RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
Authenticity in "Documentary"
Lewis Jacobs's unique anthology of criticism and reportage,
The Docu–
mentary Tradition
(1971), has a phrase attributed to John Grierson, "the
creative treatment of actuality," that makes one wonder about that
curious adjective "creative," granting as it does a license not only for
slickness and propaganda in film but even for lying and self-delusion. I
recently saw a string of "documentaries" purportedly about Germany
immediately after World War Two. In these late 1940s films, which are
filled with optimism about rebuilding the defeated nation with the aid of
the Marshall Plan and thus neglectful of such post-World War Two
hardships as food rationing, what is really documented, we can safely say
forty years later, is the Allied mentality of the time. What is essentially
documented in the more familiar example of Leni Reifenstahl's
Triumph
oj
the Will
(1936) is not Germany in 1935 but the generation of a col–
lective fantasy.
The contrary adjective is "authentic ." It follows that a documen–
tarian, as distinct from a propagandist, should make his or her produc–
tion de cisions for reasons of authenticity. In a twenty-one-minute film
recen tly made about pre-World War Two Berlin as represented in the
surviving great Jewish cemetery, my partner, Martin Koerber, and I stuck
to our theme - the cemetery as an evocation of a lost world - and
thereby eschewed a lot of "creative" moves, some of them quite fashion–
able in documentary filmmaking. If the cemetery now was our subject
and visual archaeology our theme, we dec ided it would be inauthenti c
for us to show anything else, even pictures of the place at times past.
For the soundtrack, we recorded the voices of Berliners talking
about the Weissensee Cemetery and the world represented there. To
show these people now would be inauthentic, not only because it
would be false to allow them to upstage the cemetery but also because,
as these Berliners are talking about themselves at times past, it would be
false to show them as they look now. It would be falser to resort to the
convention, " fundable" though it might be, of introducing a celebrity–
narrator who had nothing at all to do with the subject.
For instan ce, most
Krista llnacht
documentaries, by focusing upon
talking heads, miss the opportunity unique to film to create a kinetic
