During my Masters degree in film, I amused myself by trying to make out that The Blair Witch Project was more of a documentary than Nanook of the North, generally considered to be the first film in the genre. Here's the resultant essay.
How far is The Blair Witch Project more of a documentary than Nanook Of The North?
Grierson’s definition of the documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ seems to have been a particularly unsuccessful one, considering the amount of frustrated debate it has led to in the decades since. What does that phrase actually mean? What kind of film is it proposing the filmmaker should produce? Firstly, there is the question of ‘actuality’; how far is that just taken to mean what one sees with one’s eyes – the simple occurrence – and how far is it meant in the ‘philosophical’ sense – the inner reality or essence of an event? Even if one accepts the conclusion that by ‘actuality’, Grierson meant the common sense notion of ‘what is’, then what does he mean by suggesting that that reality be ‘creatively treated’? Surely the more a filmmaker imposes his own creative vision, the more an objective representation of reality is compromised. The question, then, for the documentarist is how much actuality can be creatively treated before the status of the film as a documentary is called into question.
One way of answering this question may be to turn it on its head and ask ‘How much can fiction be realistically treated before it stops becoming fiction?’ And as a way of exploring that idea, it’s beneficial to look at two films that have strangely book-ended the life of the documentary so far. The first is Nanook Of The North, Robert Flaherty’s portrait of the Eskimo people and their struggle to survive in a hostile climate which is generally taken to be the first documentary ever made. The second film is one which on first sight would appear to be its polar opposite, The Blair Witch Project, a modern horror movie built up of ‘fake’ documentary fragments. It would seem an incongruous pairing if it weren’t for the fact that both are fictions. For Nanook was not the real name of the protagonist of Flaherty’s film, nor was the life portrayed therein one that was really experienced by that protagonist. Instead, the whole documentary was a reconstruction of customs practiced by the Eskimos years before the actual filming, one in which the Eskimos themselves were complicit. For, despite their portrayal on screen as simple, hardy folk, behind camera, they were busy cutting Flaherty’s film for him. ‘Nanook’ himself was constantly advising his director on more exciting material they could film; after the success of their walrus hunt, an attack on the lair of a she-bear might thrill their viewers even more.
Thus, the subjects of Flaherty’s documentary were well aware of what he was creating – a spectacle for an intrigued audience – and were engaged as much as he in the ‘construction’ of an Eskimo’s life. Is there not as much falsehood here as in the collaboration between the directors and actors of The Blair Witch Project? Both projects are ‘hiding’ that falsehood – and with similar strategies.
Flaherty’s film opens with a title screen acknowledging ‘the kindliness, faithfulness and patience’ of Nanook and his family in the making of the picture. As William Rothman has noted, this caption operates not just as a thank you but as an indirect affirmation of the film’s veracity. It defines the people within the film as ‘real’, as having a life outside the film, one which they compromised in order for the film to be made. This affirmation of reality reinforces the following titles on the ‘Barren lands’ of the North and the ‘fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo’, despite their rather fanciful tone. Flaherty follows these titles with a close, frontal shot of Nanook himself; he is doing nothing and is facing away from the camera. The straightforwardness of the shot seeks to underline the genuine nature of its subject in contrast to the entrances of characters in fictional films. His ‘ignorance’ of the camera suggests a life caught on film.
Compare this opening to that of The Blair Witch Project. A bare, black-and-white title tells us how three students disappeared and this is what’s left of their footage; its presentation and direct language appeal to our sense of truthfulness. The opening shot comprises the blurry tracking of a video camera until it homes in on its subject – Heather, the director of her own documentary on the Blair Witch. As with Nanook, the framing is blunt and straightforward; a full length shot facing straight towards camera. But here, there is a crucial difference. Heather addresses the camera; she openly acknowledges her awareness of its presence. And in this slight but significant difference between the two openings is the record of a sea change that has taken place in documentary thinking.
For the modern documentary has largely turned its back on the idea of an ‘agreement’ between filmmaker and audience that what is seen is real.
Increasingly, the filmmakers have acknowledged their own presence as an assurance of reality. This was the spur behind the verite filmmakers of the ‘60s, who used hand-held camera equipment and sync sound to get away from the reconstruction necessary with previous film equipment. In freeing them to film incidents where and when they happened, such equipment gave the verite filmmakers, as they saw it, a more honest means of representation and the acknowledgement of their own presence was a further extension of that. By opening with this shot and sustaining a verite style throughout the film, the directors of The Blair Witch Project are profiting from the success of these new conventions of representing reality. Intriguingly, their alter egos - the makers of the
film-within-the-film – also demonstrate that they are savvy about modern documentary technique. At one point, Mike, the soundman, asks why Heather is filming them going to bed on camera. She replies that they are making a documentary. In other words, their process of making the film is part of the film itself.
So the modern documentary could be said to posit an honesty about the mode of production as the foremost assurance of truthfulness. In this way, the Blair Witch
film-within-the-film could be said to be more authentic than Nanook Of The North.
But Heather’s acknowledgment of the camera also provides another clue as to why
The Blair Witch Project may be further removed from fiction than Nanook Of The North. Rothman points out that Nanook’s deliberate ignorance of the camera recalls the relationship between camera and actor in a fiction film. Here, both the camera and the actor in question are real, physical presences and they establish a relationship in terms of movement and the conveyance of action. But part of that relationship consists of the actor’s deliberate denial of the camera’s presence; he or she treats it as an ‘absence’ while it seeks to deny their reality as an actor, conferring upon them wholly the status of the character they play. In other words, the fiction film seeks to deny the reality of the relationship between camera and actor. In this way, Rothman arrives at the
(mind-boggling) conclusion that ‘what is fictional about a fiction film resides in its fiction that it is only a fiction.’ In having Nanook behave the same way as an actor in a fictional film, Flaherty is concealing the relationship between him and the camera, too. Rothman does identify one point in Nanook Of The North where the Eskimo directly confronts the camera – when he is eating the walrus after the hunt – but otherwise Nanook steadfastly ignores it. In contrast, the actors in The Blair Witch Project are perpetually addressing the camera. Furthermore, as each person’s camera becomes synonymous with their view of events, the equipment itself becomes an extension of their personalities. The symbiosis of filmmaker (or observer) and their means of representation is complete.
As well as the filmmaker/camera person, another key figure in the making of a documentary is the editor. It was the very structuring of ‘raw material’ into a narrative form that led to Nanook Of The North being considered the first documentary. Both Nanook Of The North and The Blair Witch Project have ‘invisible’ editors. In the former’s case, these editors take the form of the Eskimos themselves working under Flaherty’s direction. But The Blair Witch Project’s editor is an unknown quantity, someone who has simply assimilated the ‘evidence’ within the three teenagers’ cameras into an intelligible form. Both films seek to disguise and emasculate this editor’s input yet it could be argued that Nanook Of The North’s method is more objectionable. For, even if we admit the fictional nature of the Blair Witch story, the footage that comprises the film is ‘genuine’; it was taken by the actors in question, it does portray three teenagers (the actors used their own names) camping in the woods with their own equipment and food and it does show them being scared by unseen forces (the actors seldom knew what the directors were doing). The filmmakers are disguising the editor’s attempt to make the film more exciting and narratively cogent, but that is the sum total of the relationship of the editor to his footage. Whereas in Nanook Of The North, on many occasions, the subjects of the footage are operating as their own editors. They are thus consciously denying one aspect of their relationship to the footage and by doing so, deceiving the audience as to their status within the film as a whole.
So The Blair Witch Project could be said, in many ways, to be closer to the spirit of the documentary than its earlier counterpart. And yet, at the same time, it undermines the very definitions of documentary itself. In terms of content – at least diegetic content – it can be argued that The Blair Witch Project shows nothing false. The actors were genuinely sent out tramping in the woods for a week and the various phenomena they encounter are made up of concrete external stimuli (sounds, rocks, twigs, etc.) There are no special effects and no interpolated characters. In this sense, the actual visual record of a documentary – which can be called, for the sake of argument, its content – is no guarantee of authenticity. As cameraman Josh himself remarks in The Blair Witch Project, seeing events through the camera – or, for the audience, on screen – is ‘not quite reality’, it’s more of a ‘filtered reality.’ A very apt description of Nanook Of The North itself.
This conclusion therefore also drags the definition of documentary through form into question. For, no matter how sophisticated or simplistic the filmmaking equipment may be and no matter how much the ‘real event’ may be reconstructed or filmed ad hoc, the end result can still be fake. The conventions by which verite filmmakers – or their Direct Cinema counterparts – sought to define the documentary can be turned just as easily to suit the telling of a fictional story. Neither content nor form can separate The Blair Witch Project from the documentary field or mark it as more fictional than Flaherty’s Nanook Of The North.
And yet, in the final analysis, The Blair Witch Project will always be found under the horror or drama section of the local video store and Nanook Of The North underneath documentary or non-fiction film. Is this due to prejudice about the content of each film? Have we bought Flaherty’s claims for his film, without investigating the foundations of those claims? Certainly, it is clear that Nanook Of The North is only a ‘filtered reality’, but it is Flaherty’s very claims for that reality that may mark it as different from
The Blair Witch Project. For, while the latter film tries to create the impression of verisimilitude – and its authors have had a lot of fun trying to keep up this hoax – it never really expects to be taken as the record of a real experience. Nanook Of The North does.
The opening titles appeal to our recognition of the Eskimos as participants in the film and self-reflexively point to the film as an artefact, not as the ‘casing’ of a story:
‘This picture concerns the life of one Nanook (The Bear), his family and little band of followers… through whose kindliness, faithfulness and patience this film was made.’
[My italics]
The characters in this film are the same as those making it; thus the ‘life’ represented is meant to be taken for real - as opposed to the life of Scarlett O’Hara, for example. The titles leading into The Blair Witch Project also try to lead the audience into taking the characters for real and also refer to the film as an artefact , it being made up of ‘footage’ that was discovered. But at the end of the film, the traditional credits of the fiction film roll onto the screen; the hoax is laid bare and the ‘casing’ of a fictional story overrides any sense of verisimilitude. Furthermore, Flaherty’s claim for the real is reinforced by what underpins his film, what acts as the guide for its structure. Normally, in a fiction film, this guide is the script – the plot, pattern of incidents, character development, etc. This motivates what is shot, the shooting style and the editing scheme used. In Nanook Of The North, this guide is Nanook’s own life, or at least how Flaherty visualised the Eskimo’s life. There is no pre-fabricated plot as such; the film is made up of various shards of material shaped into a cohesive structure. It is the pattern of real events, not fictional ones, that determines the film’s form.
The scripted pattern of The Blair Witch Project itself is the process by which a documentary is being created. Thus, it could be said that the film indirectly defines the way in which it is customarily agreed that documentaries are made; therefore, by extension, it defines the elements required to make a documentary complete. One of these elements is research. The film begins with a series of interviews with local residents, who reveal various aspects of the Blair Witch myth. It is this recognition of the necessity for research in the documentary tradition which ultimately undermines The Blair Witch Project’s status as a documentary. For the background story which the directors create is necessarily fictional and thus the people behind its exposition – the interviewees – must also be false. Lying behind the artefact that is The Blair Witch Project is no foundation of real events, but a made-up story.
Nanook Of The North, on the other hand, is based on scenes or events experienced by Flaherty – he had spent months with the Eskimos during his mining exploration – or on the knowledge of the Eskimos themselves. Lying behind this film is a store of observation and notation of real-life phenomena. In 1943, Humphrey Jennings would make Fires Were Started, a reconstruction of a fire during the Blitz, an event which had taken place a year or so previously. The film was scripted and conceived like a fictional narrative, with well-known devices being employed like the ‘new boy’ amongst
a tight-knit group of professionals and the death of a trusted colleague. The fire in question was created by the director and crew and the reason for its significance – the proximity of a munitions ship - was entirely fictional. In the face of such evidence, it would be possible to accuse Fires Were Started, like Nanook Of The North,
of being a purely fictional construction. Jennings himself was aware of this and, as Brian Winston has pointed out, he and his fellow documentarists of the time ‘sought to legitimise their scripts or treatments by tying them to this complex process of research’. [My italics] Jennings appealed to the sense of ‘prior witness’; he, or other eye witnesses, had seen the kind of phenomena recorded in the film. His researches ‘included much time spent in various fire-stations around London.’ Furthermore, the actors he used were genuine firefighters who also brought their own experience and knowledge of detail to the parts. Underlying the whole production is a wealth of background information taken from real sources. It is this sense of ‘prior witness’ that informs Flaherty’s film; like Jennings, he has done a great deal of research on his subject and the protagonists of his film are the very same ones who have lived through the filmic experiences in real life.
So, while the visual content and form of a film cannot be said to define it as a documentary, it is the very claims for authenticity that do most to draw a boundary between fiction and non-fiction film. In short, it is not the film itself which is distinguishable from its opposite, but the context in which it is presented. If a film is presented as a depiction of reality and that everything therein is based on real phenomena, then it can lay fair claim to being a documentary. This means that the argument for on-the-spot filming as opposed to reconstruction is more valuable in terms of aesthetics – how close that style gets to the truth – than it is in terms of defining the documentary. Ultimately, the answer to the question ‘How far can actuality be creatively treated?’ is ‘As much as you want’. For, the claims for reality, the context in which that creative treatment is presented, will still define it as documentary. If a film is pitched as real, it will largely be accepted as such. Whereas a fiction film can try as hard as it can to replicate the patterns and appearance of non-fiction, but if the back story is so much make-believe, it will never be considered as real. For this reason, The Blair Witch Project could never be considered a documentary while Nanook Of The North, for all its similarities to fictional narratives, could justifiably be described as a non-fiction film.