The fields of documentary, oral history, first-person reportage, case-study and participant-observer social science, and human-interest journalism were little studied and certainly not understood to be related when, in 1970, I was in the suicidal throes of beginning my dissertation, which became a book, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973; second edition, with retrospective afterword, 1986), that established my small career as college teacher.
The book published, I felt I’d exhausted documentary (or it, me). I had aired the opinions I had, many of them lifted from conversation with the photographer Walker Evans, and felt I couldn’t teach documentary history or theory because I had nothing new to say to people who knew, or might read, my book. I set off looking for another theme of equal interest (never found it, but that’s another story).
Then, in 1988, while team-teaching an undergraduate history of photography course with J.B. Colson, a photojournalist and photohistorian at my university, he and I came up with the idea of team-teaching the practice of documentary: a graduate course where students would do documentary projects (“written, photographed, videotaped, or—God save the mark—sung, danced, or drawn,” as our final syllabus said) and we would comment and provide background: examples of paradigmatic earlier work (there’s the history), and theory.
We gave the course, which I called “Documentary Explorations,” a dozen times till I retired, and J.B. and our remarkable students taught me things about documentary that—like the existence of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and of American comic books of the late 1930s that horrifically pictured Nazi concentration camps—I wish I had known when writing my dissertation. This essay discusses the two most important things I learned.
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First: we all can’t do documentary, be photojournalists, anthropologists, reporters. Some of us aren’t personally secure enough to live in a different milieu; we never get over culture shock. Further, some of us haven’t the patience necessary for fieldwork. Frederick Wiseman says his documentary films—“subjective ‘fictions’ based in ‘reality’”—have their best sequences thanks to his doing nothing but wait: "If you hang around long enough, you stumble onto sequences that are funnier, more dramatic, and sadder than anything you can find, except in really great novels. You're not inventing them. You're just lucky enough to be there when they happen." Some of us are too antsy to hang around that long.Finally, some of us are too shy or too well brought up to pry into others’ lives. We won’t thrust our camera in their faces. We can’t force ourselves to ask stinging questions. Hurrying back to school from lunch, a 16-year-old girl wraps her car around a tree, killing herself and one of three friends with her, and what is your job as the youngest reporter in the office? To get not only to her house but in it, get family photos of her, and ask her parents and anyone else on hand what she was like, what her hopes for life were, and—of course—how they, whoever you’re talking to, feel. Some of us flat can’t do it. Can’t do what Jim Goldberg did to get amazing personal confessions from the people he photographed in Rich and Poor (1985): he told some of his subjects what they had said about themselves wasn’t frank or interesting enough and they could do better, implying otherwise they wouldn’t get in his book.
Shyness, kindness, Episcopalian-taught politeness kept James Agee from making Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, revised edition 1960) the book the New Journalist Tom Wolfe would have liked. Wolfe, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on American Communist writers of the 1930s, is a close friend of my University of Texas mentor William Goetzmann, who in 1972 asked him if he’d blurb my documentary book when it came out. Wolfe wrote me a charming letter saying he loved to, but then, when he saw the book in galleys, wrote nothing. I wondered why till I read his 1973 essay on the New Journalism that blasts Agee for not giving us nearly enough of what the sharecropper subjects of his book said, felt, and did.
Wolfe is right: Agee was a crummy reporter. He couldn’t bring himself to impose upon what he called “terribly undefended” people. Because he couldn’t report on the sharecroppers themselves, he moved his attention to the things of their lives, their clothing, room furnishings, food, tools, and, more interestingly, to the issue of documentary itself; he called documentary into question—“problematized” it, as critics younger than I would say—and turned whether and how to do social propaganda into a moral debate.
A better reporter than Agee, but still wanting by Wolfe’s standards, was George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a documentary achievement to my mind of equal worth to Agee’s, equally rich in its moral vision (Orwell says the middle and upper middle classes, including his own “lower-upper-middle class,” believe the lower classes stink—who else had the guts to say it?), and half as long and a much easier read.
But Wolfe is right: what is missing in both The Road to Wigan Pier and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are the human subjects of the inquiries: the talk of the sharecroppers and of the miners and their families. Talk really matters. Almost always it is the most important way we have of knowing a person to whom we are not related. The Maysles brothers, who have brought us such celebrated documentary films as Salesman (1968) and Grey Gardens (1975), have made much of their money over the years running what is called a “reality-based commercial production company” that makes TV and radio ads that have actual people, not actors, speaking their own unscripted words. Susan Froemke of Maysles Films says, “People will give you things a copywriter could never come up with. It’s what we call the real golden moments.” She acknowledges that “sometimes clients are afraid it’s a little too real.” Sam Telerico, executive producer at Maysles, says the company’s work “involves an education process for clients, agencies, everyone. Often they don’t realize what reality is and want to modify it, make it a little nicer.” But to make it nicer usually saps its originality and strength. As the documentary playwright and actress Anne Deveare Smith has said, “There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say. They didn’t hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it’s gorgeous.” A golden moment.
The problem with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and The Road to Wigan Pier is that practically all the golden moments belong to Agee and Orwell.
“So we should be looking for golden moments?” a student asked J.B. and me in class. J.B. and I hadn’t been wise enough to be this blunt, but we said yes: their fieldwork should consist of hanging around until they felt they had a golden moment or two. Which of course begged the question of what a golden moment is.
For the oral historian Studs Terkel, it’s clear that a golden moment happens when people’s conversation shows contradictions in their values. In Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), such contradiction occurs when the advertising magnate William Benton speaks with pride and shame of having doubled his income every year of the Depression (“progress through catastrophe,” Benton notes ruefully); of having invented the documentary advertisement (with a Maxwell House Coffee radio ad in which “you heard the coffee cups clinking and the coffee gurgling as it was poured” and a man smacking his lips with pleasure; “I invented a lot of things for which I now apologize,” he says); and of having bought the struggling elevator-music company Muzak, vastly expanded its locations, and multiplied his fortune several times because he had a tin ear and didn’t know good music from bad. “My mother, who was a fine musician, held Muzak in contempt. Anybody who knows anything about music holds it in contempt.”
(Does such self-contradiction happen in great literature, as Wiseman suggests? All the time. Consider the scene in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night where the wealthy father, furious at having been mocked for miserliness by his tubercular son, shouts that the boy can spend as much as he wants on a private TB clinic, “Spend all my money!”, while he, the father, is standing on the dining room table, unscrewing some of the light bulbs in the chandelier because he says the room is bright enough and electricity costs money.)
Contradictory values are at the heart of many of the golden moments in Wiseman’s films. His High School (1967), about life in a suburban school that prides itself on empowering the individual student, shows the dean of girls at a school assembly reading a letter from a graduate, now a soldier in Vietnam. The soldier writes with pride of being what the school made him: a body doing just what he’s told. The dean is tearfully grateful that the school has succeeded in “doing our job.”
The golden moments I’ve cited so far—involving William Benton, O’Neill’s father, the dean of girls—are all ironic: speakers speak without being aware of the context in which their remarks will be understood. What they say by itself isn’t the last word. Much more commonly, golden moments occur when speakers put brilliantly, “originally,” exactly what they mean:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Sighted sub. Sank same.
Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.
Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
What constitutes a golden moment is of course a subjective judgment, though the speeches above have impressed enough people over time that I suspect most of us would put them in the pantheon. How does one know a golden moment when it’s brand-new, just spoken? Obviously by our individual emotional response to it—“belly feel,” as Orwell disparagingly called it. Fortunately, there’s a large overlap between human sensibilities, and I have little doubt that you will find some of the following statements—from the small anthology of golden moments I’ve collected on my hard drive—as striking as I do:
Queen Elizabeth I: “Had I, my lords, been born crested, not cloven, you had not treated me thus!"
Sydney Gaines, age 7, to his father, David Gaines, my friend and a professor of English at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas: “Dad, real friends are front-stabbers.”
Geoffrey Graham, 42, an Austin, Texas, artist and Gay Rights activist dying of AIDS: "I have no fear of death. It's a natural part of life. I trust the universe enough not to be fearful."
An unnamed woman overheard by a New Yorker music reviewer during the intermission of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2002 production of Anton Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: “I survived Auschwitz—I don’t have to sit through this.”
The pro golfer Mike Reid, who cried when he blew a lead in the PGA Tournament: "That's O.K. I cry at supermarket openings."
The composer Aaron Copland: "Agony I don't connect with. Not even alienation."
The soprano Renee Fleming: "I was so much the good girl that I didn’t know what I wanted to have for lunch. I only knew what I should have for lunch."
Another high-achieving good girl, the comedienne Carol Burnett, after she became her real, imperfect, happier self: “I liked me better when I wasn’t me.”
The documentary filmmaker and public-access-TV pioneer George Stoney: "Forgiveness is far easier to obtain than permission."
David Rappaport, a 3-foot 11-inch dwarf and character actor, complaining that he was discriminated against: "I want to be treated like a regular, boring, normal person. I look at boring people every day, and I say, 'God, I wish I could be like that.' But my lot is to be unique, special, so I have to put up with it. It's a hard life." Two years later, Rappaport committed suicide.
Staff Sgt. Hattie Brown, a radio operator who relayed battle reports to headquarters from the field during the 1991 Gulf War: "I've confronted the idea of death and I try not to be scared. If I die, though, I hope I do it with pride, trying to get the enemy."
From the New York Times' obituary of publisher and philanthropist George Delacorte, who died in 1991 at age 97: “Mr. Delacorte was an avid storyteller in his later years. One day, however, when he was in the middle of an anecdote he lost his train of thought. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘at 92 the memory is the first thing to go.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, the first thing that goes is sex. Then your memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.’” [This golden moment, placed near the end of a long Times article like a chocolate mint at the end of a heavy meal, would of course be the headline in a tabloid: “‘YOU NEVER FORGET SEX,’ SAYS 92 YEAR OLD.” ]
The actor Cary Grant: "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."
Jean Sexton, an Orphan Train rider in 1914, speaking of her arrival in the Midwestern town where she was "chosen": "They marched us across a stage in the opera house. First, my two brothers got chosen. And then it was time to make my stage appearance. I was only three, and my mother tells me that I was wearing a little white dress that by that time was terribly wrinkled. So when I came out on the stage I was smoothing the wrinkles from my dress. And she called out, 'I want that one.'"
The New York Jets’ lineman Dennis Byrd, a devout Christian, paralyzed in a 1992 game, asked
whether he had wondered “why me?”: “I know why me. Because of the strength on the inside. I know I can handle this." Less than a year later Byrd was walking with the aid of a cane.
Samuel Johnson, asked what the greatest pleasure in life is: “Fucking. And the second is drinking. Therefore I wonder why there are not more drunkards, for all can drink, though not all can fuck.”
Yelena V. Kozlova, whose daughter, Darya, a ninth grader, was one of 45 Russian children, mostly high school honors students on their way to a vacation in Spain, who died in a 2002 plane crash over Germany; Ms. Kozlova was speaking to her daughter’s grieving schoolmates: "Dig into life and be joyful."
My friend Archie Hobson’s remarkable mother, Verna, dying of cancer: “If there is an afterlife, won’t we be surprised!”
So this was the first important thing I learned about documentary and its outrider disciplines in social science and journalism after writing my dissertation: you have to get the golden moments. And if you don’t have the patience and the boldness to, or if you don’t fancy dealing with parents who’ve just lost their child, documentary is probably not for you.
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My second point is more complicated but more quickly made. Those who have done me the honor of reading Documentary Expression and Thirties America will remember that I distinguish between two sorts of documentary: social and human.
Social documentary deals with public phenomena that are susceptible, with however much difficulty, of being changed, improved: the sharecropping system in the American South during the 1930s; the outrageous cost of California funerals; the lard in McDonald’s French fries; racism; the lack of anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS in Africa; battered children; Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland, North Korea, Iran, Darfur; white slavery; guns in the hands of untrained civilians; the bitter circumstances of poor Muslims in Europe; bad breath, body odor, drunk driving, and the heartbreak of psoriasis (advertisements often use documentary techniques). I said in my book that when we speak of “documentary,” we generally mean social documentary.
And yet, as I didn’t say, the second sort of documentary is in fact much more common. Human documentary shows us natural, necessary, and often agreeable phenomena: childhood, festivals, dementia, work, faraway places, unusual people’s normal lives, political activity, sport, hurricanes, friendship, dying, spiritual questing, life in a Moroccan or Michigan village. “A Hospice Austin patient, a policewoman, a Mexican-American Pentecostal church, middle class women's recipes, the Creative Rapid Learning Center, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, a tattoo parlor, people’s jokes about God or Bill Stott’s lawn, a school for battered children, the custodians of this building, or Ralph the Swimming Pig”—as a late syllabus for J.B. Colson’s and my documentary class said, citing some projects done in earlier years.
When writing my dissertation I understood but only briefly acknowledged that “human documentary” was just another name for what is normally called art. Documentary, now so firmly considered a tactic for social change, actually begins with a work of art, a celebration of an unusual life: Nanook of the North. Robert Flaherty, the film’s maker, didn’t intend to change Nanook’s life—far from it. He wanted Nanook to stay just as he was and for us to admire him that way. When the film was released in 1922, it was a worldwide hit. But Flaherty didn’t send any of the money it earned to Nanook or his wife and kids, and they all died of starvation while Nanook was leaping about the screen in first-run theaters on five continents.
What holds our attention in a social documentary—The River (1937), say, or Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)—is the issue being treated and—and I underline this—the complexity the issue is shown to have. (If an issue is simple—Buy Bonds; Don’t Litter—all that is needed is a public-service ad.) The issue and its complexity hold us, not the human complexity of the people shown; indeed, the people are usually ciphers, “the halt and the lame . . . victims,” as a critic, Brian Winston, has put it, describing the people in social-reformist documentary.
On the other hand, in a human documentary, a piece of art that hopes to hold our interest, the person shown—as the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm suggests in her brilliant The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), the last book of the semester in J.B.’s and my class—must have a certain kind of energetic, self-dramatizing richness of character, like buoyant Nanook. The center in non-satiric literature can’t be rigid and one-dimensional—can’t be Horatio or Fortinbras, must be Hamlet; can’t be Enobarbus, must be Anthony. Or Cleopatra, whose “infinite variety” “age cannot wither . . . nor custom stale.”
Are there successful documentaries that mix reformist propaganda with the depiction of a fascinating person or persons—documentaries both social and human? I’m tempted to say no for the same reason that the critic Lionel Trilling said there were no great New Deal (or “liberal” or “leftist”) novels: because propaganda privileges the community, art the individual; propaganda simplicity, art complexity; propaganda human possibility, art human limitation. Perhaps Grapes of Wrath comes closest—John Ford’s 1940 film, not John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel. The film can be considered a re-enacted documentary—there have been others of the kind, most notable Humphrey Jennings’ Silent Village (1943), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome: Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966)—and Henry Fonda is spellbinding because he makes us feel the tremendous, justifiable violence suppressed in his calm Tom Joad.
Having said there may not be successful documentaries that are both social and human, let me close by pointing to an extraordinary film that is almost an exception. The film is Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours (1988), which students in the documentary class brought to J.B.’s and my attention and which we thereafter closed the course with. The film shows Europeans on a tour in Papua New Guinea among people only a generation or two removed from the Stone Age and now selling souvenirs of their past while living on the margins of our (and their) civilization.
We see the tourists staring at, photographing and videotaping the natives and artifacts important in their past culture, having the natives explain the artifacts (“Is this the rock where you killed your sacrifices?” a fat red-faced German asks a wizened black man), and bargaining to get a lower price on souvenirs, though as one woman says to her companion, “This is so cheap”—at its first price—“I can’t believe it!”
Because the tourists and New Guineans interact only when the latter are in a subservient role—photographed, asked generally demeaning questions (“How do people taste?”), looked upon as retarded (“I don’t think they understand money”), haggled with over prices—we come to respect the few tourists who to a degree drop out of the tour, an Italian family who are having such fun together they ignore O’Rourke’s off-screen questions, a woman who sunbathes rather than do the scheduled activity, the handful who go to the last night’s festival dinner not, as they were supposed to, in New Guinean dress with war-paint on their faces, but in Western sport clothes.
It is O’Rourke’s genius in mid-movie to give us the obverse of what we have been watching. All at once, without explanation, it is the New Guineans—the wizened man and a plump middle-aged woman selling trinkets—who speak to us in their native language, subtitled in ours. “Why do they come see us and we not go see them?” “When I buy food at the store, they don’t give me a second price.” “Why do they have money?” “If I had money, I would travel.” “They don’t buy, and I need money to send my kids to school!” “When the white man came, we said, ‘Our dead ancestors have arrived; our dead have come back.’ Now when we see tourists, we say the dead have returned. That’s what we say.”
The polemical point is made: East is east and West is west, and so long as each sees the other as Other, there is no authentic, human way for them to relate. None of the people we have seen do it. As the film’s final credits pass on the screen, we in the audience realize sadly that, as O’Rourke says in a 1999 article he wrote about the film, tourism is not “a process which can lead to greater understanding between cultures. There must be a better way.”
But the film doesn’t end when the credits end. Suddenly, we see a huge greensward of mown grass, then a small propeller plane, and then people we’ve not seen earlier. One’s the pilot, a white man; another is a dark native. The third and fourth are a white middle-aged American couple in loud pastels, carrying handbags and tourist trophies, saying their goodbyes. The exuberant woman does the talking we hear. She exclaims about the plane, her upcoming trip, the greensward (“My lawn back home should look so good. I should look so good!”). She is, as Dean MacCannell, author of The Tourist (1976), has remarked, a “Bette Midler-type American”—which is to say a New Yorker and very likely a Jew with the huge energy and warmth such people have in a common stereotype. Among the things she’s carrying are several (MacCannell says five) painted wooden representations of fruit, tied together at one end. One can’t but think of them as anything but penises—MacCannell calls them “realistically carved dildos”—and that’s how the woman laughingly thinks of them. “I get to ride back with these in my lap!” she says. Before she gets in the plane, she gives their native guide a big hug—her husband shakes his hand and pats him on the back—thanking him and saying something about seeing him again. They get on the plane and we watch while it taxies up the greensward.
What we just have seen, I suggest, almost overturns the film’s earlier polemic, just as sexy Alcibiades’ arrival upsets all the philosophizing about love in Plato’s Symposium. If anyone could in two minutes, this wonderful New York woman would force us to admit that contact can be made cross culture: all it takes is a powerful, open heart to do it. But I find the scene strikes most viewers—MacCannell is one—as merely a flippant coda to the film, too brief and irresponsible to be treated seriously. The film’s point remains, again in O’Rourke’s words, “The promoted idea of tourism as ‘a dialogue between cultures’ is, I believe, a myth, because there exists such an economic and cultural disparity between the protagonists and all human encounter is inevitably distorted.” Even I must admit the New York woman’s farewell is almost certainly a distortion of the couple’s relation to their guide and his people.
Thus, as I said in my book, there are two sorts of documentary, and, as I didn’t say, each has a different sort of person at its center. Social documentary shows victims needing help in coping with their environment; human documentary shows people with a measure of command of their environment, capable not only of exciting our admiration (victims can do this) but of changing themselves and their worlds and what we think of both.
I respect social documentary, but I love human documentary, and the triumph of the profile in magazines, newspapers, and electronic media, of People Weekly and American Masters, of entertainment, historical, and sports biographies on TV suggests that I am far from alone.
Acknowledgements and Endnotes
My first thanks go to J.B. Colson with whom I joyfully taught for 20 years and from whom I learned most of what I know about photography and a good deal of what I believe about life. Next, thanks to Caroline Blinder of Goldsmiths College, London, who assured me I must have something to say about documentary after my years of silence. Finally, thanks to Tom Fricke and Keith Taylor of the University of Michigan, who invited me to contribute to their documentary issues of the Michigan Quarterly Review, and especially to Keith (Tom was doing fieldwork in Nepal), who emailed me encouragement.
I regret not being able to give citations for everything I quote. I kept the quotes for my delight (James Thurber: “Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts”), for self-improvement (Carl Jung: “The great thing is here and now: this is the eternal moment. And if you don’t realize it, you have missed the best part of your life”), and for classroom use—not for research.
Late 1930’s comic books depicting Nazi concentration-camp horrors: Alfred Appel, Northwestern University, in conversation. Maysles Films: “Advertising,” The New York Times, 11/26/1993. The student who asked J.B. and me whether the class should be looking for “golden moments” in interviews was Nancy Mims. Benton, in Terkel, pp. 60-65. Anne Deveare Smith: NYT, 2/1/1997. The authors of the phrases bowels of Christ, sighted sub, nobody goes there, and you’re no Jack Kennedy are readily available through Google. Moses und Aron: The New Yorker, 2/18-25/2002. Mike Reid: NYT, 8/21/1989. Renee Fleming: NYer, 11/12/2001. David Rappaport: NYT, 5/4/1990. Hattie Brown: NYT, 1/22/1991. George Delacorte: NYT, 5/5/1991. Dennis Byrd: NYT, 1/13/1993. Yelena V. Kozlova: NYT, 7/4/2002. I’m sure I know the post-Flaherty history of Nanook from Pauline Kael’s early writing: see her note in NYer, 4/15/2005, p. 50. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, Doubleday, 1950. Brian Winston, "The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary," in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, University of California Press, 1988, p. 284. The students who brought Cannibal Tours to J.B.’s and my attention were Angela Alston and Rebecca Campbell. Dennis O'Rourke, “On the Making of Cannibal Tours,” at
http://www.cameraworklimited.com/download.html?oid=2250047090; this essay includes Dean MacCannell’s quotes.
When choosing social “victims” to document, reporters, propagandists, and artists look for subjects with—no surprise— human appeal. The filmmaker Ofra Bikel has been profiling imprisoned felons for 14 years and gotten 13 of them released for wrongful conviction. As she acknowledges, she selects those she documents with great care. “I pity everybody [wrongly put in prison],” she says, “but I can't take somebody who has molested a child and now is in for the wrong murder. If I want to convince people [in the viewing audience], I have to be smart about it.” A convicted murderer, Patsy Kelly Jarrett, had been in prison 28 years and was almost certainly innocent, yet Bikel was hesitant to profile her for PBS’ Frontline because starchy food and a sedentary life had beefed her up. “She looked, really, like a guard, you know,” Bikel told a reporter. “This short hair of hers, it’s really impossible.” She finally decided, as the reporter put it, “that the details of Ms. Jarrett's case compensated for any lack of telegenic appeal,” did a profile of her, and got her released. See Julie Salamon, “Crusading for Prisoners When the System Fails,” NYT, 6/27/2005.
