During the 1950's there were various television journalists who veered away from their usual methods of illustrating lectures and would apply different approaches to storytelling in non-fictional formats. Some producers were inspired particularly by the photojournalism of Life magazine - producer Robert Drew (1924-2014) hankered for a way to to convey the impression of life experience by chronicling and recording events as they occurred. It would be during his Nieman Fellowship at the esteemed Harvard University in the year 1954 that Drew would study the structure of a nineteenth century realist story and this was a form he wanted to allocate to documentary. Drew was riveted by the distinctive narrative tones that were the signature of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and how Flaubert's stories virtually penned themselves. The budding producer returned to New York replete with funds from Time-Life to devise a new type of actuality film. Drew conjured a group of up and coming filmmakers hence forming Drew Associates,and some of those names were - Richard Leacock, Hope Ryden, D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers among others.
These film artists passionately wanted to eliminate overt devices of narration such as the voice-over, in lieu of stories that commence in media res and unravel seemingly sans the narrator. Drew firmly believed that film, as well as television is a visual form and wanted to deter from word-driven approaches to documentary, approaches that relied solely on interviews, voice-overs and on-camera hosts. Drew Associates handpicked their stories which they believed had innate drama with clear beginnings and closure to leave nothing untied. Their films, much in the vain of Hollywood movies, were usually structured around strong protagonists in the height of crisis. The French critics responded quickly, noting the classicism of Drew's signature documentaries, even comparing them to the works of the all-American director Howard Hawks.
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| Pioneer of observational cinema Robert Drew |
In the 1960's, observational filmmakers such as Robert Drew did make claims of their work keeping more faithful to reality, but the Hollywood cinema archetype had its roots in nineteenth century realism and would also provide a template for the new documentary. Ethnographic documentarian David MacDougall has quipped 'Many of us who began applying an observational approach to ethnographic film-making found ourselves taking in our model not the documentary film as we had come to know it since Grierson, but the dramatic fiction film, in all its incarnations from Tokyo to Hollywood.' His main argument was that the truth was being slightly broached but that nonfiction producers were mistaken to cite American fictional as their models; this was a juncture in time when independent auteurs declared Hollywood the enemy. In 1983, Drew would confess, 'You don't need Dan Rather in the middle of a fiction motion picture to tell you what's going on.'
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| From Wiseman's 1969 verite High School |
These directors commonly forsake the Grierson tradition of direct address - that was also known as the 'voice of God' spoken narration - barring that for a style that used techniques of storytelling and with a continuity editing conventionally - which was associated with that of the fiction film. All modalities of explicit address to the viewer were averted in favor of a clinical type of narration that was not dissimilar to classical Hollywood cinema. The leaning toward an observational style in documentary contributed to the breakdown of strict divides between fiction and non-fiction in the 1960's. As documentary filmmakers embraced storytelling, feature filmmakers as the nouvelle-vague mastermind Jean-Luc Godard made experimental short films with on location recorded sounds and shooting with natural light, improvising and hosting interviews with voice-over narrating.
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| Or You Got It Or You Ain't Victory At Sea just didn't cut that mustard. |
At Drew associates in the late 1950's, Drew, Pennebaker and Leacock in coalition with the Maysles brothers had a commitment to revolutionize the documentary form. They abhorred the 'illustrated lectures' namely the Victory at Sea eschewing it for its endless stock footage and overall tedium. The shots of the series were interwoven from varied sources and battles with wall-to-wall music from composer Richard Rodgers. In fact the series Victory at Sea played on to Pennebaker as if 'there was no war at all.' Gone now were the conventions of realism; Pennebaker's key interest as a filmmaker was not in the lecturing of the viewer, but in the capture of the mood and tempo of basic everyday life.
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| Three-Pennebaker opera |
Like Pennebaker, Robert Drew longed to articulate a sense of 'being there' as the message in his specialized films. He honed his craft and career as a journalist for Life magazine and was profoundly inspired by fiction film and the realist novels, and with this he illustrated the distinction of showing as opposed to telling.
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| Andy Warhol deprives us all with 1963's Sleep |
Richard Leacock's stance was seemingly more radical when it came to nonfiction television. Leacock, a combat cinematographer during the second World War would work with the independent and iconoclastic filmmaker Robert Flaherty on 1948's Louisiana Story. The precocious apprentice took the works of Flaherty and the Italian neorealists as models for his very own. Both he and Pennebaker left Drew Associates as they believed that Drew's core interest in cinema was to simply construct documentaries that were appeasing what the viewers wanted to see on television and Pennebaker mused ' Leacock essentially turned his back on public as well as commercial elevation, becoming a staunch supporter of low-budget independent cinema.'
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| Verite visionary Cesare Zavattini (1902-89) |
It would not be until the middle of the 1960s where modernist takes on the narrative style of observational cinema would evolve in the independent documentary community. The Maysles would create open-ended episodic narrative as they did with 1962's Showman, What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964) during the time when Andy Warhol's visual exploits were that of minimalism in 1963's Sleep and respectively Empire (1964). In Salesman (1969), we are taken into a day in the life of the world of door-to-door Bible salesmen during an unsuccessful work trip to Florida, the Maysles brothers were now moving toward uncharted territory that was influenced by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini - who suggested there be a film that chronicled ninety minutes into the life of an everyman. Warhol with his early works exhausted the observational style of any interest in narrative, choosing time over plot. A prime example may be witnessed in Sleep, an aching five hours and twenty one minutes that features nothing more than the sleeping body of performance artist John Giorno. A work that would later be parodied by Texas writer/director L.M. Kit Carson in the hagiography David Holzman's Diary (1967). Allan King examined private life in 1969 with the brazen A Married Couple. Wiseman, who held an aversion towards concentration on personalities as subjects would introduce the cinema world to a multi-focused narrative structure for his early films on the day to day living at American social institutions High School (1969), Law and Order (1969) and 1970's Hospital.
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| Roberto Rossellini started the observational ball rolling (here with his lady love Ingrid) |
Observational cinema is a movement that leans toward the spontaneity and improvised approaches of famed Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini than to for example the scripted and densely plotted works of Alfred Hitchcock or that of the Left Bank wunderkind Alain Resnais. Observational films in their unique devices are notoriously up for personal interpretation, a device separating them far from any such madding crowds.