The final interview was over. The set, a room inside a New York hotel, had gone dark. The subject, Robert Durst, headed for the bathroom, apparently unaware that his microphone was still on.
“There it is. You’re caught,” he is heard saying. “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
It made for a chilling conclusion to an absorbing six or so hours of television. However, once HBO’s The Jinx released watchers from its grip, questions emerged.
Why had the filmmakers, Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, withheld this seemingly vital utterance until the very last scene of the very last episode? For that matter, why had they not gone back to Durst to ask him about this possible confession? When had they alerted the police?
These questions led, inexorably, to other, larger ones: Was this film a form of journalism or entertainment? And, more broadly, what should an audience’s expectations of documentary films be?
Such questions are now being asked by the viewing public after The Jinx. However, they have preoccupied documentarians for years, as nonfiction film has been transformed from a relatively straightforward, niche medium to a form of mass entertainment.
Inside the documentary world, there is an inherent tension between the need to stick to a fair, accurate presentation of facts and the imperative to tell a dramatic story.
“As the stakes go up, filmmakers are really starting to grapple with the issue of how the craft of filmmaking gels with the act of reporting,” said David Wilson, who cofounded the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri.
Not so long ago, documentaries were the cinematic equivalent of castor oil. In 1988, Miramax took pains to avoid referring to Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, the story of a man wrongfully imprisoned for murder, as a “documentary film,” promoting it instead as “a new kind of murder mystery.”
GROWING DEMAND
However, documentaries are now well rid of their take-your-medicine stigma. Today, news and entertainment companies as diverse as HBO, Netflix, Hulu, CNN, ESPN, Amazon and al-Jazeera America are trumpeting their documentary offerings. Some airlines even offer a “documentary” option on their in-flight entertainment consoles.
The changes roiling the news business are partly responsible for this boom; documentarians have stepped in to fill the void left by shrinking budgets at traditional news outlets.
Dan Cogan, executive director of Impact Partners, which matches financiers with socially conscious films, cites The Hunting Ground, a new documentary about campus rape, as a case in point.
“Twenty years ago, that would have been an investigative series in a newspaper,” Cogan said. “Today, it is a documentary film.”
For a lot of philanthropists seeking to bring about social change, the documentary film has become the investment vehicle of choice. A few years ago, the Ford Foundation announced that it would put US$50 million into independent documentaries. (Among those it helped fund was last year’s film about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour.)
Documentaries are a predominantly liberal business, but not exclusively so: Joe Ricketts, a major donor to rightwing causes, invested in Dinesh D’Souza’s first documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, which was released in 2012 and has earned US$33.4 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
Documentaries have demonstrated their form’s ability to produce results.
MAKING AN IMPACT
The 2012 film The Invisible War, about rape in the US military, helped push then-US secretary of defense Leon Panetta toward a major policy change.
The Central Park Five, also released in 2012, helped move New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to settle a US$40 million lawsuit brought against the city by five men falsely convicted of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park in 1989.
Prior to De Blasio’s entering office last year, the administration of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg fought the former inmates in court.
The 2013 documentary Blackfish, which addressed the mistreatment of animals at marine-life amusement parks, had a material effect on SeaWorld’s profits.
However, there is a flip side to the documentary boom. The proliferation of films has made it harder for a film to break out, and the results that a growing number of films have achieved have increased the pressure on documentarians not only to keep their audiences entertained, but also to produce a film whose effect can be measured.
In other words, the bar is high and it keeps getting higher. It is one thing for a film to raise doubts about the guilt of a convicted killer — as Morris did in The Thin Blue Line — but The Jinx accomplished something with a greater degree of difficulty: It put someone in handcuffs. Durst, a New York real-estate scion, was arrested on a murder charge a day before the show’s finale.
INTERNAL DILEMMA
Ask 10 different documentarians to characterize what they do and you will get 10 different answers. Some consider themselves journalists first. Others say they are primarily storytellers. Still others see themselves foremost as advocates. These impulses do not always peacefully coexist.
“The tenets of journalism and storytelling are sometimes at odds with each other,” documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger said. “And sometimes advocacy is at odds with journalism.”
Even the courts seem unsure how to view documentaries, as Berlinger knows from firsthand experience.
Several years ago, Chevron subpoenaed hundreds of hours of film that he had shot for Crude, a documentary about a class-action lawsuit brought against the oil company in Ecuador. Berlinger said that as a documentary filmmaker, he was entitled to the same protections as a journalist. He ultimately lost.
Subsequently, however, Ken Burns successfully fought back New York City’s attempts to get their hands on transcripts and other materials from The Central Park Five.
“One of the weird things is that there aren’t any rules in documentary film,” Wilson said. “Every filmmaker approaches their subjects and films differently.”
This is one reason a documentary can be such a compelling medium: Every filmmaker effectively reinvents the genre to best tell their story.
However, having no rules can be problematic. Can viewers still trust what is on the screen?
“‘Documentary’ is a very elastic word,” said Thomas Powers, the documentary curator at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I understand why that makes people in certain quarters of journalism a little uneasy.”
Without rules of engagement, viewers are left with only the filmmaker’s cues, and sometimes they send mixed signals.
During The Jinx, for instance, verite footage seamlessly blends into impressionistic recreations.
Laura Poitras, who made Citizenfour, has described herself as a “visual journalist.” She did not hold back any blockbuster revelations while making her film. Instead, she contributed to articles about secret US intelligence activities in both the Washington Post and The Guardian before Citizenfour was released.
She won a Pulitzer Prize for her newspaper reporting and an Academy Award for her film.
NARRATIVE OR NEWS?
“We do not make films to break news,” Poitras said recently in a panel at the Sundance Film Festival. “We hopefully make lasting narratives that can be returned to and we can get insight from.”
The makers of The Jinx, by contrast, wanted to break news, so much so that they structured their entire six-hour film around a dramatic final reveal: Durst’s apparent confession. They could not tease it earlier in the film, much less go back to Durst to ask him to explain what he meant, as a journalist would have. Doing so might have blunted its effect.
They wanted a bombshell, and they got it.
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