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Reality Sandwiches
Essay by Haida Paul
This essay accompanies the screening of Welfare.
“...documentary... a cinematic tradition and mode of audience reception that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries...” [1]
One day in the early seventies I watched an extraordinary film called High School. Produced, directed and edited by Frederick Wiseman and photographed by Richard Leiterman, High School was an epiphany for me. Or perhaps the seed of an epiphany, which sprouted in my mind and took root in the way I began thinking about documentary.
At the time, I was an apprentice negative-cutter and scarcely knew the defining divide between documentary and fiction film until some one told me about ‘suspension of disbelief’. This term, to me, described a vital requirement in everyday life, not just at the movies.
“According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment.” [2]
During my next few years as a fledgling editor, I wielded my splicer with enthusiasm on every project that came my way: ads, promos, documentaries of every kind, tv dramas and feature films. It soon became clear that they all, in one way or another, involved issues of belief or disbelief, for which I, as an editor, was expected to enhance or dispel.
“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent.” [3]
Around this time two things happened. A friend took me to see Welfare (another Wiseman masterpiece, made in 1975 and photographed by William Brayne), and I realized that if I was going to fiddle with the ‘truth’, I wanted it to be the kind of truth that Wiseman’s films demonstrate.
When High School and Welfare were made, films described as cinéma vérité and direct cinema were generally viewed as representations of unvarnished reality, a truer documentation. Wiseman’s insight, however, was to recognize that there is no pure documentary form, and that all filmmaking, irrespective of the intention, involves a process of imposing order. For this reason he prefers to call his films ‘reality fictions’.
“Any documentary, mine or anyone else’s, made in no matter what style, is arbitrary, biased, prejudiced, compressed and subjective. Like any of its sisterly or brotherly fictional forms, it is born in choice.” [4]
In documentary, the initial fracture with reality occurs in the choices made on location. The context of the shoot is always relevant. Who and what are being filmed? Why? Subjectivity and objectivity intermingle freely in those decisions. My preference is to work with directors who know their bias and whether or not they wish to pursue it into the editing room. Documentary editing is a constant process of manipulation. But even more than this, it is a creative expression of a particular point of view.
Wiseman, who always edits his own films, utilizes his experiences during location shooting as a form of research. He ‘finds’ the film in the editing process which can take anywhere from six months to a year.
“This great glop of material which represents the externally recorded memory of my experience of making the film is of necessity incomplete. The memories not preserved on film float somewhat in my mind as fragments available for recall, unavailable for inclusion but of great importance in the mining and shifting process known as editing. This editorial process ... is sometimes deductive, sometimes associational, sometimes non-logical and sometimes a failure... The crucial element for me is to try and think through my own relationship to the material by whatever combination of means is compatible. This involves a need to conduct a four-way conversation between myself, the sequence being worked on, my memory, and general values and experience.” [5]
Wiseman’s films offer no commentary or narration. The sound tracks carry no scored music or sound other than what was recorded on location. His films are long, sometimes exceeding three hours. They provoke questions that have no simple answers. They allow, even encourage, opposing perspectives.
I’m unable to think of a term that might describe the opposite of ‘suspending disbelief’. However, Wiseman’s work presents us with an opportunity to neither believe nor disbelieve. He shows us his own distillation of his own experience. We are then free to make of it what we will. Responsibility for interpretation is in the mind of the beholder. And isn’t that finally the purpose of art?
Curator Biography
 Haida has worked in film and television for over 40 years. Her passion for the documentary form was ignited by the early work of Allan King, the Maysles Brothers & Charlotte Zwerin and, perhaps most significantly, Frederick Wiseman. Over the years she has collaborated with independent filmmakers from Canada, India, Britain, the United States, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Her teaching activities include apprenticeship training for Directors’ Guild of Canada, workshops and seminars with Cineworks Canada, sessional lecturer at Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr University, and the University of British Columbia.
NOTES
The title of this essay is taken from Allen Ginsberg’s book of poetry, ‘Reality Sandwiches’, City Lights Publishers, 1963.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_film
Source: Nichols, Bill. ‘Foreword’, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds.) Documenting The Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
Source: Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion
- johnjosephbachir.org/content/wiseman.pdf
Source: Wiseman, Frederick. “Editing as a four-way conversation”. Dox: Documentary Film Quarterly, n.1 (April 1994): 4-6
- ibid
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