A Journey Through Documentary Film E-Book

Luke Dormehl

• Herausgeber: Kamera Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 232

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Documentary is one of the most fascinating areas of filmmaking. Documentaries have broken down societal taboos, changed legislation, strengthened and rocked entire governments, freed wrongly-convicted prisoners, and taught us more about the world in which we live. A Journey Through Documentary Film offers an overview of documentary history, taking readers from the early 'actualities' of pioneering non-fiction filmmakers such as Robert J. Flaherty and John Grierson, to the documentaries of Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, and the directors dominating the field (and box office) today. An essential resource for film students, documentary buffs, filmmakers and anyone interested in non-fiction film, it looks in-depth at over 60 documentaries from around the world, covering a century of cinema, to illustrate what 'documentary' means, and the changes and transitions that have occurred in non-fiction filmmaking over the years. Covering films such as Nanook of the North, Night Mail, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity, F for Fake, The Thin Blue Line, Hoop Dreams, Fahrenheit 9/11, Grizzly Man, Man on Wire and Exit Through the Gift Shop, amongst many others, each analysis includes an introductory synopsis, as well as detailed notes on the film's production history, filmmaker, unique innovations, construction, and key themes and issues.

Leseprobe

Documentary is one of the most fascinating areas of filmmaking. Documentaries have broken down societal taboos, changed legislation, strengthened and rocked entire governments, freed wrongly-convicted prisoners, and taught us more about the world in which we live.

A Journey Through Documentary Film offers an overview of documentary history, taking readers from the early ‘actualities’ of pioneering non-fiction filmmakers such as Robert J. Flaherty and John Grierson, to the documentaries of Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, and the directors dominating the field (and box office) today.

An essential resource for film students, documentary buffs, filmmakers and anyone interested in non-fiction film, it looks in-depth at over 60 documentaries from around the world, covering a century of cinema, to illustrate what ‘documentary’ means, and the changes and transitions that have occurred in non-fiction filmmaking over the years.

Covering films such as Nanook of the North, Night Mail, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity, F for Fake, The Thin Blue Line, Hoop Dreams, Fahrenheit 9/11, Grizzly Man, Man on Wire and Exit Through the Gift Shop, amongst many others, each analysis includes an introductory synopsis, as well as detailed notes on the film’s production history, filmmaker, unique innovations, construction, and key themes and issues.

About the Author

Luke Dormehl is a journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker. His films have appeared on Channel 4 and played in prestigious film festivals around the world, from Cannes to Rushes, garnering praise from luminaries such as Ken Loach, Louis Theroux and Simon Callow. His writing has appeared extensively in dozens of online and print publications.

Luke Dormehl

A JOURNEY THROUGH DOCUMENTARY FILM

www.kamerabooks.com

Dedicated to Tom Verran, who first suggested that these documentary things seem fairly interesting.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks go out first and foremost to Hannah Patterson, whose unending enthusiasm for documentary and replying to late-night editorial queries was nothing short of inspirational. In addition I am indebted to a number of people who have helped me along the way: Tom Atkinson, my tireless producer on several tremendous documentaries (and many more in the future); Chris Bell; Philip Bird; James Brzezicki; Simon Callow; George Chignell of Passion Pictures; Jeff Feuerzeig; Simon Garfield; Alex Gibney; Dr Thomas Green; my agent Margaret Hanbury of the Hanbury Agency; Terry James; Graham Jones of Underleaf Studios; David Lassman; Andrew Lincoln; Richard Luck; Tim Matts; Nick Newport; Hans Petch; Tim Plester; Nick Setchfield; Michael Teh; Louis Theroux; Andre and Nathan Trantraal; and Colin Wyatt. Grazie also to my significant other, Clara, and members of my family.

CONTENTS

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1. The Hammer and the Mirror: An Essay on Documentary and Truth

2. A Note on Film Selection

3. Essayistic Documentaries

4. Participatory Documentaries

5. Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

6. Fly-on-the-wall Documentaries

Copyright

‘THE HAMMER AND THE MIRROR’ An Essay on Documentary and Truth

In February 1926 an article appeared in the New York Sun, penned by an apparently anonymous critic referred to only as ‘The Moviegoer’. The item was a review of Moana, the newest film from director Robert Joseph Flaherty, concerning the lives of the native Polynesian people of Samoa. The Moviegoer was impressed by what he saw; in particular the rugged cinematography, which favoured real locations over artificial sets, and the emphasis on non-fiction detail over any manner of contrived plot. The film’s poster advertised Moana as a ‘true picture-romance of life and love in the South Seas’ and an ‘intimate drama of life’, but The Moviegoer decided to describe it as something else, in a concerted effort to get audiences to plonk down their hard-earned 30¢ to see this important film in the cinema. ‘Moana,’ he wrote, ‘being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth, has documentary value.’

It didn’t work. As it turned out Moana – the first film in cinema history to be recognised as a documentary upon its release – was a flop at the box office, despite Jesse L Lasky of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (the company which would later be rechristened Paramount Pictures) writing Flaherty what effectively amounted to a blank cheque to travel anywhere in the world to shoot the film. Flaherty spent ‘20 months’ patient work’ filming Moana, and a further year editing it, but he had been unable to find what he was looking for. Despite hearing promising rumours that a giant octopus was terrorising the people of Samoa, who he imagined to be natives untouched by Western civilisation, he instead discovered an island population – frustratingly free of sea monsters – lorded over by a man that referred to himself as the King of Savai’i, who entertained the locals by singing opera. Needless to say, this wasn’t what Flaherty, nor audiences back home, had hoped for.

Flaherty’s relationship with documentary is a fascinating one (which I elaborate on further in my discussion of his famous 1922 film Nanook of the North on page 35). The Moviegoer, too, would go on to play a large role in the form’s early cinematic development. Under his real name of John Grierson, he returned home to the United Kingdom in the late 1920s and became one of the founding fathers of the British documentary movement, as both filmmaker and theorist. His description of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ is still one of the form’s most enduring, and satisfactory, definitions.

So what is documentary? Grierson himself admitted that the term was ‘a clumsy description’. Ask a room full of film students what constitutes documentary and you may well get a dozen different answers, many dealing with the varying aesthetics of documentary filmmaking. One definition that is likely to reach a consensus agreement, however, is that documentaries deal with truth. Documentaries present reality, populated by real people, real places and real events. When we, the audience, watch a documentary we are watching a film that addresses the world in which we live, as opposed to a world imagined by the filmmaker. But while this description may meet with the Webster’s Unabridged dictionary description of documentary as a motion picture or television production ‘based on or re-creating an actual event, era, life story, etc, that purports to be factually accurate and contains no fictional elements: a documentary life of Gandhi’ this definition carries intrinsic problems.

THE TRAIN VERSUS THE ROCKET: DOCUMENTARY & THE REAL

At its most fundamental level, the notion of film-truth comes down to the misconception that the camera does not lie: perhaps an acceptable fallacy in 1895 when cinema-related technologies were still new, but one that is inexcusable in today’s postmodern climate. The apparent contradiction at the heart of documentary filmmaking is that it is intrinsically a subjective, overtly manipulated medium which nonetheless aims to, or is expected to, reveal some ultimate truth. This paradox can be reduced to a matter of semantics: the confusion of reality with truth on the part of documentary readers, or an impossible correlation being drawn between relative truth (conforming to language, cultural, ethical boundaries, and to the abilities of the filmmaker) and an absolute truth. When Grierson first applied the word ‘documentary’ to Moana, he was purloining a term used to describe still photography and applying it to cinema. Documentary photographers take images of real life but, much like their cinema counterparts, nowhere is there a tacit guarantee of truth. Who are they photographing? Which lens did they use? How did they elect to frame their image? Why were these decisions taken? All of these questions inform their work, both in conscious and subconscious execution and reading.

For the sake of pleasing simplicity, some critics have traditionally chosen to trace filmmaking’s dual tracts back to the apparently opposing ideologies of two of cinema’s early pioneering practitioners, Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Georges Méliès. The Lumière brothers are seen as epitomising documentary, or non-fiction, filmmaking; with their most recognised film being the 50-second single, unedited take of a steam locomotive arriving into a train station in the French coastal town of La Ciotat, in the film Train Pulling into a Station (1895). Méliès, on the other hand, stands in stark contrast, as cinema’s first magician, with his most associated image being that of a miniature rocket ship speeding towards a papier-mâché moon, in his groundbreaking science fiction A Trip to the Moon (1902). Divides are rarely that straightforward or neat – as proves the case here. The reality is that both the Lumière and Méliès camps, as well as many of their filmmaking contemporaries, utilised elements in their practice which fall under Grierson’s description of the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. The fact that it would take more than 30 years for a retroactive fiction/non-fiction divide to be written into cinematic classification speaks volumes of the two-way traffic that exists between the two ‘rival’ modes of filmmaking; a traffic that continues unabated more than a century later.

What, for example, makes United 93 (2006, Paul Greengrass), Titanic (1997, James Cameron), or any one of a number of Hollywood biopics – dramatised films that rely entirely on reconstruction, but are nonetheless based on events which historically took place – not widely considered documentaries by today’s definition? With their adherence to the tiniest authentic detail, Grierson, writing in 1926 as The Moviegoer, may well have also praised them for their ‘documentary realism’. Many of the early divisions between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking now seem comically arcane and irrelevant, such as the notion of soundstage sets (for fiction films) versus filming in real locations (for documentaries). Modern documentaries such as Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara (2003, see page 113) illustrate one obvious fallacy in this concept – being, as it is, comprised of an extended interview which takes place within the confines of a studio setting. Furthermore, reality television shows (which, as I discuss in ‘A Note on Film Selection’, page 31, I have chosen to ignore in this book) such as Big Brother take place almost entirely within the confines of an especially designed set, the artificiality of which is emphasised in a way rarely remarked upon in a fiction film. On the opposite end of the spectrum, fiction films are routinely filmed on location, often utilising faux-documentary aesthetics (such as the adoption of handheld cameras) to give added verisimilitude through cinematic shorthand. As an extreme example, note, for instance, Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), in which Tom Hank’s titular (invented) character is seamlessly digitally inserted into numerous pieces of historical newsreel footage, within the confines of a Hollywood fiction film.

But even with fiction and documentary filmmaking borrowing techniques, whether they be for stylistic or storytelling purposes, from one another, audiences apparently have no problem mentally separating them. It is what I refer to as the belief matrix: audience’s reading of the cinematic text based on their pre-determined expectations of where it should be critically situated. ‘The paradox of belief [in fiction films is that] we do not simply believe or not believe,’ says Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006, see page 75). ‘We always believe in a kind of conditional mode: I know very well that it’s a fake, but nonetheless I let myself be emotionally affected.’ Fiction, Žižek argues in his magnum opus, The Parallax View (2006), exists not as a distinct, separate thread of cinema to fiction film; rather, it ‘emerges out of the inherent limitation of… documentary’. With documentary, that wilful suspension of disbelief Žižek describes in The Pervert’s Guide is simply not there. Although educated documentary viewers, aware of the infinite number of manipulations a documentary filmmaker may use, may critique a documentary’s objectivity, the widely accepted belief is that what is presented on screen is, by and large, real: a version of the truth less shaped than the one seen in a fiction film. A fiction film may strive for a represented reality in the same way that a photorealistic painting may do so, but we are aware that we are watching actors performing according to a script. Even the noticing of filmmaking gaffes – a boom mic straying accidentally into the frame, the changing levels of liquid in a glass when an editor switches between camera angles – does nothing to drag audiences out of this conditioned mode of belief. As Žižek points out (again, The Parallax View), ‘far from destroying the diegetic illusion [of fiction film], they, if anything, reinforce it in a kind of fetishist denial.’

Documentary, on the other hand, suggests a tacit truthfulness; whether it is demonstrated by the seemingly spontaneous images captured by a handheld camera in a cinéma vérité film (and if the execution of the filmmaking process is laid out so clearly on screen, how can we be misled?), or merely the suggestion of authoritative truth from an apparently omniscient, sonorously voiced narrator. It is in the state of fluidity which exists between subjectivity and objectivity that documentary filmmaking is truly defined. Audiences watch a fiction film to see a subjective story told subjectively. A documentary, on the other hand, is supposed – at least in popular myth – to be subjectively objective. We know that what we are watching in a documentary is the result of manipulation, but nonetheless we watch it expecting truth. This is why, regardless of agreeing or disagreeing with his overarching political views, some audiences find Michael Moore’s documentaries (which I discuss later in this essay, and elsewhere in this book) fundamentally dishonest by virtue of the manipulations involved in their construction.

Truth itself, however, is subject to the same ideological belief matrix as cinema, being equally shaped by the very same cultural and social economies. Take, for instance, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s Oscar-winning documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001, see page 179), which details a legal case in which a 15-year-old African-American boy was wrongfully accused of murder. The truth or reality revealed in the film is an answer to the question: is the suspect guilty or not in the eyes of the law? But this is not so much a truth of the Real as it is a truth of the Symbolic order. As Žižek discusses, ‘When a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge – if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. (Psychoanalyst and philosopher) [Jacques] Lacan aims at this paradox with his “les non-dupes errent”: those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their eyes, are the ones who err most. A cynic who “believes only his eyes” misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality.’

To go deeper down the rabbit hole, the entire quest for truth at the centre of documentary, based on the belief that reality itself is an obtainable commodity (like expensive cars, natural resources, etc), is symptomatic of our own cultural and social ideology: namely late capitalism. In his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) Mark Fisher reiterates the frequently voiced opinion that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by capitalist realism: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ In the same way that we cannot comprehend a world outside of an all-pervasive model of capitalism, so we cannot imagine documentary removed from the inconvenient notion that it needs to provide us with the truth on any given subject.

SMASH THE SUBWAY: DOCUMENTARY & SUBJECTIVITY

When Flaherty was making Moana the equipment he required to achieve his so-called ‘documentary’ images necessitated the use of 16-tons of filmmaking equipment (which led to the Samoans he was documenting nicknaming him ‘The Millionaire’). As is well known, lighter-weight cameras and direct sound recording equipment subsequently revolutionised documentary filmmaking in the 1950s and ’60s, allowing for a more on-the-hoof style of naturalistic documentary making. Today, filmmaking equipment has shrunk yet further – meaning that documentaries in which the subjects are completely unaware of the existence of the camera are more than possible from a technical perspective. In fact, according to commonly cited statistics, citizens in the UK may be caught on camera in excess of 300 times per day, with more surveillance cameras per head of population than any other country in the world. But few people would argue that such footage would constitute documentary. ‘CCTV footage is perhaps the only pure form of “true” documentary that exists,’ says filmmaker Tim Plester, director of Way of the Morris (2011, see page 138). ‘And you have to pay people a salary to sit through that.’

Documentary requires an editorial decision with regard to content, and furthermore demands a context that extends beyond merely a superficial document of events. The 50,400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each day, much of it user-generated content, demonstrates the huge demand that exists for real footage. However, the majority of that footage is composed – as is the case for the majority of Internet videos – of short, often sub-one minute clips, devoid of any greater context. This is another separation from documentary, which is looked at to answer questions which extend beyond simply what happened and into more subjective territory. ‘I go in the subway, I look at it and I note that the subway is dirty and that the people are bored – that’s not a film,’ said Jean Rouch, one of the founding fathers of the cinéma vérité movement, in an interview reproduced in Imagining Reality: the Faber Book of the Documentary (1998). ‘I go on the subway and I say to myself, “These people are bored, why? What’s happening, what are they doing here? Why do they accept it? Why don’t they smash the subway? Why do they sit here going over the same route every day?” At that moment you can make a film.’

It is in answering exactly how to reveal that truth that documentary falls most noticeably into its different categories. (NB I have written more about the different modes of documentary in the individual chapter headings of this book.) Each mode contains its own modus operandi that opens it to both unique insights and manipulations. ‘There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real,’ wrote French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin. ‘The first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité. The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth.’

These separate schools of truth extraction form the ideological divide between direct cinema and cinéma vérité. Direct cinema champions the idea of achieving truth through observation: the closest to the surveillance-camera model of documentary making hypothesised earlier. Of course this kind of documentary filmmaking still carries its innate manipulations. The sheer mathematics of documentary filmmaking, whereby hundreds of hours may be compressed into a 90-minute running time, means that at some point the film becomes shaped by the filmmaker. One is also largely unaware of the degree to which images, as much as they appear unaffected by the filmmaker, may be prompted by his or her actions. For instance, in the book Documentary in the Digital Age (2005), an interview is recounted with Nicolas Philibert, director of To Be and To Have (2002, see page 181) in which he discusses subtly ‘provoking’ events at the primary school at which he was filming to create a scene for the documentary. Philibert recalls that he had previously seen the younger children in the class struggling to use the photocopier, at which point they would ask for help from one of the older children. Wanting to see how they would react if this was not possible, Philibert devised a solution: ‘When I saw them [go into the photocopying room] I put the camera in the doorway,’ he explained, noting that the children continued trying to solve the problem rather than going for help. ‘It was a strategy,’ Philibert said. ‘I simply provoked a reality. Not invented or re-enacted. A reality.’

A more critically troubling version of the above notion of ‘provoked… reality’ can be seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935, see page 160). The film, which chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany, represents a most perverse form of documentary: a film in which the scenes being documented are true (in that they actually occurred), but were designed and stage-managed specifically for the purposes of the making of the documentary. While Triumph documents real events, without the film these real events would not have taken place in the way that they did.

Participatory cinema, on the other hand, readily accepts the role of author as part of the documentary-making process, and opts to heighten rather than ignore its effects. A director of vérité documentaries may often provoke a truth into being revealed in full view of the audience. ‘I think a filmmaker who thinks his role is simply to sit back and watch the action doesn’t tell the truth,’ said Bill Jersey, director of A Time for Burning (1966, see page 164), ‘because the truth doesn’t always bubble up to the surface, like an artesian well. The truth sometimes has to be grappled with, sometimes has to be pushed and shoved and pulled, and I think that’s my job.’ Nowhere is Edgar Morin’s ‘problem of truth’ laid barer than in the reflexivity of documentaries in which the filmmaker becomes an unavoidable presence on screen. No pretence is made that a film crew is not there, and the making of the documentary becomes the catalyst for events: whether it be the protagonists hopelessly playing up to the camera as in the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975, see page 92), or the terrifying violence of World War II veteran Okuzaki Kenzo in Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, see page 99). Structurally, many of these participatory documentaries become reflexive not just in their aesthetics, but also in their structure: emerging as ‘documentaries about the making of a documentary’. Films such as Nick Broomfield’s The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991, see page 106) epitomise this mode of documentary filmmaking. In the documentary, the challenges and setbacks Broomfield experiences when trying to arrange an interview with the controversial Eugène Terre’Blanche become the film’s entire structural raison d’être, and the filmmaker himself becomes a sort of detective of the Real; butting heads with a constant series of narrative roadblocks which make it impossible for him to tell events in a linear, ‘realistic’ manner.

Vérité documentaries reveal an axiom of modern documentary: that there is no singular universal truth about a subject, and that rather than searching for one we should examine the competing perspectives and ideologies which have constructed separate narratives from events. In the mode of participatory documentary, the onscreen presence of the filmmaker underlines that they are presenting not the objective truth, but their subjective truth. Had Broomfield taken a different tack, or a strongly pro-Boer line when making his film, he would have experienced a very different truth to the confrontational one he, in fact, did.

THE MIRROR SPEAKS, THE REFLECTION LIES: DOCUMENTARY & PROPAGANDA

Michael Moore’s documentaries (of which three – 1989’s Roger & Me, page 105; 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, page 120; and 2009’s Capitalism: A Love Story, page 134 – are examined in this book) deserve their own essay, or even their own book, regarding documentary-truth and its associated ethics. Partly thanks to his position as the highest-grossing documentary filmmaker of all time, Moore’s polemical films have sparked more debate than any other documentary body of work. Those in favour of Moore’s methods as a filmmaker praise him for crafting populist documentary blockbusters which create engagement with issues such as the American healthcare system and the latent flaws in capitalist society, which would otherwise be unlikely to receive such mainstream exposure in a popular context. Critics accuse him of manipulating facts, altering timelines, and utilising misleading filmmaking techniques to make his points. Although plenty of critics have since taken issue with this supposed methodology of misrepresentation in Moore’s documentaries, one of the first people to do so was film critic and lecturer Harlan Jacobson, who interviewed Moore in an article entitled ‘Michael & Me’ that appeared in the December 1989 edition of Film Comment magazine: ‘The movie is essentially what has happened to [Flint, Michigan] during the 1980s,’ Moore responded to Jacobson’s critique of his techniques. ‘What would you rather have me do? Should I have maybe begun the movie with a Roger Smith or GM announcement of 1979 or 1980 for the first round of layoffs that devastated the town, which then led to starting these projects; after which maybe things pick up a little bit in the mid ’80s, and then boom in ’86, there’s another announcement, and then tell that whole story? Then it’s a three-hour movie. It’s a movie, you know; you can’t do everything. I was true to what happened. Everything that happened in the movie happened… If you want to nitpick on some of those specific things, fine.’

Moore has influenced several generations of documentary filmmakers since he first emerged as a filmmaking presence in the late 1980s, and yet his films (Roger & Me is often considered the documentary which kick-started the documentary boom that subsists today) are more rooted in the tradition of wartime propaganda documentaries than they are consciously in the postmodernist approach to non-fiction filmmaking pursued by other contemporary filmmakers working in the medium. Like John Grierson, Moore is concerned with presenting a perceived social truth in his films, and this seemingly outweighs any fidelity to maintaining the lie that the camera always tells the truth. ‘The idea that a mirror held up to nature is not so important in a dynamic and fast-changing world as the hammer which shapes it,’ Grierson wrote. ‘It is as a hammer, not a mirror, that I have sought to use the medium that came to my somewhat restive hand.’

This notion of social truth can also be seen in works as disparate as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, see page 40), which deals with the hardships of life on the Great American Plains during the Dust Bowl period; Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1963, see page 150), which investigates a leper colony outside the capital of Azerbaijan; and Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2000, see page 177), which examines the problems faced by New York’s homeless population. In each of these cases certain constructed liberties are taken by the filmmaker to present the ‘realities’ of a particular cause as they perceive them.

That these films succeed as powerfully as they do (both as effective pieces of cinema and, to a greater or lesser degree, in changing social circumstances, legislature or perspectives) is not so much due to the quantity of new information presented in them as to the manner of their storytelling. Because documentary exists as a well-tuned collage of image, editing and sound, it does not so much coldly present facts as it does inform the audience how they should feel about certain facts; an emotive response triggered not by rational thought but by constructed feeling. Due to its framing, it is impossible to watch a documentary such as Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994, see page 171) and not feel sympathy for the plight of the working class African-American families depicted in it, as they struggle to achieve the best quality of life that they can against seemingly overwhelming odds. At the same time, the totality of James’s footage could have been used to create an entirely different film – made up of the worst elements he captured on camera during his several years of filming. It is ironic that many of the audiences that enjoy Hoop Dreams would find no central contradiction to appreciating the film on an emotional level, and yet also subscribing to mainstream news media’s portrayal of that same socio-racial strata of society, which is most often vilified.

‘In my day job as an actor, I quite understand that a director, for whatever reason, might not always use your favourite take of a scene in their final assembly,’ says Way of the Morris director