Movies based on true stories have an obligation to adhere to the truth, but what is that anyway?
Does knowing you are watching a documentary
predispose you to believe what you are seeing?
People turn to documentaries to learn about the world because documentary footage is supposed to be free from manipulation.
It should show the unvarnished truth.
But those rules can be rewritten.
ERROL MORRIS: "It's hard to believe that people really believe it, but they do
that if you use available light and
use a handheld camera, and you don't move anything
into or out of the frame
the truth will emerge."
In the case of Errol Morris' 'The Thin Blue Line,'
the documentary is heavily manipulated to look and sound like a Hollywood thriller.
But it's also what Morris withholds from us that critics have found dishonest.
None of the interviewees are identified until the end and the camera work is so self conscious and carefully composed
there's never any sense of the natural world right outside the frame.
Documentary advocates were uncomfortable with how scripted everything was.
At that time
these were cardinal rules Morris was breaking as the documentary filmmaker.
Well the documentary tradition at the time was to reveal using fly-on-the-wall
photography and available light, Morris pioneered the contemporary nonfiction trope to conceal
through scripted reenactments and stylized photography.
The form of the documentary would be forever changed.
and his cameraman would go on to shoot some of those stylized fictional films of the decade.
True-crime documentaries were changed forever by Morris' film, but what are the obligations to the facts when making a documentary?
To get to the artistic truth, you must discard the facts.
'I, Tonya': "I never did this."
Who was the rogue who inspired Errol Morris?
Perhaps you'll recognize his voice?
"Errol has set a good example.
He's a landmark now, and I'm very proud for it. I'm proud for him
and and I'm proud for me that I pushed him a little bit into into this."
I was a member of Werner Herzog's rogue film school seminar in New Jersey.
He had us watch 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'
and he lectured to us about the importance of being gutsy with our filmmaking.
He also revealed that he paid actors to pretend certain actions in his documentaries.
In 'Bells From the Deep,' he paid drunken Siberian villagers to stare into the depths of a frozen lake at a mythical religious city underwater.
The drunk man fell asleep on the ice
which resulted in the viewers of the film thinking him to be the most devout believer of the group
and one of the truly Russian figures on screen.
For 'Lessons of Darkness' Herzog uses documentary footage of oil fires in Kuwait with music
and totally recontextualizes the meaning of the very real devastation from the Gulf War in 1991.
That idea of adjusting the context of the truth in order to make a point
is something you see in documentaries a lot more since then.
"It is the deepest strata of truth in cinema, and there's such a thing as poetic,
ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and
imagination and stylization."
So while it's a fact that Hertzog has paid people to act in his documentaries,
he is doing it to attain, in his eyes, a larger truth.
A truth bigger than a simple transcript of just what happened,
but this places a lot of importance on himself as the creator, the arbiter of the truth.
"And I know I can do it to a certain degree."
Now there are little arbiters of the truth everywhere you look.
And if you disagree with their version
you're free to make your own.
In the next episode of "I'll Believe It When I See It," I ask you to consider films inherent potential for misogyny.