Documentary Modernism and the Sponsored Film

-->

The Confluence of Documentary Modernism and the Sponsored Film

            Upon watching Master Hands for our week on sponsored films, I was struck by an unexpected connection.  In its construction and aesthetic, the film very much resembles the mode of documentary modernism exemplified by Man With a Movie Camera and laid out polemically in Jors Ivens' "The Artistic Power of the Documentary Film" (1932).  Ivens rails against the industry element of commercial narrative cinema, asserting that it "made incorrect use of your technical and scientific work and created a sort of 'art inflation'" (Bakker 227).  As he goes on to describe the components that distinguish "artistic" documentary film, however, he lists traits that can be easily found in Master Hands, despite it being sponsored by Chevrolet. 

            Ivens strongly emphasizes the notion of "cinematographic rhythm" and its importance to the artistry of the medium.  By rhythm, he primarily means editing and the sense of flow and tempo created by putting images together, the essential factor which distinguishes film from other art forms.  He cites the development of sound as "an excellent ally" in creating the desired rhythm for a film. 

            Ivens' principles can be clearly applied to Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, with its abstract cutting between objects of industry and urbanites on the move.  The connection to Master Hands, however, is more surprising, as the sponsored film is even farther removed from what Ivens seems to want.  Master Hands is almost entirely made up of shots of machinery, sometimes operated by workers, but it is the machinery which is most important.  Although in theory, the film depicts the construction of an automobile, instead of employing a voiceover or titles for clarity of the process, it relies on avant-garde techniques to create a more fluid, impressionistic picture of the industry.  A more clear explanation of the process is provided in Prelinger's shotlist (http://archive.org/details/MasterHa1936_2), but for a civilian watching the film the mechanics are quite unclear, and the film quickly takes on a more avant-garde feel as the viewer settles into the Wagnerian music and the repetitive, mechanistic visuals. 

            The Prelinger notes describe the style of Master Hands as "capitalist realism" that "uses the representational methods of the Soviet and German cinemas to strengthen its vision of American enterprise."  I find this confluence and cross-pollination fascinating, as the two documentary genres are philosophically so far removed from each other.  Master Hands pretends to be about the auto workers who build its products, but the shots chosen are primarily of the machinery, therefore glorifying the corporation itself rather than the human laborers.  As a sponsored film, it is by definition the opposite of what Jors Ivens espouses in his treatise, but employs all the same techniques. 

            Master Hands therefore both proves and disproves Ivens's point.  It does indeed co-opt the techniques of the avant-garde to serve its own ends, amounting to the "art inflation" Ivens describes.  It does so, however, in a documentary mode without a scripted narrative, indicating that documentary film does not necessarily have the purity of purpose he ascribes it.  Ivens writes that, in documentary, "It is not a series of external ideas, but the objects themselves which indicate their sequence in place and time" (Bakken 228).  I would argue that both can be true in the documentary film.  Indeed, most documentaries are built around thematic, polemical ideas as well as the dictates of the sounds and images.  Master Hands is an example, as is Man With a Movie Camera, though the former has a more commercial ideological bent than the latter. 

            Just through the comparison of these two subgenres of documentary – the sponsored film and documentary modernism – we can see the murkiness of the boundaries of nonfiction film.  Truth and ideology, artistry and corporate ambition all blur together.  Delineating what is pure and what is mediated and for what reasons becomes a complex endeavor.  Is there such a thing as a nonfiction film, when editing and mediation are at play? 

Diana Bilbao

Bernstein and Ebert on 'Roger and Me'

Aden Jordan 

"There was a startling vehemence to the journalistic critics' denunciation of Roger & Me (1989), Michael Moore's insightful and bitingly funny expose of corporate greed in the 1980s…The controversy demonstrated how difficult certain journalists find conceptualizing the documentary film…Unlike the journalistic discourse, academic discussion has acknowledged that defining the documentary is difficult, whether documentary is understood in terms of its formal features, its assumptions about the construction of knowledge, its assertions of authority, the experience it evokes in the audience–or all of the above."[1] (Bernstein, 397-398)

In his essay "Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore's Roger & Me", Matthew Bernstein uses the angry reaction of some critics to Michael Moore's Roger & Me as a starting point in his argument that there has been more discourse on the different and complex modes of the documentary in the academic world than in the journalistic field. Some critics were outraged by the ways that Moore played loosely and deceptively with the facts in his film, including his decision to arrange events he covered in Roger & Me out of order as a means of further strengthening his portrayal of how the corporate greed of General Motors and their decision to close an automobile plant in Flint, Michigan affected their laid-off employees and damaged their community. Bernstein argues that these critics were still under the impression that there is a rigid and single kind of documentary.  He posits that the critics did not see Roger & Me as fitting proper documentary format, and that these critics were unaware of the different modes that documentaries can fall into.

Using the four documentary modes defined by Bill Nichols, Bernstein classifies Roger & Me as a documentary that falls into the interactive and expository modes. Moore's film is interactive because Moore puts himself in front of the camera and uses his authorial voice to inform us that we are hearing his opinions. According to Bernstein, "Roger & Me establishes itself in its opening moments–in what theorists call the primacy effect (cf. Bordwell 37)–as an interactive documentary, one which relies heavily on subject interviews and the filmmaker's openly acknowledged and limited understanding" (Bernstein 401). Bernstein describes the film as being a hybrid of the interactive mode and the expository mode because "after the film's prologue, Moore settles into the expository mode of documentary, whereby his apparently objective narration asserts its absolute authority" (402). One of way of understanding the film as a hybrid of these two modes is to consider that through the interactive mode Moore asks questions inRoger & Me and through the expository mode he answers these questions himself without leaving room for "ambiguity in terms of the audience's interpretation of the people, places, and events they see" (402).

While I'm in complete agreement with Bernstein's arguments regarding how the nonfiction features of Moore's film were received differently by critics and academics, I found it curious that Bernstein waited until the last paragraph of his essay to mention that there were critics who were not in opposition to some of Moore's manipulation tactics within the film. According to Bernstein, "Some critics have defended Moore's film on the grounds that the considerations like those I have raised above about Roger & Me should not outweigh Moore's achievement in demonstrating vividly and humorously corporate America's indifference to the welfare of the communities in which it operates" (412). Throughout his essay, Bernstein used direct quotes from the critics who denounced Moore and his film including Pauline Kael, Richard Schickel, and Harlan Jacobson, but he neglected to include any quotes from critics who did support the film despite Moore's manipulations. In this last paragraph, Bernstein does parenthetically reference Miles Orvell's essay "Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation: American Dreamand Roger & Me", in which Orvell does acknowledge the film's "hybridization of forms"[2] (Orvell, 134) and Nichols's four modes of documentary. Orvell's essay originally appeared in Film Quarterly, an academic journal, and this further supports Bernstein's claim that the film academics could distinguish between different kinds of documentaries better than film critics.

Roger & Me was a very popular documentary at the time of its release, and I was personally interested in trying to find reviews or articles on Roger & Me by journalistic critics who did have some awareness of the different methods that documentaries utilize, whether they were the specific four modes outlined by Nichols or other approaches. One of the film's more popular (or populist) defenders was Roger Ebert, who did not use the modes of documentary utilized by Bernstein and Nichols, but instead classified Roger & Me as a type of documentary satire in his article "Attacks on 'Roger & Me' Completely Miss Point of Film"[3]. Ebert wrote that by using manipulation in his film Moore "was taking the liberties that satirists and ironists have taken with material for generations, and he was making his point with sarcasm and deft timing". For his article, Ebert spoke with other documentary filmmakers including Werner Herzog's cinematographer Ed Lachman, documentary director Karen Thorsen, and Pumping Iron director George Butler. Ebert writes, "if they all had one point in common, it was this one: There is no such thing as a truly objective, factual documentary". Unlike Kael, Schickel, and Jacobson, Ebert did not have a problem with Moore's more exploitative use of chronology in Roger & Me and could appreciate the documentary as a satire, but he still displayed what Bernstein refers to as 'documentaphobia' by saying that he wouldn't be interested in going to Roger & Me "for a factual analysis of GM and Flint". While Ebert may have shown a more open mind towards the complex methods of the documentary by classifying Roger & Me as a documentary satire, he still displayed the same fear of the in-depth, fact-centered 'three hour movie' that Moore said he wanted to avoid creating because it would bore viewers.

While I do agree with Bernstein that some critics received Roger & Me more negatively than scholars because the two groups had differing classifications for the documentary, I still find the views of the critics who dismissed the film's manipulations to be valid. No documentary is objective, and the truth itself is always elusive and hard to grasp even for filmmakers who aim for objectivity. Even with that in mind, Moore's film is sensationalistic and he purposefully withheld certain information in his film to appeal to viewers' emotions. It's important to note that Bernstein refers to the critics who denounced the movie as journalists. In journalism, where sensationalism is frowned upon, journalists certainly value information integrity. However, that integrity is damaged when information is presented misleadingly. I think that to constructively assess any documentary film we need to be able to accept that there is no completely objective nonfiction film while also holding filmmakers accountable for the information they spread.

---

[1] Bernstein, Matthew. "Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes." Documenting the Documentary. Ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. P. 397-415.

[2] Orvell, Miles. "Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation." Michael Moore: Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon. Ed. Matthew H. Bernstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. P. 127-140.

[3] Ebert, Roger. "Attacks on 'Roger & Me' Completely Miss Point of Film."The Chicago Sun-Times. 11 Feb. 1990. (also available at RogerEbert.com)