Camera obscurer?

IRISH DOCUMENTARIES: HUGH LINEHANreviews Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland Since the 1990s Edited by Carol McKeogh and Díóg O'Connell Cork University Press, 176pp. €39

LIKE ITS SISTER ART, photography, film has always had a tenuous, paradoxical, productive relationship with concepts such as “facts”and “truth”. The camera lens that supposedly records reality is just as good, if not better, at conjuring up the worlds of dream and fantasy.

Yet we somehow expect factual film-making to aspire to some pure notion of truth, regardless of the high artifice involved in conceiving, planning, filming and editing any film. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the deeply unsatisfactory definitions of the documentary form, which by some reckonings encompasses everything from David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, taking in along its way swathes of reality television and investigative journalism.

So what is documentary? John Grierson’s famous formulation, that it is the “creative treatment of actuality”, doesn’t help much, as it could stretch to include Tallafornia.

The film theorist Paul Rotha offers a more nuanced definition: “Documentary defines not subject or style, but approach. It denies neither trained actors nor the advantages of staging. It justifies the use of every known technical artifice to gain its effect on the spectator . . . To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person.”

This collection of essays and interviews from some of Ireland’s leading film-makers and academics touches on many aspects of the wave of documentary production that has taken place here since the early 1990s.

In a rather breathless introduction, the book’s editors look back even further, to the early 1960s, described as a time when “the media’s role was to support the state, the church and big business; to maintain the status quo. It was certainly not to investigate, challenge or criticise”.

This is contrasted with the situation today, when, “in a more stable democracy, the balance has shifted and the media play a key role as the watchdog of society”.

You don’t have to be an ideologue of any stripe to find this analysis a little wanting.

It’s no accident that the introduction refers to the media and looks back to the early 1960s and the launch of Teilifís Éireann. Despite the attempts of film-makers such as Robert Flaherty, documentaries have never attracted the audiences or made the profits of their fictional counterparts. They have always been marginal activities, often subject to the whim of State agencies. So the relationship between documentary and public-service television is central to this story.

It’s disappointing, therefore, that the critical analysis here fails to tease out fully the aesthetic and creative tensions between documentary film-makers’ desire to make original work on the one hand and commissioning departments’ need for more generic “factual” TV strands on the other.

To be fair, Kevin Rafter does detail the dramatic rise in RTÉ’s commissioning of independent productions that took place over the period, and notes correctly that, despite the positive implications of this, the broadcaster’s dominant position in Irish commissioning means that it maintains “considerable control over the programmes produced by the independent sector”.

In other words, rather than acting as a funding source for original or innovative film projects, RTÉ defines exactly the programmes it wants, then invites tenders to carry out the production duties. This is more akin to outsourcing than to true independent commissioning. As a result, writes Rafter, high concepts with the potential to deliver “appointments to view” over the course of several weeks gain precedence over the authored, single feature-length documentary.

Donald Taylor Black quotes an internal industry report from 2007 that says: “The role and input from directors is becoming less and less important to broadcasters and when a doc is commissioned by RTÉ there is this real sense that ‘they are the bosses and editorially you do it their way or else’.”

There’s little point in bemoaning these realities; TV executives have their own job to do, and, in the right hands, TV programmes can reach and affect far more people than any other medium can. The late Mary Raftery, in an interview with Carol McKeogh, points this out when talking about her hugely influential States of Fear, from 1999. “There hadn’t really been a history of documentary making such an impact,” Raftery says. “Certainly some had been made which had had an impact but nothing quite on that scale and I think it would have been difficult for any other medium to have had that impact.”

States of Fear demonstrated what we all know: that good journalism – the patient unearthing of facts, the assembling of a narrative, the in-depth interview – can have much greater impact on the screen than on the page. The obverse of that is that pseudojournalism – the absurd High Society, for example – can receive far more attention than it deserves.

But are journalism and documentary synonymous? A chapter on the production background of the Prime Time Investigates programme on Leas Cross nursing home seems more appropriate for a book on media studies than one on documentary-making.

While the Irish Film Board, the Arts Council and, to some extent, TG4 provide support for what might be characterised as pure creative work, the reality is that nobody in Ireland will ever get rich from making documentaries. The best pieces here, therefore, are from vocational film-makers at the coalface: Louis Lentin’s memoir of his struggle to make Dear Daughter and Ken Wardrop’s description of the creative processes behind his charming His and Hers both fulfil Rotha’s precepts on meaning and significance.

And Alan Gilsenan, whose films since the late 1980s probably stand as the most substantial body of work documenting and exploring contemporary Irish society in an unashamedly cinematic language, contributes a typically thoughtful piece on how ethics and aesthetics, trust and sincerity intertwined in the making of his powerful series The Asylum, finding an apposite quote from Oscar Wilde: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either.”

Hugh Linehan is Online Editor