule. Often you make the film in starts and stops, depending on the money you have available.
Critics more than viewers want something from a documentary that is impossible. The governing idea, the heart that is behind the film is more difficult to achieve. The documentary filmmaker should not submerge his or her vision with an over abundance of technique, but he or she should make a film that is satisfying to the eye as well as to the mind. So technique is important even for the non-fiction film.
The documentary filmmaker usually seems content to get the story finished and into the marketplace, rather than to spend additional time in making the picture crisp, the sound audible and the effects, well, effective. An editor I once worked with theorized that the documentary film should always be a bit rough. By that he meant if it is too polished, its story suffers. I agree to a point that the story must always rule.
The documentary film may be the only medium where a compelling story will matter more than, finally, how the film looks. I know this sounds counter to what I have been saying, but story can rule under special circumstances. The filmmaker can shoot his story with a low-end camera using poor stock, cheap lenses and barely workable microphones. The film can come across as if shot by an amateur. It may even have weak or suspect reporting, and, worse, shoddy writing. But if the story is compelling and the characters strong, those two elements invariably help the filmmaker overcome the problem of something that looks like home video or, in the old days, 8 millimeter film, or one better, Super Eight film.
Let me also be clear that I am talking about films of length, meaning 20 minutes and up, not shorter pieces usually found on magazine style shows that run anywhere from 2 minutes to my designated 20 minutes. Stylistically, these short pieces may resemble the documentary film, but length does dictate content. In no way does a short pictorial story, with moving images, stills and sound – thus multi-media — for either TV or the Web approach a documentary because someone used a similar technique. These techniques are universal. They apply to every video or film story, but, to make its points, a documentary requires time despite the audience of today and its hurry-up show me quickly because I have to move on attitude. It is impossible for a short piece, even a so-called 3-minute piece, long for the Web, to have depth and breadth. Usually these pieces will only be a slice of life, limited in scope because the focus is far too narrow to effectively tell a meaningful story beyond the immediate emotion it produces.
The marketplace dictates how one produces a documentary film. Though the pure documentary is dying in today’s marketplace, it still represents the only outlet for one’s personal viewpoint. Therefore, the production team must take care in how it renders the final product. However, postproduction costs money. The culprit is cable where postproduction work on a pure documentary is almost non-existent. Cable works on small budgets and slender margins. Using video almost exclusively, and often old black and white film with all its problems of age and misuse, the final product for air looks thin, seems to have no depth, and often has a weird patina or shine on the final product. This does not apply to the semi-documentary shows that dominate cable where re-enactments are king and where the “you are there” feeling prevails and works to confuse the audience as to what is true or false. In the purer documentary form – think PBS, a few National Geographic films, some shows on Discovery and its many channels, nature films on a few other channels — if the producer, whether as individual or with a production house, is to make a profit, there is not much money for what an executive for a cable network once described to me as “the niceties of film.” He went on to say, “ the audience does not know good from bad in a documentary anyway, so why should we care?” I thanked him for his insight and exited his office as quickly as I could.
In television when I worked with film, we took pride in how the piece looked when it went on the air. It mattered to us that the audience deserved the best quality we could give it. Connecting with the audience was important then, and it should be now. Giving the viewer a palatable image, however strong, emotional and daring, was uppermost in our minds. It still should be. Sadly, it is not. To make something better does not interfere with creativity. It in itself is a creative act. It enhances the possibility of getting your message across to the viewer in a compelling manner. As a producer, you need the time to give your documentary that extra something that will link the story you are telling to the person seeing it for the first time. But there is a problem, especially in cable. Each day that some film lingers beyond its completion, means there is less profit for the company making it. Most cable documentaries do not hold quality as a goal. That would be asking too much in that highly competitive world.
When you are a producer for hire, you have no choice but to conform to the will of your masters. Producing documentaries or hybrids for cable is a world of its own. I will soon tackle that in another column.
It is a shame that some documentary filmmakers prove lazy when it comes to giving their work the best quality possible. I understand too well how costly it is to enhance the color and sound. Money is always a major consideration making an independent film of any kind. But if you cannot hear what the characters are saying, why see the film? If the images are fuzzy, hazy, and lack color, if the blacks and whites and grays all seem as if they are the same and without definition, the audience will react in kind and turn away from your work.
I do not include the world of video art, often subsumed under the rubric of the avant-garde, an area filled with all the tricks of editing and shooting, but none of the soul of a meaningful film. These films usually end up in art galleries and critics review them as if they are “art” rather than the personal indulgence of an artist at play. Just because inexpensive cameras are available, and more recently easy to learn and use desktop editing, does not mean I have to sit through an often disjointed and rambling discourse that uses diverse and mismatched elements and images that are only clear in the mind of its creator, if at all. I leave that criticism, which I hope will be fierce, to art critics who seem better able to interpret what I can only call self-indulgent juvenile drivel. I have to wonder, though, if these art critics are pandering to what they would like to be a creative act for the sake of saying something about nothing.
We never forgive sub par standards for a non-fiction writer, a novelist or a poet. They, too, often create something so powerful that we find their work impossible to ignore. Yet, critics demean these other artists for their “misguided” efforts if in the end what they create does not meet the standards of “worthy” art. I exclude painting or sculpture because these are inanimate arts and the stories they tell are self-contained by the restraints of physical movement. Why give film this leeway?
Finally, without a compelling story, there will be no documentary film. I know that sounds simplistic. Some filmmakers compose their documentary in the field where they shoot everything in sight and then hope they can find the films essence in the cutting room. The other method is to have a plan, to know your story as well as you can before you shoot a frame of film. Be prepared for the unexpected, though because it sometimes changes everything. Even with a reasonably defined story, the unexpected can and should be welcome. However, do not become mesmerized with your film because of what you hope is a compelling story, a single powerful interview or a one-time image or set of images unique to that film. That is not enough.
In the end, the audience, and the reviewer who matters because the marketplace looks to critics for advice, will sometimes ignore many of the elements in a film that deserve criticism, good or bad. When critics and the audience gloss over the making of a film, its composition created from all its elements, they do a disservice to that film and all future films. Form and content must mesh. They must compliment each other. If they do not, we will soon forget the piece as a whole, deny the art, and rarely remember the message.

Part 2 of Story and Image will concentrate on the story.

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Tags: Cable, Documentary, Film, Filmmaker, TV