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the new golden age of documentary

From Kevin MacDonald's examination of the YouTube phenomenon
to a cab ride with Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard,
cheap technology is allowing film-makers to stretch the form as never before

Sunday 7 November 2010
The Observer
Sean O'Hagan
This article appeared on p12 of the The New Review section of the Observer
on Sunday 7 November 2010.
It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.06 GMT on Sunday 7 November 2010.

"Right now, documentary film-making is like malaria," says Hussain Currimbhoy, curator of the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Britain's premier showcase for new documentaries from around the world. "It's a virus that's spreading fast and far and wide."

In the past week, the festival has screened 120 new documentaries – including shorts as well as feature-length films – from 26 countries. As well as fly-on-the wall documentaries about well-known figures, such as the American comedian Joan Rivers and the English playwright Alan Bennett, there were music documentaries about subjects as diverse as Elgar and Heaven 17, and biographical documentaries about the beat poet William Burroughs, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and a taxi driver who once worked as Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard.

This year, the festival also focused on low-budget films about everyday life and politics in the Middle East, made as Currimbhoy puts it "by people who really needed to tell their stories and can suddenly afford to do it on film". He seems genuinely excited, even by the films that have arrived on his desk unsolicited and not made it on to the festival programme.

"There is definitely a new energy out there. We are living in a moment when film-makers, and young film-makers in particular, are increasingly turning towards documentary as a way to make sense of the world they live in. They are more alert about, and suspicious of, the mainstream media and eager for a form that talks to them about real events in a real way, even if that form is often rough or even low-key. It's a very exciting and ground-breaking time for the documentary."

This view is echoed by the young British director Lucy Walker, whose latest film, Waste Land, opened to rave reviews across America two weeks ago (the film is out here in March). It tracks the artist Vik Muniz as he travels from Brooklyn to his native Brazil to undertake an unlikely creative collaboration with the "catadores" – garbage pickers – who scavenge a living on the world's biggest garbage dump in Rio. It is a film, says Walker, about "the transformative power of art" and one that utilises the grammar of fictional film-making to tell a real-life story that is as uplifting and redemptive as any fictional feelgood movie.

"I really do think we are living in a golden age of documentary film-making," says Walker, over the phone from Los Angeles, where she is currently on a frantic promotional schedule. "There is a frustration with traditional media and a hunger for documentaries that have the stamp of integrity. The week it opened, my film was number one at the box office in terms of what they call 'per-screen average attendance'. Of all the movies playing in America, a Portuguese-language documentary about the lives of people living on a garbage dump in South America had the highest per-screen average across America. That tells me that people are looking for bigger truths about the way we live now, truths they are not getting from Hollywood or the traditional media."

To a degree, this has always been the case, but today, with the coming of affordable high-end digital camera and laptop technology, it is possible to prep, shoot and edit your own film in a fraction of the time – and the budget – it would take to make a traditional film. In many ways, cheap technology has energised film-making for a fast-forward generation who have little time for the slowness of traditional script-based film-making. "I've been in development hell for four years for a fiction film that never got made," says Walker, bullishly. "I don't have that kind of time to waste. I want to get on and make films that I think need to be made."

The availability of cheap digital cameras and software has also meant that, for every campaigning film like Walker's more hard-hitting nuclear weapons documentary, Countdown to Zero (released in March next year), or Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, a riveting, clear-headed exposé of the ruthless financial tsars behind the 2008 global financial meltdown (due next February), there are a host of smaller, stranger documentaries being made, many of which seem to push the boundaries of the form almost to breaking point.

In Exit Though the Gift Shop, released earlier this year, Banksy, the world's most famous street artist and arch art-prankster of our time, plays havoc with notions of authorial "reliability" and takes the audience on an entertainingly self-referential rollercoaster ride that says more about the baroque pointlessness of contemporary youth culture than it perhaps intended.

One of the most ground-breaking documentaries of the year, though, is also one of the most complex, formally and emotionally. The Arbor (released last month) is a film about the short and brutal life of dramatist Andrea Dunbar (writer of the 1986 film, Rita, Sue and Bob Too), who died from alcoholism at the age of 29. Director Clio Barnard restages short extracts from Dunbar's work using actors on the estate in Bradford where Dunbar grew up. The director also uses actors to lip-synch to recorded testimony from Dunbar's friends, family and grownup children. This has proved problematic as well as distracting to some reviewers although, as the Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw, noted, the end result is a kind of "hyper-real intensification of the pain in Dunbar's work and in her life". All human life, it seems, can now be reassembled, and sometimes even creatively reinvented, by contemporary documentary directors.

Many recent documentary films also denote a generational shift in both style and subject matter away from the political and outward-looking, towards the emotional and solipsistic. One could argue that Catfish (out here next month), currently the most talked about documentary of the year in the US, is one such film. It is a documentary for – and about – the Facebook generation and it was made possible, says co-director Henry Joost, "by technology that is available to anyone. You can now buy a consumer-level digital camera for $400 [£246] or less that shoots in HD [high definition] and that still looks pretty good when blown up on a cinema screen. This really is an anyone-can-do-it moment for film-making."

Catfish chronicles the odd relationship between a young, hip and handsome New York photographer, Nev Schulman, and Abby, an eight-year-old who initially sends him an unsolicited painting of one of his published photographs. She lives, she says, in rural Michigan with her mother and her sister, a horse-riding, guitar-playing beauty who flirts with Nev shamelessly via phone texts and email. It all seems too good to be true and it is, though in ways that are surprising and, at times, affecting.

Made in a seamless vérité style by Nev's brother, Ariel Schulman, and his friend, Joost, two young men who seem to chronicle every waking hour of their lives on camera, Catfish is essentially a film about narcissism and self-delusion in the social networking age. There is a sting in this particular tale – and one that would be giving too much away to talk about here. Depending on where you are coming from, however, this unlikely twist is either redemptive or exploitative. You may come away, as I did, feeling both charmed and manipulated, wondering if real life could ever be as unreal as this. Are we seeing a film that unfolded alongside the events it portrays, or a retouched version of the same. And, more pertinently, how retouched?

"It really was an unbelievable perfect storm of circumstances and events that led to this film being made," insists Joost. "We're a little compulsive, systematic. We are all making home movies all the time. It's kind of like fishing. Then, suddenly, we found a story right under our noses. Our friend, who's sitting right in our office, was the story. We just followed it to see where it led. I really do feel that my life as a film-maker – all the dumb jobs, the commercial work, the videos – all led up to this moment."

Catfish may indeed herald an age when the quotidian can become prime subject matter for documentarists – this has already happened with photography. With one or two exceptions, everyone in the film seems to live lives that are so mediated by the grammar of reality television and docudrama that they behave as if they are somehow both utterly knowing and wilfully naive. Like Banksy's film, Catfish may ultimately say more about the emotional shallowness of the culture it betrays than its makers intended.

"There is a sense that the grand narratives are gone and that people are now living in an age of uncertainty, and documentary increasingly reflects that," says the film-maker, Adam Curtis, who has made two ground-breaking documentary series for the BBC: The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares, each of which illustrated in their different ways how ideologies of power work on the collective imagination. "Traditionally, documentaries were part of a progressive tradition, a progressive machine. They provoked us or inspired us to do something. I would contend that, when politicians turned into managers, that system did not work any more and even big budget, well-meaning, measured documentaries, like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, leave us perplexed and helpless rather than angry and politically energised. At the other extreme, you have films like Catfish that noodle about with the intimacy of feelings. Here, people know the grammar of feelings, they know how to act on camera and how to emote formally, while real feelings, which are of course messy and complicated, are hidden."

Back in 1935, the pioneering British documentary film-maker, Paul Rotha, declared: "Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present." Rotha was a socially conscious director who believed, like many of his contemporaries, that the role of the documentary film-maker was to help change the world for the better. One wonders what he would have made of The Arbor, Catfish, or Exit Through the Gift Shop, all of which undoubtedly "reflect the problems and realities of the present", but in ways that Rotha could not have envisaged. In doing so, they don't set out to change the world but rather to question the nature or reality, truth and, indeed, documentary itself.

"The form is certainly being stretched more than ever," says the director Kevin MacDonald, who has made feature films (The Last King of Scotland), documentaries (One Day in September) and merged the two (Touching the Void). "But documentary is a generous basket that can hold a lot of different things. If you think about it, journalism, letter-writing, memoir, satire – they all qualify as non-fiction, so why can't the same loose rules apply to documentary?"

To this end, MacDonald is currently working on the first feature-length documentary made entirely of user-generated content shot in a single day and then uploaded on to YouTube. Called Life In A Day, the impressionistic film is currently being edited down by MacDonald from 5,000 hours of footage from 190 countries. It will premiere as a three-hour documentary at next year's Sundance festival. "It's amateur film-making on a grand scale," says MacDonald. "But, because the participants are often showing such incredibly intimate things that you could not get in a traditional documentary unless you spent months filming, it is also ground-breaking in ways that we did not expect."

In the end, says MacDonald, it all comes down to great storytelling. "The irony is that, when I make a documentary, I always feel like I am taking all this real material and trying to tell a story almost as if it was a fictional narrative. When I make a fictional film, I do the opposite."

Documentary, as MacDonald reminds us, is essentially structured reality. "The only real breaking point," he adds, "is when documentary actually becomes fiction, but more often than not, as many great documentaries testify, real life does often turn out to be a hell of a lot stranger than anything you could make up."

That is perhaps the reason why its boundaries are currently being stretched – to keep up with the increasing unreality of the real world.

Camera, laptop, action: the new golden age of documentary, O, 7.11.2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/nov/07/documentary-digital-revolution-sean-ohagan

Computer Animation, Made by Hand

August 27, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN ANDERSON

WYNNEWOOD, Pa.

NO one’s four-legged friends were harmed during the making of “My Dog Tulip,” but the roar of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s untethered Jack Russell suggests that two-legged strangers might not fare so well.

“Oh, Oscar, stop,” Sandra Fierlinger said, opening the door to the couple’s tree-shrouded cottage on the Main Line, outside Philadelphia. “He’ll be fine, as soon as you get to the other side of the room.”

He wasn’t, it turned out. But even the menacing Oscar couldn’t distract from the room itself: a bank of computer monitors stretched across half the width of the house; beneath them a phalanx of custom-made computers and hard drives crowded one another along the floor. Here the couple put into motion J. R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir about his late-life “romance” with a German shepherd, taking computer animation into an orbit both new and retrograde: computerized yet hand drawn.

Which didn’t quite make sense until Mr. Fierlinger sat down at what he calls his light table: as his digital “pen” moved across the horizontal surface, a line drawing appeared on the vertical screen, creating the “motion” of two existing images that, when run at 24 frames per second, will be cinema. About 60,000 drawings went into “Tulip.” But no paper. Or plastic.

Opening on Sept. 1 at Film Forum in the South Village, “My Dog Tulip” features the voices of Christopher Plummer as Ackerley, the writer and longtime BBC radio host; Lynn Redgrave, who died in May, as his nettlesome sister; and Isabella Rossellini as a kindly veterinarian. As it happens, nearly everyone involved is a dog lover: the Fierlingers have Gracie, a mix of shepherd and corgi, and Oscar (whose electronically adjusted voice was used when an aggressive bark was called for). Mr. Plummer said in a telephone interview that he grew up around dogs and “prefers them to a lot of humans,” while Ms. Rossellini said that, of course, she is “a huge dog person.”

“I even raise dogs for the blind,” she said via e-mail, adding: “The drawings for the animation are very charming, don’t you think so? I love their work.”

That work has won the Fierlingers a Peabody Award (“Still Life With Animated Dogs,” 2001), and Mr. Fierlinger earned an Oscar nomination for best animated short in 1980 for “It’s So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House.” Anyone who’s grown up watching “Teeny Little Super Guy” segments on “Sesame Street” has been watching a Fierlinger creation.

Ms. Fierlinger, 55, who has a fine-arts background, adapted her skills to colorizing her husband’s sketches. “I paint with layers, just as I would with traditional animation,” she said. “I make my own brushes and mix my own colors, just as if it were a paper background. But I do it all on the computer.”

Unlike studio cartoons, which often involve computer-generated imagery, the Fierlingers’ work is hands-on, sort of. What’s eliminated is wasted motion: the shuffling of paper, the sharpening of pencils, the setting up of shots. That it still took them three years to make “My Dog Tulip” almost seems surprising. It certainly gave Mr. Plummer pause.

“He said, ‘I was told it’s going to take you three years to do this,’ ” Mr. Fierlinger, 74, recalled, “and I said, ‘Yes, at least.’ He said, ‘I’m going to be dead by then, I’ll never get to see it.’ I told him: ‘I’m roughly about your age, so if you think you’re going to be dead, then so am I, and it will never get done. You won’t miss anything.’ When we met again last year in Toronto, we agreed the time had gone so fast.”

The heart of “My Dog Tulip” is Mr. Ackerley’s story of his late-middle-age relationship with an Alsatian named Tulip. Bittersweet, heartfelt and rendered in an eccentric, expressive style, the movie seems poised to draw dog-loving moviegoers like beagles to bacon. (New Yorker Films, the distributor, is doing grass-roots promotion to dog walkers, vets, pet food stores and bookstores; New York Review of Books Classics is reissuing the Ackerley book.)

But Mr. Fierlinger’s story could be a movie too — and was, actually, in his animated autobiographical 1995 film “Drawn From Memory.” The child of Czech diplomats, he was born in Japan, relocated to the United States as a youngster and then shipped to Czechoslovakia, where his uncle, Zdenek Fierlinger, became the country’s first postwar prime minister, while his father worked in the top echelons of the Soviet puppet government. A boarding-school classmate of Vaclev Havel’s and a member (at least geneaologically) of the ruling elite, Mr. Fierlinger fled to America shortly after his father’s death in 1967.

The Fierlingers use French software called TVPaint; the director Nina Paley, whose “Sita Sings the Blues” was a breakthrough in personalized computer animation, uses the more popular Flash.

“There are many ways to use Flash,” she said, “the most common being with ‘motion tweens’: creating a virtual puppet, and having Flash automatically move the pieces from place to place. That’s commonly called ‘cutout style.’ But you can also use Flash to draw every single frame from scratch if you want. I used a combination in ‘Sita’: mostly cutout style, but also some straight-ahead-style hand-drawing straight into the program.” She also “did some paintings on paper, which I scanned in.”

Not so at Chez Fierlinger, where the forward-thinking animators are cutting themselves loose not just from graphite and cameras but also from traditional avenues of financing and distribution: a children’s film they wanted to make — and are in fact making — centers on Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world solo. It was turned down for financing by the public-television production arm ITVS.

“We thought we could do whatever we wanted,” said Mr. Fierlinger, who is returning to his teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania this term. “Everything we’ve done for PBS has been a success. But they said, ‘We can’t see why children would want to watch this for an hour.’ ”

So they’re doing it in installments, like a graphic novel, and selling it online. “We realize we could do this all on the Internet, for the iPad or similar devices,” Mr. Fierlinger said. “We don’t need a distributor. We don’t even need actors. And the technology is developing so fast that by the time we’re done, there are things we’ll be using that people aren’t even talking about now.”

Computer Animation, Made by Hand, NYT, 27.8.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/movies/29tulip.html

'Beowulf' Defies Animation Label

November 16, 2007
Filed at 9:08 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The tagline for Disney's upcoming ''Enchanted'' could well be the motto for the latest push in animation: ''The real world and the animated world collide.''

Not simply colliding in the slapstick tradition of 1988's pioneering ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,'' but in the more fundamental sense of transforming actors into animated characters and vice versa.

The technique is seen in Charles Schwab TV ads and Richard Linklater's bomb from last year, ''A Scanner Darkly.'' Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are collaborating to make three comics-based movies blending performances with computer graphics.

The lines have been rendered so blurry that even close observers of the industry are asking what seems an easy question: What is animation?

The director of ''Roger Rabbit'' has created a film that challenges whatever your answer may be. Robert Zemeckis' ''Beowulf'' marries filmed actor performances, animation and special effects to create a unique, semi-but-not-quite-realistic look that many identify more with video games than movies.

On Friday, it arrives in IMAX and regular theaters nationwide, accompanied by 3-D glasses and the stamp of ''animation'' from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. ''Beowulf'' qualifies under Academy rules -- revised several months ago to require ''frame by frame'' work -- to compete for an Animated Feature Oscar against the likes of ''Ratatouille'' and the black-and-white 2-D Iranian film ''Persepolis.''

But because of its hybrid nature, few in the animation world expect it'll actually become one of the three nominees.

That possibility distresses traditional animators.

''It's a little bit odd when they're being put in the category competing in the same way for awards,'' said Kevin Koch, a longtime animator of DreamWorks films like ''Into the Hedge'' and ''Shrek 2.'' ''Some of us are kind of scratching our heads a bit.''

The intricate detail of ''Beowulf'' is what sets it apart, but it was created with a motion-capture process inherently similar to those used in recognizably cartoonish movies. Child actors overacted before a green screen to form the basis of last year's animated Oscar nominee ''Monster House,'' and dancer Savion Glover supplied the penguins' smooth moves for winner ''Happy Feet.''

There has been push-back. ''Ratatouille'' director Brad Bird, one of the most visible CG animation purists, is believed to be behind a good-natured jab at competitors following the credits on that film's DVD. A cartoon businessman is pictured smiling proudly as text proclaims the movie was made with ''100 percent genuine animation'' and ''no motion capture or any other performance shortcuts.''

''If you ask the average animator what they think, they'll tell you they don't think motion capture is animation,'' said Jimmy Hayward, an animator on ''Toy Story'' and other Pixar films.

Yet there have never been bright lines. The technique of rotoscoping -- capturing human movement in images and then tracing those into the cartoon world -- was invented by Max Fleisher in the 1910s and even incorporated into key early Disney cartoon features like 1937's ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.''

So what's the problem with that? And who are today's animators to talk, anyway? They long ago traded in pen and paper for customized computer rendering programs.

''The essence of caricaturing life is an art form, and it's its own art form,'' said Hayward, who is now directing an animated Dr. Seuss feature, ''Horton Hears a Who,'' due in March. ''Motion capture is outside of all the craft that goes into the other parts of it.''

''Most animators feel there's a charm to see a drawing come to life, or to see these computer puppets come to life, because they clearly exist in their own universe,'' said David Silverman, who directed the 2-D ''The Simpsons Movie.'' ''When what you're doing is trying to replicate life 100 percent, you could call it animation, but it's puzzling. I just sort of get puzzled.''

It should be said: The creators of ''Beowulf'' don't call it animation, nor do they intend to replicate real life.

''It's a new art form that is performance-based,'' producer Steve Starkey said, echoing comments Zemeckis made about his 2004 effort, ''The Polar Express'' (a performance-capture movie that had many traditional animators shuddering for its characters' lifeless eyes and stilted movements.)

''If one were to call it traditional animation, I think it would be a disservice to the brilliant animators of the like that worked on 'Roger Rabbit,' that brought those characters to life. I also think it would be a disservice to the performers like Ray Winstone, whose performance lives on-screen.''

Jerome Chen, visual effects supervisor for ''Beowulf,'' oversaw some 500 animators and worked on the project for three years. He argues that it should be included in the animation category.

''An artist still has to tune this software program. We use 3-D animation tools, but an animator still has to slave over key frames,'' Chen said. ''The computer program is really just a sophisticated brush in that sense.''

Chen said animators regularly tweaked the facial expressions or movements of actors depicted in the film.

Just don't try telling Winstone, who plays the title character, that somebody changed his acting. ''To me, I can't see where performances were changed,'' he said. ''We all played our parts.''

Winstone is credited on IMDB as the ''voice'' of Beowulf.

''No, I beg to differ. No way. That's a performance,'' he said. ''It wasn't just voice, believe me. I broke two ribs doing this film. Probably the most physical job I've ever done in my life on a film.''

Starkey predicts the familiarity of working primarily with actors will continue to draw high-profile filmmakers to performance-capture animation.

James Cameron is using the technique -- with advanced camera technology -- for his ''Avatar'' movie, coming in 2009. Spielberg and Jackson announced in May that they'd direct and produce three 3-D animated movies based on Belgian comic artist Georges Remi's adventuresome Tintin character.

''Both Steven and Bob (Zemeckis) love to be able to do things that in their mind's eye they could see but physically they couldn't accomplish,'' Starkey said. ''It's spreading.''

That's all well and good with traditional animators. They just wish there were more room for recognition of their work among Hollywood's elite. The Oscars animation category was created in 2001 and no animated film has ever won overall Best Picture.

''The problem is animation isn't considered in enough categories,'' Hayward said. ''With the amount of box office that CG animation represents, it's really ridiculous that we're all relegated to one category. ... It's about 15 years out of date, really.''

'Beowulf' Defies Animation Label, NYT, 16.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Film-Whats-Animation.html

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