9
American Documentary in the 1980s

Carl Plantinga

The 1980s brought remarkable developments to documentary filmmaking in the United States. The decade witnessed the emergence of several promising and innovative filmmakers; the bold exploration of new techniques and styles; increased theatrical, video, and television distribution and exhibition; and significant efforts to educate the American public about social and political issues. By the end of the decade, more Americans were viewing documentaries dian ever before, and interest in the documentary had reached an intensity not seen since the days of direct cinema and the social and political unrest of the 1960s. Despite consistent problems with funding and distribution, American documentary of the 1980s gathered a momentum that extended into the 1990s.

Before tracing the history of the genre, it is essential to circumscribe the use of the term documentary. The films falling under the rubric nonfiction—for example, social documentaries, nature, concert, comedy performance, IMAX, instructional, and promotional films—are too diverse to allow for a coherent historical or critical account. Thus I will follow conventional practice in setting aside one particular exemplar of nonfiction—the social documentary of feature length (over fifty minutes)—as my focus. Social documentaries deal with human society, broadly speaking, and range from biographies, autobiographies, and histories to films analyzing current social and cultural phenomena.¹

This chapter emphasizes three aspects of documentary history in the 1980s: (1) the business of documentary filmmaking (financing, distribution, and exhibition); (2) the cultural functions of documentaries; and (3) developments in the art and technique of documentary filmmaking. Film is essentially a technological medium, and the history of documentary filmmaking technology might also be deemed important. Here, though, I devote little space to developments in technology, because the decade saw comparatively few important changes.

With only minor improvements, 1980s documentary filmmakers used equipment similar to that which sparked the cinéma vérité movement in the 1960s: lightweight 16mm motion picture cameras, sound recorders capable of recording synchronizedsound, and a range of microphones suitable for varied situations and environments.² While cinéma vérité purists were dedicated to the use of existing light, the 1980s filmmaker more often used a lighting kit to supply sufficient light for exposure or to "sculpt" the image. Documentary filmmakers in the 1980s also had access to fast color film stocks that enabled color cinematography in low-light conditions. Thus, color was the norm and black-and-white film stock, for decades the hallmark of the documentary film, was rarely used.

The 1980s was the decade of the rapid development of small-format video and cable television. With a few exceptions, however, these affected distribution and exhibition more than the production of feature documentaries, as I describe below. Video enabled all kinds of novel activities, encouraging widespread home videography, the use of video for surveillance, and community-based video activism. Nonetheless, documentary films, whether destined for theatrical distribution or television broadcast, were still shot on film. Video production technology did have at least one use for the documentary filmmaker; it provided an easy and inexpensive means of testing potential interviewees for the camera. By the early 1980s, video was being used as a tool to test and select interviewees, and the practice became commonplace as the decade progressed.³ In preparation for the filming of Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), for example, directors Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman conducted about fifty video interviews to enable them to select five interviews to record on more expensive film stock. Although technological factors such as these were not unimportant, the most significant developments lay in the economics, cultural import, and styles and techniques of American documentary of the 1980s.

The Business of American Documentary

The economics of documentary filmmaking in the 1980s were governed by two major factors. The first—that documentary films were rarely profitable for their makers—was hardly unique to the 1980s, but nonetheless important to an understanding of the genre. Documentary filmmakers were forced to spend a good deal of their time raising funds before production and securing distribution after. As documentary director Jon Else says, "Half the battle in making documentaries is finding subjects which embody an emotionally charged drama, lived by people worth caring about…. The other half is finding the money.""⁴

Second, the increasing pervasiveness of television and video blurred the distinction between film and television documentaries. Successful theatrical distribution was an outcome few documentary filmmakers counted on and fewer achieved. For many documentaries, the largest audiences were found on public television, and thus many filmmakers turned to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for financing. Although the commercial television networks tended to avoid feature-length documentaries and typically broadcast only in-house programming anyway, the situation was different with public television. On the various Public Broadcasting System (PBS) stations in the 1980s, serious documentaries were common. The most prestigious regularly scheduled documentary series was "Frontline," but other series such as "Odyssey" and "American Masters" also showed interesting films. Moreover, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting developed various schemes (of questionable success) to fund independent documentary filmmaking, as I describe below. One sign of this blending between film and television documentary was that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began to nominate for best feature documentary programs designed specifically for various PBS television series.⁵

Given the meager financial returns expected by most documentary filmmakers, fundraising and securing distribution were (and still are) an integral aspect of documentary filmmaking. As one observer wrote in the early 1980s, "If you don't think raising money for a documentary film is creative, and if you don't think getting a film circulating safely in the world is creative, you don't understand a massive portion of the documentary filmmaker's craft and art.""⁶ The cost of an hour-long broadcast-quality film might be $150,000 to $250,000, and given the difficulty in making profits, a documentary filmmaker would most likely be searching for grants and benefactors rather than investors. The four sources of funding were federal and state programs, foundations, corporations, and individuals (supporters, relatives, or friends). Various organizations might grant varied amounts of money, but a filmmaker could usually count on stiff competition for every dollar. For small amounts—up to $25,000—a filmmaker could solicit state and local arts councils, private foundations, church groups, and individual investors. One could also apply to the Independent Film Program of the American Film Institute for such grants. Larger grants were sought from the National Endowment for the Arts, state and local humanities organizations, foreign television systems such as West Germany's ZDF, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.⁷ The Film Fund, an organization specializing in financing social-issue documentaries, offered some support until its demise in 1986.

For independent documentary filmmakers, the National Endowment for the Humanities was often the most generous source of grant money for "humanities projects in the media." Between 1980 and 1989, annual NEH Media Grants, including grantsin-kind, totaled between $8.6 and $10.6 million, with the exception of 1982 ($5.1 million), when President Ronald Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, slashed funding for the NEH. Funding levels for media projects rose and fell during the 1980s, but the trend was slightly downward while production costs grew throughout the decade. The biggest funding year was 1980 (at $10.6 million), and by 1989 funding had fallen to $10.3 million.⁸ Fiscal year 1980 saw 291 applications and 83 grants awarded. The 1980 awards ranged from $4,000 to $1 million and averaged $114,000. Not all of the NEH Media Grant money went to documentary productions, of course, but also to radio programs, fiction films, and scriptwriting projects.

Some documentary filmmakers were able to fund their projects through one or two major sources, thus cutting the time devoted to fundraising significantly. At NEH, the larger grants typically awarded for documentary projects ranged between $150,000 and $250,000, but only a few filmmakers each year could count on such generous support. Home Box Office funded some excellent documentaries, including Bill Couturie's Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987) and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. Filmmakers occasionally won full support from an arts agency or other institution. An example is Ross Spears's Age (1980), which lists the Tennessee Arts Commission as its sole funding source. Ken Burns's popular nine-part documentary The Civil War (1989) was financed in large part by General Motors.

Filmmakers were usually forced to seek funds from many different sources, however, and financing involved major work in grant writing and other forms of solicitation. For a typical example, Ken Burns's Brooklyn Bridge (1981), produced before Burns had become a celebrated filmmaker, lists among its funding sources the New York Council for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Public Television Stations of New York State, Citibank, Abraham and Strauss, the American Society of Civil Engineers, New York Telephone, Consolidated Edison, and the New York State Council for the Arts. The producer of the PBS civil rights history Eyes on the Prize (1987), Henry Hampton, worked for six years to obtain the $2.5 million required for the first six shows. He eventually gained support from no fewer than forty-four underwriters.⁹ Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen held fund-raisers and even direct-mail campaigns to complete The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), and were certainly not alone in those practices.¹⁰

The scarcity of funds also put constraints on documentary style and subject matter. Of course, each funding institution provided guidelines for the kind of projects it would fund, and political considerations often played a role in the grant-making process. The National Endowment for the Humanities is a case in point. The NEH Media Grants were for projects about subjects central to the humanities. The emphasis, therefore, was on solid scholarship and clarity and effectiveness in its presentation—the documentary as a vehicle to treat a subject in the humanities. Such requirements encouraged conservatism in style and technique, and a filmmaker interested in exploring new directions in documentary style had to look elsewhere for funding.

"Acceptable" topics and political perspectives were also prescribed by the NEH and were subject to the vicissitudes of the changing political climate. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the NEH had funded widely seen progressive documentaries such as The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980), The Good Fight (Mary Dore, Noel Buckner, Sam Sills, 1983), and Seeing Red (Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1983). The Reagan administration soon decided to define the humanities more narrowly, and the NEH closed its doors to explicitly political documentaries. New guidelines announced in 1984 under William Bennett, NEH chairman since 1981, declared ineligible projects that "advocate a particular program of social action or change."¹¹ The perception among many filmmakers was that politically or stylistically progressive projects were increasingly unlikely to receive federal funding. Filmmakers making documentaries about Latin America—for example, Deborah Shaffer, Susana Muñoz, and Glenn Silber—all reported funding prejudices against various projects. As Shaffer said, "Under the Carter administration the funding appointees in federal foundations were interested in topics like labor history. Now it's Great Works of Literature."¹² Susana Muñoz and Lourdes Portillo produced the 1985 film Las Madres: the Mothers of Plaza del Mayo, about Argentinean women who bravely protested the kidnapping and disappearance of their sons and daughters by the military Junta. The film was eventually nominated for an Academy Award, but the filmmakers report that federal moneys from the NEA, NEH, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the federally funded American Film Institute were closed to them. In Muñoz's words, "Obviously, the trend is now toward safe, mild stuff."¹³

Throughout the 1980s, documentary filmmakers turned to public television organizations for funding. For seven years, between 1977 and 1984, independents could apply for money from the Independent Documentary Fund. The fund had been set up by David Loxton, a producer with WNET New York, and it was financed largely by the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Grants were evaluated by peer paneling, and David Loxton oversaw projects as executive editor. Among the many significant films financed in part or in whole by the fund was the Academy Award-winning The Times of Harvey Milk; Les Blank's film about director Werner Herzog at work, Burden of Dreams (1982); and Errol Morris's look at small-town eccentrics, Vernon, Florida (1980). Although the Independent Documentary Fund was welcomed by filmmakers, it served only a few of them. Moreover, the projects it funded were still overseen by a public television producer (Loxton) and thus, in the opinion of some, were not truly independent.

It is also important to understand the role of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in financing and showing independent documentaries.¹⁴ The function of CPB was in part to fund programming for public television. Although it procured its monies largely from the federal government, it was designed as an independent entity to minimize governmental intrusion into programming decisions. Independent filmmakers argued that CPB should reserve some of its funding for truly independent work by filmmakers wholly outside the public television system. After vigorous lobbying by various coalitions of independent filmmakers, the 1978 congressional bill for public television funding directed the CPB to reserve "a substantial amount" of its programming funds for independent filmmakers, with 1980 given as a deadline for compliance. This provision brought continuous and sometimes rancorous debate among independents, PBS, and CPB about the intent of Congress and the meaning of the word independent. It also initiated competition between local public television stations and independent producers for the funds reserved for "independents."

Lewis Freedman, who began as director of the CPB program fund in 1980, was responsible for complying with the congressional mandate to provide "a substantial amount" of funding to independents. Rather than create an independent agency or turn money over to the Independent Documentary Fund, he instead created two ill-fated series, "Matters of Life and Death" and "Crisis to Crisis," designed to showcase independent productions. Whether such programming could justifiably be called independent was doubtful, but it remained a moot question, since both series failed to become a part of the PBS core schedule.¹⁵ Freedman next turned to the "Frontline" documentaries to meet the congressional mandate; "Frontline" executive producer David Fanning had promised to use independent producers for his series. Independents, however, argued that these producers would not be independent but "freelance," since their programs and ideas would be subject to the editorial standards of the series they worked for.

David Hull, who succeeded Freedman as director of the CPB program fund in 1983, created an Open Solicitation Fund of $5 million per year. The funds, however, were open not only to independents but also to PBS stations. Moreover, there was no guarantee that grant winners could show their work on public television. After more intense lobbying by coalitions of independent producers, Congress in 1988 wrote a provision into the public television funding bill directing the CPB to provide $6 million per year for three years to an Independent Production Service. Implementation of the funding was extremely slow, and the first show funded as a result of this mandate did not appear on PBS until the 1992-93 season.

An encouraging development for independent filmmakers was the genesis of a new PBS series, "P.O.V." (the letters of the title denoting "point of view"), which since 1988 has shown ten to twelve independent documentaries per season. Some of the films shown by the series generated controversy at local PBS stations and nationally. The airing of Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) caused the most consternation. A funny and angry film about what it is like to be black and gay, Tongues Untied caused North Carolina senator Jesse Helms to argue for funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, which had partially funded the film. Helms, arguing that Riggs's film "blatantly promoted homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle," used the documentary as a rallying point for the push to purge public television of its "liberal bias."¹⁶

From its very beginning, PBS had to market P.O.V. carefully, as consisting of films driven by personal visions (points of view) and thus not subject to made-for-television aesthetics or conventional standards of objectivity. Documentaries shown during the first season included Deborah Shaffer's Fire from the Mountain (1987), on Nicaraguan history and politics; Lucy Winer and Paula de Koenigsberg's Rate it X (1986), about sexism in American culture; Las Madres: the Mothers of Plaza del Mayo; The Good Fight, about Americans serving in the Spanish Civil War; and Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven (1978), a brilliant study of two pet cemeteries in California and the people who run them.¹⁷ Through the 1990s, "P.O.V." continued to be the most important television outlet for the screening of independent documentaries. In public television, uncertain and unstable funding discourages the production of creative and risky programming. Scarcity of funding, William Hoynes argues, breeds a "mentality of scarcity and dependence" and a "logic of safety."¹⁸ A result is a rhetoric of objectivity and fairness. "P.O.V," on the other hand, is clearly identified as a program that transcends such standards. Thus it not only provided an opportunity for independent filmmakers to screen their work for large audiences; it also allowed for some of public television's most innovative and provocative programming.

As mentioned above, few documentaries in the 1980s enjoyed the large sums of money brought by successful theatrical distribution. Despite what Variety's Richard Gold called "the current boomlet in theatrical documentaries" in the mid-1980s, Gold also noted that "the consensus is that documentaries remain the toughest of all sells to exhibitors, draw the smallest advances and return the most marginal profits in the picture business."'¹⁹ Of the American nonperformance documentaries of the 1980s, only the wildly successful Roger and Me (1989), at $6.7 million, grossed over $5 million in box-office receipts. After Roger and Me, the most successful American documentary films were Koyaanisqatsi (1983) at $3.2 million, Imagine: John Lennon (1988) $2.2 million, Hell's Angels Forever (1983) at $2 million, Streetwise (1985) $1.8 million, and The Thin Blue Line (1988) at $1.2 million.²⁰ Small as these returns were compared to commercial fiction films, they were nonetheless cause for some optimism.

This may seem a dismal record in comparison with the expectations of mainstream Hollywood, but several observers noted that by the mid to late 1980s, more United States commercial cinemas than ever before were showing documentary films.²¹ The breakthrough film was Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), the first independently made social documentary to gain widespread theatrical distribution. Next came The Atomic Cafe, which grossed over $1 million in 1982.²² As the decade progressed, greater numbers of documentaries were being shown in theaters. For a documentary, a successful theatrical run was not measured with a Hollywood yardstick. Most documentaries were distributed on 16mm rather than the usual 35mm, and since 16mm venues were rare, a $500,000 box-office gross would be considered a major success. Documentaries would typically open in one or two cities, hope for publicity or good reviews, then move out gradually. The Ken Burns film Huey Long (1985), for example, received positive reviews, including mention on the PBS review program "Sneak Previews." This enabled the distributor to move the documentary into twenty-four cities, and the film eventually grossed around $600,000.²³ Because advertising budgets were typically minuscule, filmmakers depended on free publicity to get the word out. Publicity came from reviews in the popular media, of course, but also from screenings and awards at major film festivals.

A major coup would be to win a nomination for an Academy Award for best feature documentary. Winning an Oscar was apparently a much-coveted goal, and during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, significant controversy was generated by the Oscars nomination process. To put it bluntly, none of the films most favored by either the critics or the public managed to get nominated for best feature documentary. In 1989, forty-five filmmakers (including Pamela Yates, Spike Lee, and Louis Malle) signed and circulated an "Open Letter to the Film Community" in which they expressed "outrage" that the overwhelming critical and popular success of the year, Michael Moore's Roger and Me, was passed up for an Academy Award.²⁴ It was not simply that Moore's film was ignored, however; resentment had been building for some time. At issue was the method by which films were nominated, the makeup of the nominating committee, charges of conflict of interest, and the perception that the nominating committee had priggish ideas about what constituted a "proper" documentary. This controversy about documentaries and Oscars escalated in the 1990s, when films such as Paris Is Burning, 35 Up, Hearts of Darkness, A Brief History of Time, Empire of the Air, Brother's Keeper, and Hoop Dreams all failed to win nominations.²⁵ Prominent film critic Roger Ebert suspected a conspiracy on the part of Hollywood to protect big studio interests, suggesting that "the Academy wishes the documentary makers would drop dead and go away and not take time away from the glamorous promotion of features. This is getting embarrassing."²⁶

Lost in all the hoopla was the unfortunate fact that being nominated for an Academy Award, while it might increase visibility for a film, rarely helped much in theatrical distribution. The 1985 Academy Award winner Broken Rainbow deals with the effects of Congress's decision to give to the Hopi tribe some land formerly settled by Navajo Indians and the forced relocation this caused. Filmmakers Victoria Mudd and Maria Florio attribute their limited theatrical success to winning the Oscar. As Florio claimed, "If we'd only gotten the nomination, the film would have been forgotten; it would play Sunday mornings at one L.A. art theater, and that would have been the end of that."²⁷ Despite Florio's testimony, however, the Oscars usually influenced theatrical distribution very little, and the public seemed to sense the chasm between what they found interesting and what the nominating committees thought were good documentaries. Few of the public's favorites were ever nominated for Academy Awards, and those that were nominated did not fare especially well at the box office.

Documentary filmmakers did not have to rely solely on commercial theatrical distribution for revenue. Some filmmakers, including Mudd and Florio, took distribution into their own hands and organized screenings outside the regular theatrical venues. Filmmakers could tap the market generated by educational institutions and special interest groups. Broken Rainrow showed in theatrical runs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Denver. In addition, it was shown by hundreds of private groups who rented a print for $175 or held benefits in which portions of the proceeds would go to the filmmakers and the rest to the Navajo cause.²⁸ Many documentary filmmakers, realizing where their chief market lay, produced educational study guides to accompany their films on video. When one purchases or rents Meg Switzgables 1982 In Our Water, a film that well illustrates the kind of roadblocks a citizen encounters when taking on polluting corporations, one also gets a study guide made possible by a grant from J. C. Penney.

Distribution continued to be a major problem for documentary filmmakers, and many were disappointed to find that, after years of work and the production of a worthwhile film, few people took notice. While home video sales became increasingly important as a means of distribution, documentaries often found themselves squeezed out by fiction films and economies of scale. A video copy of Fast Times at Ridgemont high High (1982) or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) could expect massive video sales, and low prices could be set accordingly. Even when a documentary was distributed on video, the distributor could expect comparatively few sales and often set a much higher sales price. Thus many lesser-known documentaries were priced out of the home video market.

Documentaries and American Culture

With a basic understanding of how documentaries were financed and distributed in 1980s America, we now turn to how these films were used in American culture and to what purposes they were put. Given the difficulties of financing and distribution, documentary filmmakers rarely had profits as a primary motivation for making films; typically they were enthusiastic about the craft of filmmaking, fascinated with the subjects of their films, or strongly committed to initiating social change through their work. American documentaries stood at the margins of 1980s mainstream culture but played important roles nonetheless. One role was to present progressive alternatives to main-stream politics and social thought, as I detail below. Another was to offer informative and in-depth films at a time when the television networks increasingly turned to the newsmagazine format and away from in-depth documentaries.

The 1980s saw a continuation of a function that documentaries can perform particularly well, namely, to provide a visual and aural record of and information about a whole range of issues. The kinds of subjects dealt with by filmmakers tended to cluster around common concerns, but were ultimately as diverse as the filmmakers themselves, ranging from female body builders in Pumping Iron II: The Women (George Butler, 1985) to the Hell's Angels in Hell's Angels Forever (Richard Chase, 1983) to homeless street children in Seattle Streetwise (Martin Bell, May Ellen Mark, and Cheryl McCall, 1985). Frederick Wiseman, a well-known American documentary filmmaker since the late 1960s, continued to make direct cinema films about American institutions at the rate of about one film per year. Among these are Model (1981), about the fashion industry; Deaf (1986), on the experiences and culture of the deaf; Missile (1987), on life at a nuclear missile facility; and Near Death (1989), about the institutional practices surrounding death and dying. Les Blank produced more of his joyful explorations of the folk cultures of various American ethnic groups with films such as J'ai été au bal (I Went to the Dance) (1989), on the Cajun and Zydeco music of Louisiana, In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984), about polka music and dancing. Blank also contributed Burden of Dreams (1982), a fascinating study of German filmmaker Werner Herzog on location in the jungle to shoot Fitzcarraldo (1982). Other filmmakers and institutions were intent on regional interests. Ross Spears, for example, concentrates on southerners and the South with his 1980 film Agee and Long Shadows (1987), examining the cultural legacy of the Civil War. Appalshop, a nonprofit folk arts cooperative, continued to make documentaries about Appalachia.

Numerous film biographies offered accounts of the lives of the famous and noteworthy, for example, Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist (Saul Turell, 1980), Eight Minutes to Midnight: A Portrait of Dr. Helen Caldicott (Mary Benjamin, 1981), Portrait of Maya Angelou (David Gruber, 1982), Burroughs (Howard Brookner, 1983), Frederick Douglass: An American Life (William Greaves, 1984), George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey (George Stevens, Jr., 1985), Thomas Hart Benton (Ken Burns, 1988), the excellent film Adam Clayton Powell (Richard Kilberg and Yvonne Smith, 1989), and Super Chief: The Life and Legacy of Earl Warren (Judith Leonard and Bill Jersey, 1989).

American history was a favorite topic. While Ken Burns is best known for his historical series The Civil War (1989), he also produced Brooklyn Bridge (1981), The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), Huey Long (1985), The Statue of Liberty (1985, with Buddy Squires), and Thomas Hart Benton. Other valuable historical documentaries include the public television films Vietnam: A Television History (1983), Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years and Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985 (both Henry Hampton, 1989), The Day after Trinity: Robert J. Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (John Else, 1981), and Radio Bikini (Robert Stone, 1987). Although the most striking 1980s films about Vietnam were fiction films, documentary filmmakers continued to explore the war and its aftermath. Two notable films include Soldiers in Hiding (Japhet Asher, 1985) and Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (Bill Couturie, 1987).

The medium of film is well suited to record musical performances because film not only records the sound of the performance but also its visual details. Some 1980s films about music and performers not only recorded the performances but also aquainted us with the musicians and their culture. Among best of these is From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China (Murray Lerner, 1980), which follows Stern's fascinating trip to mainland China to meet with and teach classical musicians there. Say Amen, Somebody (George T. Nierenberg, 1984) uses cinéma vérité techniques to show us some of the personalities important in African-American gospel music. Penelope Spheeris provides valuable cultural documents with her The Decline of Western Civilization (1980), on punk music and culture, and The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years (1988).

While many documentary filmmakers in the 1980s worked within the bounds of mainstream political and social thought, just as many were part of a noticeable progressive movement in social issues and foreign policy. The decade saw a wider diversity of filmmakers who made films about social issues that the mainstream media tended to avoid. There was an explosion of filmmaking by women, ethnic minorities, and gays during the 1980s. In part this was due to a perceived need to deal with pressing issues being ignored in the mainstream media. Filmmaking by women and minorities was also made possible by the fact that financing for documentary films was not governed by the socalled free market but came primarily from government sources (NEH, NEA, CPB state humanities councils, etc.) bent on granting funds to a diversity of filmmakers.

During the 1980s, many documentary films squarely confronted issues of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and American foreign and domestic policy, most often from a leftist perspective. Many of these films' makers were educated during the turbulent sixties and now had the maturity and resources to use the film medium for their activism. For example, while the Reagan administration was waging a covert war on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and supporting military regimes in South and Central America, American documentarists were busily making films explicitly and implicitly critical of American foreign policy. Numerous documentaries appeared in the 1980s dealing with political problems in South America and especially Central America—so many, in fact, that the film journal Cineaste was able to offer two separate surveys of films about those regions.²⁹ Deborah Shaffer, for example, directed several such documentaries in the 1980s, including Nicaragua: Report From the Front (1984, with Ana Maria Garcia and Glenn Silber), Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements (1984), Fire from the Mountain (1987), and Dance of Hope (1989). was filmed in Chile near the end of the Pinochet rule; Fire From the Mountain is a look at the war in Nicaragua through the eyes of Nicaraguan writer and former guerrilla Omar Cabezas; Witness to War, for which Shaffer won an Oscar for best short documentary, tells the story of Dr. Charlie Clements, an Air Force Academy graduate and Vietnam veteran who spends a year in El Salvador with the rebels attending to their medical needs. Also of importance is When the Mountains Tremble (1982), by Pamela Yates, Tom Sigel, and Peter Kinoy, a film about political oppression in Guatemala and U.S. complicity in supporting a corrupt regime there.

The 1980s also brought films about domestic social movements, most importantly about gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and homelessness, all calling for equal treatment and the cessation of discrimination and discriminatory practices. Films about gender and women's issues include the well-known The Life and Times of Rosie The Riveter (Connie Field, 1980), on women working in heavy industry during World War II; Soldier Girls (Joan Churchill and Nicholas Broomfield, 1981); Rate it X (Paula de Koenigsberg and Lucy Winer, 1986); and International Sweet Hearts of Rhythm (Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, 1986).³⁰ Films also appeared by and about racial and ethnic minorities, including (to name just a few) the work of William Greaves (Booker T. Washington: The Life and Legacy [1982], Frederick Douglass: An American Life [1984], Black Power in America: Myth or Reality [1986], and Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice [1989]), Marlon Riggs's Ethnic Notions (1987) and Tongues Untied (1989), Christine Choy and Renee Tajima's Mississippi Triangle (1985) and Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988), and Yo Soy (Jesus Salvador Trevino, 1985).³¹

Many filmmakers worked in the area of homosexual rights and the alarming AIDS epidemic. Two of the best of these films—brilliant documentaries by any standard—are The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen, 1984) and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1989), both winners of Oscars for best feature documentary in their respective years.³² Documentarians also confronted entrenched social issues such as homelessness, poverty, unemployment, and the prison system, with films such as Down and Out in America (Joseph Feury and Milton Justice, 1986), Promises to Keep (Ginny Durrin, 1988), The Bronx: A Cry for Help (Brent Owens, 1988), Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (Tony Buba, 1988), Roger and Me (Michael Moore, 1989), and Through the Wire (Nina Rosenblum, 1989). Other films deal with the history of labor and political movements. Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle (Jack Santino and Paul Wagner, 1983) tells the history of attempts by black Pullman train car porters to unionize, and places their efforts in the larger context of the struggle for civil rights. The Good Fight (Mary Dore, Noel Buckner, and Sam Sills, 1983) details the efforts of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion as they fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Finally, Seeing Red (Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1984) interviews onetime members of the American Communist party.

That most documentaries on social issues and foreign policy were both funded by government grants and had a progressive bent was not lost on the Reagan administration, which employed various means to curb such films. While Republican attempts to cut funding to both the NEA and the NEH were intermittently successful, funding levels generally remained constant throughout the 1980s while production costs rose. The struggle against "liberal" filmmaking, however, extended beyond levels of funding to attempts to redirect monies away from certain kinds of projects. As I noted above, the NEH, under director William Bennett, narrowed its definition of the humanities to exclude films that promote social causes. As Bennett said, "If you look at the record, you would form the opinion that the NEH was a national organization for raising social consciousness."³³ For Bennett and the Reagan administration, this was a negative.

One struggle that occupied the last half of the decade had to do with the United States Information Agency (USIA) and American documentaries exported to other countries. It was part of the business of the USIA to grant "education" certificates to documentary films. This enabled distributors to avoid high import taxes in sixty countries under a 1942 international treaty called the Beruit Agreement. During the early 1980s, the USIA under the Reagan administration had begun to deny certificates to certain films that espoused "liberal" political positions. These were films, for example, about Nicaragua (implying that the United States was the aggressor), uranium mining, and the threat of nuclear war.

The Center for Constitutional Rights brought a lawsuit against the USIA in 1985, arguing that such practices were arbitrary and violated the First Amendment to the Constitution. In 1986, a federal judge ruled that the regulations used by the USIA to approve distribution of films abroad were unconstitutional and far too vague. One of these regulations, for example, allowed the agency to deny special export status for films that attempted to "influence opinion, conviction or policy." The USIA responded to this ruling with new regulatory guidelines permitting it to label certain films as "propaganda" and thus deny them duty-free status, and requiring films to acknowledge viewpoints other than their own and represent "difference of opinion or other point of view."³⁴ In 1988, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down these new regulations. Both decisions were seen as a victory for supporters of the First Amendment, denying the government the right to label films as propaganda on the basis of whether they criticize the policies of the current presidential administration.

During the 1980s, then, documentary filmmakers continued to make compelling and informative films about diverse issues. Despite attempts by the Reagan administration to curb the production of films it deemed "liberal" or "left-wing," the 1980s saw an energetic movement to make progressive films about domestic social issues and foreign affairs. Moreover, with the rise of videotape and cable television, more people than ever before were seeing serious documentary films. By the end of the decade the place of documentary film in the mainstream media was expanding on public television. Moreover, by offering an alternative to official politics and mainstream social thought, documentaries played an important social role in 1980s America.

The Art of American Documentary in the 1980s

By the "art" of American documentary I mean basically two things. The first is the craft of making documentary films and developments in the techniques and methods used by documentary filmmakers. The second depends on a conventional understanding of a "work of art" created by an artist. Here the concern is with creative films and emerging documentary filmmakers, especially those who show an interest in expanding the boundaries of conventional documentary styles and going beyond journalistic objectivity.

The documentary legacy of the 1960s, the movement known as direct cinema or cinéma vérité, provided a backdrop against which 1980s developments in documentary style can be assessed. Cinéma vérité was a style that emerged at the end of the 1950s, with the availability of new technologies. Lightweight cameras and sound equipment enabled the recording of 16mm images and synchronized sound with a crew of two persons moving independently of each other. This new technology allowed for unprecedented spontaneity and freedom in documentary filmmaking and encouraged an aesthetic of "reality." The goal for many became to "capture" reality on film and tape and to allow it to "speak for itself," or to present the material such that viewers are allowed freedom of interpretation. Various techniques that manipulated this pristine image and sound recording—for example, voice-over narration—were seen as authoritarian and artificial.

Cinéma vérité was criticized from the start, but by the 1980s it was clearly seen by many as theoretically misguided and too restrictive for the practicing filmmaker. It was misguided because it exaggerated the ability of the camera to provide an objective record of any scene or event. Cinéma vérité films could not escape the manipulation of the real that they so consciously tried to avoid, and the initial enthusiastic pronouncements of early cinéma vérité practitioners seem naive in retrospect. On the other hand, vérité techniques were restrictive because without voice-over narration, a musical score, and other creative devices, documentaries were unable to explicitly deal with abstract ideas. While cinéma vérité techniques were fine for capturing the sights and sounds of an event, they were less able to provide history, context, and analysis. In emphasizing the recording capabilities of the camera, cinéma vérité techniques also effaced filmmaker. One of the most celebrated documentary filmmakers of the 1980s, Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven [1978]; Vernon, Florida [1980], The Thin Blue Line [1988]), professed to admire the films of Frederick Wiseman, the best-known practitioner of vérité (although Wiseman rejects the term cinéma vérité). Yet Morris practiced a style of filmmaking that couldn't be further from Wiseman's. Morris says he tries to be "as obtrusive as possible" in making his films. "I believe cinéma vérité set back documentary filmmaking twenty or thirty years," he says. "There's no reason why documentaries can't be as personal as fiction filmmaking and bear the imprint of those who made them. Truth isn't guaranteed by style or expression. It isn't guaranteed by anything."³⁵

Although Fred Wiseman and a few others continued to make films in the cinéma vérité style, the usual documentary in the 1980s differed greatly from that paradigm. The documentary of the 1980s typically incorporated filmed interviews, archival footage, musical scores, and most often a voice-over narrator or narrators to give information and analysis. One film that is conventional in style yet tells a compelling story is Jon Else's The Day after Trinity: Robert J. Oppenheimer and the Atomic. Bomb The film features a deep-voiced (male) voice-over narrator, interviews with former acquaintances and relatives of Oppenheimer, archival materials (photographs, press clippings, and film footage), and appropriate music. Given the degree to which cinéma vérité practitioners had opposed voice-over narration, it is a mark of the wholesale rejection of vérité methods that voice-overs had become so common in the 1980s. Most often the narrator is impersonal (unidentified), and a male with a stentorian voice. Sometimes major Hollywood stars would lend their voices to a project they believed in. Martin Sheen provided the voice-over for Promises to Keep, for example, and Dustin Hoffman for Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. Many filmmakers tried to avoid "omnipotent" narration by using, as much as possible, recorded voices from existing films, historical television or radio broadcasts, or the voices of those interviewed. For All Mankind (Al Reinert and Betsy Broyles Brier, 1989), a poetic film about NASA moon missions, uses only the voices of the astronauts and ground control personnel recorded at the time of their missions. Other documentaries avoided such impersonal narration by choosing narrators who were involved in the subject of the film, and then by clearly identifying the narrator. Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle, for example, identifies its voice-over narrator as the one hundred-year-old Rosina Tucker, the wife of a Pullman porter.

While cinéma vérité had thought arrangements and reenactments to be dishonest or manipulative, filmmakers in the 1980s were more willing to engage in such practices. In his Agee, for example, Ross Spears has actors reenact family gatherings on the warm Tennessee nights of James Agee's childhood. In When the Mountains Tremble, Pamela Yates reenacts a stormy meeting between the elected leader of Guatemala and the U.S. ambassador. The director who most consistently employed scene arrangements and reenactments, however, was Errol Morris, each of whose documentary films takes the practice to new heights. By Gates of Heaven (1978) Morris had developed his conventional techniques for filming interviews with arranged backgrounds, careful lighting, and placement of the camera at a consistent height from the ground and distance from the person being interviewed. In The Thin Blue Line (1988), one of the most celebrated documentaries of the 1980s, Morris reenacts the murder of a policeman, shown over and again from the perspectives of several different witnesses. The recreations do not show what the film takes to be "the truth," but are presented to illustrate the stories of witnesses, most of whom are shown to be unreliable. Thus the recreations contribute to the theme of memory and the difficulty of knowing and reconstructing the past. Morris takes reenactments and arrangements further still in A Brief History of Time, where he actually constructed a set to appear as though it were the office of physicist Stephen Hawking. The assumption of documentary filmmakers who explore such techniques is that insight extends beyond surface appearances, and that at times the documentary can communicate such insights more effectively by a direct manipulation of those appearances.

Documentarians of the 1980s found other ways to leave the methodological constrictions of cinéma vérité behind. The use of music to express mood and emotion became very common. For example, For All Mankind uses "space" music composed by Brian Eno, The Thin Blue Line expresses a sense of mystery and fate through the compositions of Philip Glass, and Bobby McFerrin and Voicestra composed and performed the musical compositions for Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. The Atomic Cafe (Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, 1982) used archival footage of silly government propaganda and naive period songs (such as "Atomic Cocktail" and "Duck and Cover") to paint an ironic picture of government attempts to soothe the cold war fears of post-World War II America.

Perhaps the most artful visual style is found in the documentaries of fashion photographer Bruce Weber, whose films Broken Noses (1987) and Let's Get Lost (with Nan Bush, 1988) are both impressionistic personality studies. Although Let's Get Lost, about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, is the better-known film (having been nominated for an Academy Award), Broken Noses is at least as compelling, telling the story of the vibrant, good-hearted professional lightweight boxer Andy Minsker and his boxing club for boys in Portland, Oregon. Both films feature Weber's stylized black-and-white cinematography, making use of careful and artful compositions, flash frames and quick fades in and out, a roving camera, expressionistic low-key lighting, and sometimes the use of moving lights and even spotlights. Together with Chet Baker's cool, relaxed jazz scores (on both films), Weber's films conjure up a dreamlike world that takes us far away from the idea of the documentary as a record of objective reality.

A film that gained much attention as a personal documentary is Ross McElwee's Sherman's March (1986), a highly reflexive and intimate film that examines McElwee's travels in the South, ostensibly to follow General Sherman s Civil War march of destruction.³⁶ The film's subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, gives some idea of other directions in which the film meanders. Ultimately, the film is about Ross McElwee and his romantic interests, and is important for marking the development of personal and idiosyncratic documentary filmmaking. What McElwee rejects is not so much cinéma vérité as the conventions of traditional historical or journalistic documentary. Although the film begins with a conventional off-screen voice-over narration, McElwee soon rejects this approach for a more personal style in which he often films his encounters with others and films himself talking to the camera.

Some filmmakers became highly interested in questions of epistemology and in so doing produced highly unconventional work. Can truth be known and represented in the documentary? If so, what are the best methods of doing so? Jill Godmilow's film Far from Poland (1984) wonders how to best make a film about the Solidarity movement in Poland after her entry visa had been denied by the Polish consulate. The film becomes a highly reflexive meditation not only on Solidarity but on knowledge and representation, incorporating the questioning of the filmmaker-narrator, voice-overs over black screens, and staged and recreated interviews. Trinh T. Minh-ha is explicit in her rejection of truth and even meaning in representation. Her films, for example, Surname ViÊt Given Name Nam (1989) are highly disruptive in style, refusing the coherence and clarity of more conventional documentary techniques.³⁷ (Both Godmilow and Minh-ha are treated as experimentalists in ch. 10.)

Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989) was not only the biggest box-office success of any nonperformance documentary in history but also generated the most intense controversy, making the documentary a common subject for discussion. In Roger and Me, Michael Moore takes on General Motors and then-CEO Roger Smith. Moore appears in his film as a shaggy citizen of Flint, Michigan, on a righteous quest to show Roger Smith the havoc the CEO caused by closing down factories in Flint and moving the work to Mexico. Initially the film drew attention because it is immensely entertaining, because it skewers Smith and General Motors, and because it fared phenomenally well first at various film festivals and later theatrically (after having been purchased for distribution by Warner Bros.). Michael Moore showed a special talent for self-promotion both within his film and in his public appearances.

Although the automobile industry was naturally critical of Moore and his film from the very beginning, the more intense furor did not develop until Harlan Jacobsen, then editor of Film Comment, accused Moore of dishonesty.³⁸ In an interview and cover story for Film Comment, Jacobsen criticizes Moore for representing events out of chronology in Roger and Me. For example, Moore makes it appear as though an unemployed auto worker steals the cash register of a pizzeria while President Reagan is visiting, when in fact the register was stolen a few days earlier. Moore also makes it appear as though the massive layoffs in Flint occurred all at once in 1987, when in fact they had been occurring in smaller numbers for many years. In general, Moore rearranges and streamlines his account of the factory shutdowns and Flint's response to create the tidy narrative structure of a Hollywood movie, and in so doing, leaves himself open to charges of deception. Richard Schickel in Time, for example, accuses Moore of "imposing" a "fictional design that proves the predetermined point he wants to make."³⁹ Then came Pauline Kael's withering review in the New Yorker. Kael attacked the mocking humor of the film, which holds up various unemployed Flint citizens, such as the "Rabbit Lady," who sells rabbits for "pets or meat," as objects of our ridicule. Roger and Me, Kael writes, "made me feel cheap for laughing."⁴⁰

In a sense, the discussion about truth telling and deception sparked by Moore's film is an extension of the characteristic problem for documentary filmmakers in the 1980s and beyond. After rejecting the theoretical assumptions and practical methodology of cinéma vérité, filmmakers are left to struggle with an inevitable conflict between the creativity that is an ineluctable aspect of all filmmaking and the need to show and tell the ostensible truth. In response to Michael Moore's manipulations, some critics claimed that he had lied, while others countered that his rearranging was simply an instance of the inevitable manipulations all documentary filmmakers must incorporate into their films. Part of the problem here is that while many filmmakers have rejected the cinéma vérité claims about documentary—that it is or should be the unmanipulated record of reality—the public and many critics have not. The more difficult issue, however, and one that will continue to confront documentary filmmakers, is how to distinguish legitimate creative techniques from those that are manipulative and deceptive. No documentary can be a mere objective recording of reality, but that does not rule out the possibility that the art of a film can misrepresent and deceive.⁴¹ Questions about documentary art, then, do not simply concern entertainment or imagination; they are also about how to make claims through the medium of film—compellingly, creatively, and without deceiving the audience.

Conclusion

Despite ongoing problems with financing and distribution, by the end of the 1980s the documentary genre in the United States was doing comparatively well. It was still extremely difficult to secure theatrical distribution, but nonetheless documentary films were being shown theatrically in greater numbers than ever before. Public television was showing and financing more independent documentaries, although spots on "P.O.V.," for example, were given to only ten to twelve independent films per year. For independent documentary filmmakers, the end of the decade promised more opportunities to produce and distribute their work.

One enduring legacy of the 1980s will be the significant trend toward filmmaking by women, members of ethnic and racial minorities, and gays and lesbians, together with the progressive social and political messages that strongly emerged during a decade when mainstream politics was generally thought to be quite conservative. When one looks at who is making documentary films, one can only conclude that the institutions of documentary were open to a wide diversity of people. While filmmakers sometimes claimed that funds were closed to innovative and politically incisive projects, it must also be concluded that the dominant political project of American documentary, if the American political scene be the standard of measure, was decidedly progressive.

The 1980s was also a decade of remarkable stylistic experimentation, and the decade brought the emergence of several filmmakers who saw documentary as an art form or means of personal expression. Filmmakers such as Errol Morris and especially Michael Moore brought a good deal of attention to the documentary and prepared the way for increased coverage in the popular media, rising interest by the public, and more theatrical distribution for documentaries in the 1990s. As filmmakers experimented with personal expression and creative uses of technique, the documentary was increasingly seen not only as a vehicle for information or social activism but as an art form in its own right.