The Second Thing:
10 Documentaries that changed the World

To talk about the insight documentaries afford into social and political problems is all well and good, but it is the second thing we must do. The first is to respond to them as works of art. We should be interested in the fiction films of, say, Ousmane Sembene, not because they are vehicles for information about women, post-colonial society etc, but because they are great films. We don’t go to see Bergman movies primarily because of what say about Swedish society in the 1960s. Sembene’s cinema does, of course, also reveal much about its human milieu, its power structures, masculinity, and dress codes, just as Martin Scorsese’s films do about New York City. But it’s not the first thing they do. I’ve ranted about this for years and have argued endlessly that the way the world responds to documentary is, mostly, blind to this first thing, form.

Yet in this programme of Documentaries that Changed the World, I’ve done a U-turn. I’ve set aside primary questions of aesthetics to ask a secondary, empirical one: Which films demonstrably have had an impact on the social, legislative or political times in which they were seen? I allowed myself to be vague about what a film is (there are TV pieces in the selection), but was determined not commit the sin of omission of most documentary programming – anglocentrism. So, from Venezuela and Ireland, we’ll show The Revolution will Not be Televised (Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain, 2003); from Japan there’s Minamata: The Victims and their World (Noriaki Tsuchimoto, 1972); from America, there are Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) and The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988); from Britain, Death of a Nation – The Timor Conspiracy (John Pilger and David Munro, 1994), BBC News Ethiopia Report (Michael Buerk and Muhammad Amin, 1984), and McLibel (Franny Armstrong, 2005); From Germany, there’s Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935); from France, The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1967) and from Iran, For Freedom (Hussein Torabi, 1980).

The Revolution will Not be Televised is not only one of the greatest eye-witness films about Latin America since Patricio Guzman’s The Battle for Chile. There’s strong reason to believe that Hugo Chávez’s use of the media as part of his political apparatus can, in part, be credited, to his experience of being in, and seeing, this film. It did not set out to change Venezuela, but ended up doing so. Tsuchimoto’s epic Minamata films chart the heartbreaking process by which a group of fishermen take the Chisso conglomerate to court for polluting the water course with methyl-mercury. It is the Ur-environmental documentary, its climax is one of the most moving scenes in world cinema, and Chisso were forced to change their operation as a result of the villager protests. As is well known, Bowling for Columbine made Kmart stop selling certain types of bullets – a small but significant step given its omnipresence in America. The Thin Blue Line got Texan drifter Randall Adams reprieved, and is the Ur-miscarriage of justice film. The outrage caused by The Timor Conspiracy was so great that it helped lead to the eventual liberation of East Timor in 1999. Irish rock musician Bob Geldof saw Michael Buerk’s Ethiopia report, coconceived Live Aid, and improved, and probably saved, hundreds of thousands of African lives. McDonald’s pulled out of schools advertising as a result of the legal challenge to it in the European Court of Human Rights. Despite her life-long claims to the contrary, as the central piece of Hitlerian marketing in the whole of the 1930s (this was before TV , of course), historians agree that The Triumph of the Will helped swing Germany behind its psychotic Fuhrer. The Sorrow and the Pity removed the glow from France’s sense of its wartime self, though belatedly so because it was banned from French TV for more than a decade. And For Freedom, shown every year on Iranian TV , locked in the apparent triumph of Khomeini’s 1979 revolution.

The Venezuelan, German, Iranian and French films changed the mood of their nations, often looking backward to effect the present. The three corporate films – McDonald’s, Chisso and Kmart – are David and Goliath parables. Though documentary was formulated by Scottish filmmaker John Grierson as a social force of the left, the Iranian and German films are right wing works. The Pilger and Buerk pieces are powerful televisual expressions of post-colonial liberalism.

Yet as I write I realise what should have been obvious: that though these films were chosen specifically because of their social impact, that impact is in part explained by aesthetics. Claude Lanzmann said of the unforgettable courtroom scene in the Minamata film, for example, where the relatives confront the directors of Chisso and jostle Tsuchimoto’s camera, that it is “unparalleled in the annals of the cinema.” He talks about the “heartrending and enigmatic” beauty of the film’s opening shot – a fishing boat on the sea.

Michael Moore’s film is a situationist mix of John Pileresque moral outrage, laced with dashes of Simpsons’ satire, mawkishness and audacious stunts. Leni Riefenstahl’s film is a famously Wagnerian attempt at Gesamtkunstwerk but, like much of her work, can be understood as the product of a heightened, monotonal, erotic imagination. The Thin Blue Line is Robert Siodmak meets true crime TV programming. In The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls whips collaborationist testimony, Maurice Chevalier chansons and film clips, into what he calls “a love song to France”, a Lubitschean state of the nation piece in which the situation is “desperate but not serious”. And For Freedom, shot in colour 35mm, with cranes and tracking shots, makes the Iranian Revolution look Spielbergian.

The stylistic wow of these films, their unexpected tonal, baroque, film noir, mittle-european, satirical, epic or mythic departures from the expected, Griersonian fly on the wall norms of documentary filmmaking, surely help explain how they got into people’s heads, or through the hub-bub of other social imagery and stories, and out into the world of impact and social change. Even the Michael Buerk report seems to have hit hard in part because of its style: years after its broadcast, the BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson wrote that it was the understatement in Buerk’s writing – the fact that he wasn’t seen to be emoting – that allowed others to do so.

Whether they were trying to change the world or did so inadvertently, the formal diversity of these films shows that documentary is less a genre (ie sub-section) of cinema than something like a movie megalopolis, where genres and languages of film co-habit and interact.

Mark Cousins
Curator


Support from:
British Film Institute, British Council, Instituto Goethe