[Leica] Seriously, folks (long).

["Johnny Deadman" <deadman@jukebox.demon.co.uk>]

Not a word about underwear in this post, I promise.

All the talk about restaging & interference in accident scenes etc. prompts
me to decloak and give you another perspective on this. For the last nine
years I have been a documentary filmmaker (switched careers in April to
writing), which I came to from documentary photography.

There has been a lot of controversy in the UK over 'faked' documentaries in
the last year... much of it involving people I know and respect and have
worked with. Some of them lost their jobs. But it reflects a real dichotomy
in attitudes to what is ethical, which I wanted to tell you about.

As a doc photographer or photojournalist, I always took the view that I
should NEVER fiddle with reality... to the extent that I found it hard to
take portraits because I felt awkward about asking people to do particular
things... I wanted to be that proverbial fly-on-the-wall (unless I was doing
Bill Klein street shots and trying to provoke a reaction with a flash or
something...yeah, I got hit once).

However, when I moved over into filmmaking, I was astonished to find that
almost exactly the opposite ethic prevailed. Most, if not all, cameramen I
worked with (and they were the best in the business) felt no compunction at
all about rearranging a scene to make it look better... those medical papers
fluttering in the foreground of the demolished hospital, you know the kind
of thing.

Moreover, even in 'fly on the wall' documentaries, a HUGE proportion of the
footage you see is restaged, if not entirely staged. I can say this now,
because I'm not in the business any more, but if you ask anyone still in the
business they will deny it completely. Yes, it is a conspiracy...of silence.
Why do you think you never see fly-on-the-wall documentaries about the
making of fly-on-the-wall documentaries? People have this idea all the time,
but no-one ever gives them access. Why? No filmmaker would be stupid enough
to open themselves up in this way.

The reason for this elision of reality is very simple: time & money. You
have to come back with a movie. If you need a particular sequence to make it
work, you will get it. Until you have experienced the stress of being a
producer/director, responsible for several hundred thousand dollars worth of
investment, knowing you have to produce a rough cut for the exec producer in
four weeks, you can have no idea of the pressures involved. "We didn't get
it" is one of those phrases that you only utter once in your professional
career, if you see what I mean.

Ethically speaking, most people I know in documentary regard it as
unproblematic to restage a scene which genuinely took place, or even stage a
scene which usually would take place, or which is helpful for the narrative.
You've seen this kind of thing over and over: the deputy gets on the radio
to the medical examiner, or reports back to his boss, or discusses what to
do next... often when it's bleeding obvious what should be done next.

Before I get flamed to death here, let me point out probably the most
obvious example of demonstrably faked footage in existence. This is the
motion picture film of trench warfare in WWI. I have been through thousands
of feet of this footage (obtained from the London Imperial War Museum) on an
editing bench while making a number of historical films. Almost all of it -
whether filmed by Brits, French or Germans - is faked. The dead giveaway is
the camera position -- several feet ABOVE the trench parapet. These babies
were handcranked. Just feet away from the camera position soldiers are
'dying' as bullets allegedly hit them. If you go through the footage frame
by frame, it is obvious they are not being hit, but just falling down.
Besides, in the time it took to get the camera into position and shout
action, the operator would have been picked off by the opposition.

In fact, historians have investigated the footage and their research shows
that much of it was shot in trenches some way back from the front line, or
not in the field of combat at all. Some of it was even shot in practise
trenches in England, though I have to say this stuff is very unconvincing
when you look at it with the slightest closeness.

What little real combat footage there is from WWI has an entirely different
quality from the 'going over the top' stuff you are probably familiar with.
For a start, it is shot at ground level, with the lens just poking over the
top of the trench. Half the frame is filled with mud, and it is almost
unframed because the operator was cranking with his eye away from the finder
to avoid getting his head blown off. The soldiers who are running into
no-man's land are doing so in obvious terror and disorder. The whole thing
is suffused with panic, quite rightly so. The quality is shitty as hell, all
grain and chalk/soot tonality, because the light levels were so low (who'd
attack in broad daylight?) and there is also very, very little of it for
obvious reasons.

(Similarly with the D-Day landings: the well-known ruined Capa shots have
the same quality).

In fact, the most authentic WWI footage comes not from the trenches but from
the treatment stations several miles back from the front line, where the
horribly wounded soldiers were taken back to be pieced together or die.
There is lots of this footage, and not a frame of it I have seen is faked,
except some cheerful stuff with officers. The rest of it is horrible and
harrowing. You can see that some of the troops have gone mad with fear or
pain or shock. Elsewhere, there are great crowds of troops staring blankly
at the camera, numb with exhaustion. They look like lost souls.

But were these cameramen who shot the images we now carry in our collective
unconscious of, for example, the first day of the Somme in July 1916,
'faking'? Should they be condemned? I don't think so. Undoubtedly, they
wished to convey pictorially what was happening before their eyes. Yet if
they had filmed the real stuff, they would have been killed. What good would
that have done? When you see the other stuff they shot, you realise they
were good, honest documentarians (very often). They weren't trying to make
it look 'nice'. They were just doing the only thing they could to make
pictures that would transmit information to the folks in cinemas back home
whose sons and fathers were being blown to bits for reasons that were
becoming less and less clear as the war dragged on.

My point: reportage is a dirty business but somebody's got to do it.
Silence, or the visual equivalent, is not always an option -- nor should it
be. Therefore, while I feel as betrayed as the next person when something
with claims to authenticity turns out to be inauthentic, there is another
point of view.

Returning to the Iwo Jima/Capa soldier issue -- whatever the facts are, it
would not surprise or particularly disturb me to learn that the Iwo Jima
shot was staged, or restaged, or whatever you want to call it. We know that
the flag was indeed raised and in any case this picture is so full of
political content (the similarities to Soviet propaganda of the time are
striking) that you can hardly see it without beginning to decode it. But if
the Capa soldier were faked, that would disgust me. That picture clearly
works because it claims to show the moment of death... if it doesn't, then
it is a confidence trick, pure and simple.

That's my gut opinion, anyway. I hope I have muddied the waters a little...
in my opinion, anyone who pretends they aren't muddy hasn't drunk deep
enough of them.

- --
Johnny Deadman <--- pseudonym, by the way, if you hadn't guessed