 Starring: Aileen Wuornos, Nick Broomfield
Director: Nick Broomfield
Year Of Release: 1992
Plot: Documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield travels to Florida to make a film about female serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who killed seven men in the space of only a year. Now on death row, Broomfield recounts what got Wuornos to this point in her life, while also looking into how everyone from her lawyer, to her adoptive mother, to the police is trying to use her to make money, with Nick even being asked for $25,000 for an interview with the killer. |
Documentaries generally seem to be fairly straightforward things. You film something that’s happened, maybe use some archive footage and talking head interviews and tell a ‘true’ story, but of course it’s actually a lot more complex than that. As the Movie-A-Day Project now has two documentaries by Nick Broomfield about Aileen Wuornos in a row, I thought it might be worth taking a quick look at the problems of telling the truth in documentaries, starting off with how even deciding how to make your documentary alters how ‘truthful’ it is, and the arguments that rage over the most honest ways of making documentaries.
Nick Broomfield, director of Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, is well known for appearing in his own films. It’s led some to claim that his documentaries are often more about him than the subject (an accusation that’s also been thrown at others who appear in their own documentaries, such as Michael Moore). However from him perspective it’s not about Broomfield’s ego (well, it might be a bit, but that’s not the main reason), it’s partly about him saying where he stands in a debate that’s gone on for decades about ‘honest’ documentary filmmaking.
One of the problems with documentaries is that unlike narrative films, they say to the audience, ‘this is the truth, this actually happened.’ But how true is that? The director of a documentary decides what footage to use and what not to use, whether to have a voiceover and what that says. They can lead the viewers in particular directions while ignoring other aspects of the subject (and some documentary makers are more open about doing this than others), and they can decide what order to tell the story in, which can profoundly alter how an audience reacts to it emotionally. As a result there’s been a lot of debate over what the most truthful type of documentary making is, and whether any documentary fimmaking style can really be said to 100% honest.
In the late 50s and early 60s, the idea of direct cinema and cinema verite (literally cinema of truth) emerged, which suggested that the best way tell the truth was simply by filming something and showing it to the viewer without voiceover, interviews or anything that got in the way of just letting people see what happened. The likes of Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker made films that simply consisted of footage they’d shot and nothing else, and they do indeed seem very honest.
However, as many people have suggested, the ‘cinema of truth’ isn’t necessarily as honest as it first seems. For example, it’s still the edited highlights, so while the director seems to be saying ‘this is exactly what happened’, what they actually mean is, ‘these are edited highlights of events that I happened to film, which have been put together to tell a particular story in a particular way’. It’s also a style that tends to deny that training a camera on somebody has any effect at all. Of course, just putting a camera in a room effects what happens, whether it’s people being more careful about what they say, or showing off, or deliberately trying to make sure that the filmmaker only sees certain aspects of their personality.
While all that would seem to suggest cinema verite is pretty deceitful in its claims to be the ‘cinema of truth’, in many respects it is more honest than a lot of documentary making. By not trying to effect the events being filmed (other than inadvertently), or having artificial devices like talking heads and voiceovers to try and force the audience into thinking about what they’re seeing in particular ways, the filmmaker is limited to things that actually happened. Unlike many documentaries there’s no recreation or interpretation (other than through editing) to artificially push the audience in particular direction. While it may be the edited highlights, it is a record of exactly what happened, left to the audience to interpret, which can certainly be argued to be a far more honest approach than documentaries that explicitly try to steer the viewer’s thoughts.
Broomfield on the other hand comes from an almost opposite tradition. His sort of investigative journalism basically holds its hands up and admits that the sheer act of training a camera on something is going to affect it. Having Broomfield on camera and narrating allows him to tell the audience how the documentary came about, the limits placed on it by budget, access to interview subjects and most importantly that rather than it just happening to be things that were filmed, it’s somebody being open about the fact that they went out and decided what to train their camera on, what archive footage they wanted to use and what story they want to tell.
In many respects, despite Broomfield occasionally being rather annoying, it’s a pretty honest way of doing things. However there’s a problem. At the end of Aileen: The Selling Of A Serial Killer, you may know the truth about how the film came to exist, but you’re left with a seeming contradiction – the way it’s made seems honest (although some say Broomfield more trick than it appears he does), but the documentary maker is basically casting doubt on any ‘truth’ they turn up about the subject by highlighting the artifice of both how documentaries tend to be made and also the sheer fact that if there hadn’t been a camera there, what it documents would never have happened and that the people in the movie may not be 100% honest.
The Selling Of A Serial Killer is fairly open about this, but it just goes to show that both these extremes of documentary filmmaking style highlight the essential problem with telling ‘true stories’. The more you suggest you’re showing the unbrushed truth about a subject, the more you have to deny the effect the filmmaker has on both what they filmed and how it’s presented to the audience. Conversely the more upfront you are about the actual filmmaking process, the further away the ‘truth’ of the movie’s subject seems, as everything you see and hear is revealed to be somewhat unreliable .
Most documentaries sit somewhere in between these two extreme, but all have to negotiate the fact that while documentaries are supposed to reveal some sort of truth, there’s no agreement on what being truthful means in documentaries. As a result all of them are in some ways a balancing act between being honest in their filmmaking style (although as we’ll see tomorrow, some aren’t very honest on this score at all) and on the other hand trying to present the most truthful look at the subject they can, based on their perception of it. Unfortunately there is no way to make a 100% honest documentary, but that won’t stop documentary makers experimenting with way they can try to be honest about both the making of the film and the subject it’s talking about.
TIM ISAAC
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