Objectivity Good and Bad
BOROFF, DAVID
On television By David Boroff Objectivity Good and Bad I have long been a devotee of documentaries. In fact, having reached the point of near satiety with the general fare on TV, I find that...
...But documentaries have become elite entertainment shown at film festivals, art theaters, etc...
...But worst of all was the fatal condescension: Elizabeth Taylor talking about the common life of London as she walked about regally in a procession of expensive gowns...
...Why shouldn't the interviewer press home the logical inconsistencies, the moral squalor of his position...
...Melina Mercouri, as handsomely garbed as her fellow guides, holding the poor, abused hands of an ancient crone who had spent her life weaving rugs...
...Happily, the slack in the popular arena has been taken up by TV...
...Even in less artificial offerings, there are certain generic weaknesses...
...Today a flaccid objectivity has taken over...
...She reveals that she works as a prostitute to support her "habit...
...And this comes at a time when fact-films are sorely missing in our movie theaters...
...One's mind immediately went back to a really superb documentary about the West a few years ago, narrated by that archetypal Westerner, Gary Cooper...
...There were the monarchs, the splendid horses, the magnificently gowned ladies...
...Later, one of the German leaders would say sadly: "This is not what we intended...
...Indeed, on the last morning of the War, thousands of soldiers were killed...
...What about the charge of brutality...
...Alas, the film-maker does not understand his own medium either, for he throws away the opportunity to develop a real drama within the context of his form...
...Still, at its best the documentary can do in a moment what the writer labors to do in hours...
...You don't seem brutal to me...
...We see Thomas Mann hailing the War as an opportunity for "the purification of the race...
...One must be wary of the kind of cultural piety which makes them all out to be landmarks of truth and integrity...
...There was the camera trained on the jubilant cannoneers of both sides as they checked their watches to get the last salvo in before the 11 A.M...
...Sophia Loren, the ex-proletarian, trying but failing to re-establish her roots in the earthy precincts of Rome...
...Let My People Go, produced by David Wolper (shown on independent stations) deals with the Jewish effort to achieve a homeland during the last 80-90 years...
...Inevitably, this documentary tended to be superficial (it covered so much ground) and the prose often degenerated into what might be called UJA baroque...
...And providing the perfect vocal framework for all this was Montgomery Clift's gentle, bruised voice...
...A documentary on Faulkner's Mississippi was regrettably short on Faulkner but wonderfully evocative in rendering the sights and sounds of Mississippi...
...She was just a high school student before it all happened...
...But in this documentary, the fact that it could happen to anyone even the winners of the middle class was brought home through a single figure...
...Then war came and people who should have known better made pompous 19th-century noises...
...The cultural artifacts were there, but the person describing them lacked any real connection to the life she described...
...Instead on one of the race documentaries, the interviewer remarked affably to a Southern bully-boy sheriff: "You seem to be a nice fellow...
...It was all so solid and permanent and unalterable...
...We see the pinched Calvinist faces in the barbershop, the edgy good-nature ("We're a friendly folk if a man is in trouble around here, black or white, we'd he'p him...
...Movie stars, on the other hand, tend to be more self-projecting than outwardly-directed...
...Visually, however, the documentary gave one a sense of that brooding, tormented state...
...In other words, The American West was a fraud...
...Though they both lean too heavily on stock shots of soldiers marching, and though one attack looks much like another, the films are still able to convey something of the weariness, the sense of hopelessness that enveloped those dread years...
...To be sure, not all documentaries are good...
...And who am I to decide...
...others are meager, inartistic...
...Edward R. Murrow set the pace for topical journalism on TV...
...I cited earlier the two documentaries on World War I, one on CBS-TV, the other on WNEW-TV...
...Freud patriotically announces that all his "libido is given to the Austro-Hungarian empire...
...But there were moments of almost intolerable horror, especially in scenes of the Warsaw Ghetto passersby hurrying past corpses in the street, the bodies piled up like cordwood (the cliche suddenly comes alive), an improvised but inefficient slide in the Warsaw Ghetto cemetery to hasten the stick-like bodies from the carts which transported them to the earth which awaits them...
...At the conclusion of one of the World War I documentaries (there have been two running all y e a r ) , the narrator stated that at the very edge of the Armistice soldiers on both sides especially the artillerymen-wanted the distinction of having fired the last shot...
...Another documentary I responded to was on General Custer, that foolish, forlorn cavalier...
...She tells us that she is 17 years of age...
...The very notion of a great star serving as a guide invites artistic and intellectual disaster...
...The point of view about Custer from all indications a reckless glory-seeker swung between admiration ("There is no one on the frontier who does not feel secure for his presence") to mild censure ("The vanity of the man is inconceivable...
...in the sea, the fish...
...Again, TV' s mindless objectivity spoiled things...
...The irony of all this is that if you talk to a documentary film-maker, he will invariably say that the professional writer does not understand films because he is too word-oriented...
...And as a musical backdrop (on the CBS series) there is a score that alternates effectively between oom-pah-pah martial music and elegiac strains grieving over a shattered Europe...
...And H. G. Wells, perennially the optimist, declared that "it will lead to world disarmament...
...Some are pretentious, overblown...
...And it happened to her...
...But there were more comforting moments too the vivid, sensitive, tough faces of the kibbutzniks, fighter-intellectuals all of them...
...This touches on another weakness of TV documentaries: inept interviewing...
...He purveyed facts on both sides of an argument, but he shaped his programs in accordance with the thesis he was developing...
...Nor are they necessarily consigned to the Sunday afternoon cultural ghetto or to out-of-the-way time slots calculated not to interfere with profits...
...We see a young girl in shadow...
...In another documentary The Losers about young people "hooked" by heroin, there was a marvelously chilling sequence...
...In orotund tones, she then translated his rejoinder: "If I die on land, the worms will eat me...
...This time, the narrator was Lorne Greene, the young-old man on Bonanza...
...still others are offensive...
...Out of timidity or out of some cockeyed notion of equal time, the documentary- makers suffer fools and knaves to rattle away in an atmosphere of bland acceptance of all points of view...
...She has long hair, she wears loop earrings, her speech has the familiar inflections of the world we know the good plays, the paperbacks, the ballet...
...Absent is the developing dialogue, the parry and thrust of a real interview...
...But it was the period immediately before the opening of the War that was most vividly underlined the pageantry and grandeur of a world that was about to be smashed into bits...
...It's an affliction of the others the losers...
...Certainly, the series of documentaries on London, Rome and Greece, which featured, respectively, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, and Melina Mercouri, were demonstrations of what can go wrong with a documentary when it goes Hollywood...
...cease-fire...
...Why shouldn't the racist be forced into a corner...
...Typically, the host, narrator, or reporter throws a question at an interviewee and lets him talk...
...There was a period when "shorts"abbreviated documentaries, really were part of our film diet and served a genuine educational function...
...The Indians were figures of folklore given to pronouncements in a kind of Biblical prosebut at least the dignity of their situation was respected...
...We have been so numbed by the horror of drug addiction that we can't really identify with it...
...In all fairness to the medium, too, it should be said that the range and variety of documentaries have been enormously expanded...
...To be sure, there was more than a dash of Faulknerian rhetoric ("Slavery put the curse on the land"), but there wasn't nearly as much as one might like about Faulkner's novels...
...Chasidim dancing in the streets of Jerusalem...
...In fact, having reached the point of near satiety with the general fare on TV, I find that documentaries constitute the bulk of my viewing these days...
...Equally intolerable was the moment when Miss Mercourithe Tallulah Bankhead of the Levant called out to a fisherman and warned him to be careful...
...Moreover, they are synthetic products, and this tends to get in the way of real communication...
...The essence of the documentary is truth, as sifted through the mind of a sensitive and self-effacing filmmaker...
...Then on to the next question...
...But the show was less a documentary than a commercial for Bonanza and other fictions about the West...
...There is, at the very least, a modest social conscience at work in the industry...
...But the type immediately comes into focus...
...In London, Rome, and most recently in Athens, there was a constant alternation between the real and the unreal...
...And here, instead of Panavision heroics, the scenes of battle were recreated with a handful of men and horses, usually in shadow, so that the story achieved a kind of mythic dimension...
...Another questionable show was something described as The American West (NBC-TV...
...Of the real Westthe backbreaking toil, the lonely sodbusters, the desert spaces not a word...
...It was the kind of thing that a moderately imaginative junior high school teacher might have put together for an assembly program on the West some songs and dances, the inevitable props (covered wagons and Winchesters, sunbonnets), and a smidgeon of folklore...
Vol. 48 • May 1965 • No. 11
