Tag Archives: Alex Gibney

In Praise of the Longform Documentary

There is simply no narrative form that is quite as effective as an extended video or film exploration of a complex person or trend.

Our heads are now and too often cast down to small screens so we can read even smaller messages.  Sometimes it seems like we are spending our time looking at the equivalents of fortune cookie aphorisms.

We can do so much better.  The technology is there.  We just have to show an interest.

One of the more recent advances in our media is not particularly “digital” at all; it’s the rebirth of the longform documentary focusing on important histories and cultural trends.  It’s not an overstatement to note that the culture changed after CNN broadcast Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 83-minute documentary, Blackfish  in 2013.  More viewed it when it was distributed as a feature by Magnolia Pictures. Once people saw the trailer  they were drawn to the film.  Cowperthwaite put the issue of animal abuse front and center at the moment when the topic was at a cultural tipping point.

The prime advantage of most documentaries  are that they are inviting entry points into an important narrative. The subject could be popular a single musician, a saga about one family, or our financial system.  Diverse subjects have been explored with sensitivities to the people whose dreams have been realized or dashed by mostly systemic pressures that are not visible in shorter narratives.  Most are personal; documentary filmmakers understand that their focus needs to be on individuals with stories to tell and tough choices to make.  Many have also been trained to structure stories that are coherent even without an off-screen narrator.  That was once a novel mode of working, tried by Frederick Wiseman, which has since become the norm.

The longform documentary is sometimes still used by PBS, though they are often more enthusiastic about non-confrontational elements in the natural world.  And CBS once had a crack documentary unit headed up by Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, now just a distant memory, but recalled in the feature-length docudrama, Good night and Good Luck (2002).  Now it is mostly the larger streaming services and cable services that buy and schedule hard-hitting documentaries.  HBO, Showtime and Netflix are examples. To be sure, financing documentaries and selling them is still a rugged and difficult process for a filmmaker, even though shooting can now be done using more economical digital equipment.  We can thank a handful of dedicated professionals who have persevered–Alex Gibney, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Ken Burns, Michael Moore–among many others.

Here are a few favorites that are generally available for streaming and found with a simple Google search:

Working and Workers

  • American Factory (2019)
  • Roger and Me (1989)
  • The Last Truck (2009)
  • Last Train Home (2009)
  • Harlan County USA (1976)

Music

  • Jazz
  • Hitsville: The Making of Motown (2019)
  • Seymour: An Introduction (2015)
  • 20 feet from Stardom (2013)
  • Glen Campbell, I’ll be Me (2014)
  • Moon Over Broadway (1997)
  • The Last Waltz (1976)
  • Best Worst Thing That Could Have Happened (2016)
  • Woman of Heart and Mind (2003)

Politics, Culture and Society

  • Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
  • The Inventor (2019)
  • Alive Inside  (2010)
  • Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
  • Man on a Wire (2008)
  • The Fog of War (2003)
  • Sound and Fury (2000)
  • Hearts and Minds (1974)
  • An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
  • Gasland (2010)
  • Fyre (2019)
  • The War Room (1993)

There is simply no narrative form that is quite as effective as a well-made 90-minute exploration of a topic.  We are lucky that the form has never been more accessible.

Who Gets to Tell Our Story?

 

Frieze of Columbus in the New World, US Capitol
Frieze of Columbus and Indigenous Americans in the New    World, US Capitol Rotunda

 There is truth in the irony that our most cherished possession is not exclusively ours to own.

We think that our most precious possessions are the things we have acquired or the relationships we have.  But for many people the “right” to tell their own story looms just as large.  Narratives of our personal or tribal lives may be the keys to understanding who we are and where we came from.  But in fact they are not exclusively ours to tell.  We don’t have proprietary rights to our own personal histories.

This is both self-evident and enormously consequential.   It’s not just that we can’t easily agree even about the foundational stories about our collective past.  What Christopher Columbus or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln actually achieved will always involve contentious narratives.  We can also be unpleasantly surprised by accounts of ourselves offered even by friends or relatives.

It’s apparent that anyone can write someone else’s biography.  Even biographers who are out of favor with their subjects or never met them are frequently eager to weigh in with their own versions.  For example, we are presently surrounded by multiple narratives that recreate the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.  There’s Walter Isaacson’s 2011 best-selling biography (Steve Jobs, 2011) and the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin film based on it.  Both recognize Job’s  vision for turning computing into a necessary life skill.  And both portray a garage innovator with a knack for ingenious design and an inability to acknowledge his co-visionaries.  Then there’s Alex Gibney’s very different documentary (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, 2015) detailing a single-minded marketing genius reluctant to engage with the unpleasant facts surrounding the Chinese factories that produce Apple products.  Amazon currently lists about ten books on Jobs. The point is that we can count on each version to offer a different person to readers.

The same is true for groups that seek power or legitimacy in the larger culture by presenting what are sometimes very different accounts about their pasts and their aspirations.  What’s the story of Scientology? It depends on who you ask. How has the institutional life of Catholicism evolved since revelations of widespread child abuse were widely reported at the beginning of the new century?  Skeptics and admirers routinely compete for attention to relay their stories.  In many ways the fissures that are spread across the culture deepen over time, often expanding into complete fault lines as interested parties vie for media access to “get their story out.”

There’s a whole lexicon of useful terms to represent these divisions.  We talk not only about “narratives,” but also “contested narratives,”  “counter-narratives,” “preferred narratives,” “backstories,” “storylines,” “myths,” “legends,” “lore,” “rumors” and “histories” that are disputed as “more fiction than fact.”  Facebook champions an individual’s own preferred narrative: a kind of carefully constructed window display of one’s life. Most other digital outlets focusing on the culture of celebrity capture readers by taking a very different turn:  favoring counter-narratives and backstories.  Sometimes they are even true.

Novelists who would seem to have the advantage of exclusive use of the products of their imagination are inclined to end up in tangles of their own making when readers find possible connections to the writer’s biography.  Readers can also be unforgiving if a scribe borrows another’s particularly traumatic narrative.  A few years ago the prolific Joyce Carol Oates came under criticism in New Jersey for embellishing on a news story about a college student found dead in a campus garbage container. The short story, Landfill, was published in the New Yorker, to the chagrin of the student’s family and others in the region.

For all of our hope that our stories can be communicated in ways that bring us the credit we seek, the fact is that we can never claim rights to exclusivity.  Ask anyone who has recently been in the news how well their views have been represented or how they were characterized. You are apt to get a response of mild frustration.  What we see in ourselves is probably not what those who retell our stories are going to report.  For individuals or groups without power this is sad to witness. Groups lose something basic when they lack the means to communicate their preferred narratives.  The rest of us battle on, even occasionally discovering a narrative that gives us far more credit than we deserve.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu

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