ABSTRACT
In the decade or so prior to the writing of this book, filmic documentary (and, slowly but surely, attached discourses of criticism, historical analysis and praxis) has undergone something of a boom. The
litany of box-office successes in recent years that can reasonably be categorised under a general – but not, as we shall see, always comfortably exclusive – rubric of ‘non-fiction’ extends ever onward towards some presumed future drop-off back to the dark days of the ‘cine-tech
and cine-club’ (Goldsmith 2003: 6). According to a few watchers, this renaissance has peaked, yet the evidence would suggest that much life remains in a multitude of subjects before the public loses its appetite for ‘true stories’ writ large.1 As I write, Larry Charles’s Religulous (2008) and Nathan Frankowski’s Expelled (2008) are doing brisk trade, taking
roughly opposing sides in a cultural struggle for minds; numerous other films, including March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, 2005), the polemicist Michael Moore’s tremendously popular Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Sicko
(2007), and Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones ‘rockumentary’ Shine a Light (2008), will likewise not fade to obscurity soon. Relative to the still
prevalent cinema of outright dramaturgy, such productions’ budgets have often (though not always) been small, yet modest initial outlays seem encouragingly and regularly to yield results beyond festival acclaim. Often documentaries are ‘hits’ in the sense that they recoup
vastly more than was spent on their making, as was the case with Jonathan Caouette’s autobiographical Tarnation (2003), discussed in Chapter Five; sometimes they are hits outright, competing even in the biggest industrial context of international cinema-ticket and video
format sales. (Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), ‘one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime’, according to Roger Ebert (Ellis and McLane 2007: 318), may be seen as having partly catalysed the new boom. The eleventh-highest-earning documentary of all time, ‘it
easily made its money back’, wrote the Telegraph’s David Gritten, ‘a signal to investors that documentaries were worth a punt’ (Gritten 2003: 1).) Notwithstanding the difficulties faced by certain national cinemas in achieving global distribution despite creatively very fecund non-fiction outputs (Spain’s cine social is a particular case here),2 the new wave of
big-screen non-fiction, whilst perhaps not constituting the tsunami for which some filmmakers may hope, still has not hit the shore. Although it should be borne in mind that, broadly speaking, non-fiction is overall not as profitable an enterprise as its counterpart, it nonetheless seems
absurd that, as recently as 1996, Britain’s New Statesman magazine was plausibly able to denigrate documentary as a ‘fringe pursuit for a few consenting adults’ (quoted by Chanan 2007: 3). A word at one time cursed by marketers, documentary – for reasons only partially under-
stood, and to which we shall return – is currently seen as having the potential to do big business, across manifold platforms from the multiplex to mobile phones, and to fulfil an audience’s needs in respect of not only intellectual edification, political motivation and social engage-
ment, but also spectacle and entertainment: the bangs for our bucks, so to speak, have more than ever been found to issue from sources located in unscripted, ‘non-acted’, ‘real’ life.
