Documentary Advice From Dinosaur Land by Simon Louvish

Part 1: Documentary Notes

In April, The National Film Theatre ran a season of feature and documentary films on apartheid in South Africa, which included a 45 minute documentary I was involved in making in 1969-1970, called “PHELANDABA – END OF THE DIALOGUE.” I say “involved in” since the film was released without personal credits, with the words “Made illegally in South Africa by members of the banned Pan-Africanist Congress.” We were a team of three white students – two of us from what was then The London School of Film Technique, myself and Antonia Caccia – and the third a Cambridge student, now a noted producer, Chris Curling, and three black South African exiles, Nana Mahomo, Vus Make and Andrew Rakehtla Tsehlana. The exiles could not return to South Africa under apartheid, so it fell to us students to shoot the documentary film, utilising as a cover a drama tour of Cambridge students who were booked on a boycott-busting tour. Of such complications is art – and propaganda – made. I was the documentary cameraman.

When showing the film, and discussing it afterwards, it struck me that it would be strange for present-day students, or young film-makers, to realise the technical gulf between those days and now. Today, any event in the world can be seen by someone, anyone, holding up a phone-camera and sending video clips instantly around the world. Not then. The film was shot with a 16mm Beaulieu camera – I even think it was hand wound, not even battery driven! – using 100 foot rolls, lasting about 3 minutes each. Film was expensive and precious. You couldn’t afford to waste a shot. Filming in the streets, in black townships, under the constraints of a police state, meant having to get in quick, shoot quick, and leave quick. You had no way of viewing your material until it was brought back from South Africa to London to be developed at Humphries Laboratories. Until that viewing of the rushes you had no idea if you had captured anything at all. On the other hand, taking film in and out of countries was not the insane issue it is now. Imagine a world in which travel involved no “security checks,” in which you took your bags through customs without an outward check (unless you’d been rumbled) and in which people saw you off on the runway, as you climbed up into the plane. Planet Earth before hijacking, 9/11, etc etc.

All the processes involved in film-making were costly, even for low budgets. END OF THE DIALOGUE cost about £5,000 – including the cost of buying the camera! – because nobody took a penny, editing facilities were donated free, and so forth. After that, I made two other similar documentaries, on Greece under the Colonels’ dictatorship, and the Israel-Palestine issue, both on shoestring budgets.

The cumbersome processes of “film” are now undercut by the relative ease of digital technology. You load up your 60 minute cassettes in your handycam – or proper camera if you can afford it – and away you go. The ratio of film shot to that used is not a factor. Fred Wiseman used to shoot hundreds of hours of 16mm film over months of work, in films like WELFARE and HIGH SCHOOL, a long and laborious process. As ever, distribution was the bottleneck. Television was a closed medium to outsiders – END OF THE DIALOGUE was a rare exception, as there had been little footage of daily life under apartheid since the ground-breaking COME BACK AFRICA in 1959. You depended on private showings, independent distributors like Contemporary Films in London, university and college circuits. That is still, as cycles go, mainly the same for independent productions. (I’m discounting the Shock Politics genre as exemplified by Michael Moore and others – watch carefully how certain points are emphasized and others – less amenable to an easy analysis – are set aside.)

Nevertheless it appears that the flood-gates have opened for cost-effective, cheap film-making in a way we couldn’t dream of decades ago. “Just Do It” becomes a practical mantra.

A word of warning about footage: I note that, due to the cheapness of digital media – people tend to just press the ON button and keep the camera going on whatever’s going on in front of the lens – but that doesn’t always result in a watchable film. Editing is an obvious bugbear, although, once again, technology has banished the terror of losing crucial bits of three frames in the outbin. But the main casualty is something easily banished from current day documentary shooting – the elusive Quality of the picture – the Shot. When every foot of film is precious you pay attention to the shot – in an old fashioned word – its aesthetic qualities – its composition, the way the light falls, the elusive event that should occur when the camera points at something. Not everything you capture is meaningful. So the dinosaur advice in this case, as in fiction filming: Best to behave as if the “easy” digital medium is as complicated as the old film version: treat the shot as if there is a shortage. Make every image count.

It is possible, I suppose, that viewers, audiences, perceive the image differently, particularly due to the way images are accessed on the internet, in bits and bobs, multiple frames, a jagged nest of impressions, none of which stands out in itself. The human eye, however, hasn’t quite evolved much, nor has psychology, in a mere thirty, or a hundred years. Seeing is still an aesthetic as well as a practical process.

Just pretend you’re stuck in a foreign place with no money, no back-up, no exit strategy, a wind-up camera and five cans of 100 foot film to get the whole story, and you should be O.K....

For more inspiration see:

The Guerilla Feature Film: The Dinosaur's Narrative Challenge - "Yol"

www.simonlouvish.com

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