American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

      Introduction

      Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time.

      WILLIAM JAMES, ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM¹

      A TENTATIVE OVERVIEW OF BOSTON-AREA DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING

      Over the years, particular forms of filmmaking have been identified with particular cities: Hollywood, with commercial melodrama, obviously; Mumbai, with a certain form of Indian musical; and New York and San Francisco with American avant-garde filmmaking. And in his remarkable book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), David James argues convincingly for the Los Angeles area’s centrality not simply in the history of commercial filmmaking but in the histories of a wide range of alternative cinemas. One of James’s accomplishments is to recognize that the makeup of a particular urban area can facilitate the production of specific forms of cinematic art and particular kinds of cinematic critique.

      During the past fifty years, the Boston area has been the fountainhead of American documentary filmmaking.² Much of the most interesting and influential nonfiction filmmaking of recent decades has been made in and around Boston, or by men and women who have had significant connections with the Boston area. And filmmakers working in Cambridge at the MIT “Film Section” and at Harvard have made formative changes in how documentary is understood and in what kinds of documentaries get made. Surprisingly, however, relatively little attention has been accorded this phenomenon. Even in the Boston area itself, at least until very recently, very few have seemed to recognize the city’s significance for this crucial dimension of film history.³

      

      To some extent, the Boston area’s emergence as a producer of documentary film had to do with the expansion of technological options available to nonfiction filmmakers beginning in the early 1960s. The availability of lightweight, sync-sound film rigs (Ricky Leacock, who would team up with Ed Pincus in 1968 to establish the Film Section at MIT, was a central figure in the development of this equipment) made new forms of “cinema verite” filmmaking possible.⁴ The result was a new set of options for documentary. The increasing mobility, flexibility, and sensitivity of recording equipment facilitated a wide range of innovative approaches to representing reality. Filmmakers recording image and sound from within the flux of events could now act as “flies on the wall,” observing what they saw and heard with little interference, or they could instigate new situations and record the results as they unfolded.⁵

      Observational documentary has substantial roots in the Boston area. In 1960 Robert Drew, who studied new editorial approaches for candid film reporting while on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, assembled a group of filmmakers—Leacock, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker—to document the Wisconsin Democratic primary race between John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. The result, Primary (1960), was a breakthrough, providing viewers with an insider’s view of the American political process; this in-close depiction of American politics at work continued in Drew Associates’ later films, including Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), a documentation of the desegregation of the University of Alabama by John Kennedy and his attorney general, Robert Kennedy, in the face of Governor George Wallace’s resistance.⁶ Several of the Drew Associates were soon making their own contributions to the observational mode: after filming what became a television show about the strange scene that surrounded the birth of the Fischer quintuplets in Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1963, Leacock made Happy Mother’s Day (1963, co-directed by Joyce Chopra), his own satirical version of the experience. At MIT from 1968 on, Leacock would continue to explore the possibilities of observational filmmaking, to work toward the development of increasingly lightweight and inexpensive sync-sound equipment, and to nurture a younger generation of filmmakers. Albert Maysles and his brother David (both were born in Boston and raised in Brookline, and both were graduates of Boston University: Albert earned an M.A. in psychology and taught at B.U. for three years; David, a B.A. in psychology), made their breakthrough feature, Salesman, in 1968, documenting four Bible salesmen who were working out of Boston.

      The most prolific and independent of Cambridge documentary filmmakers working in the observational mode is Frederick Wiseman. Since 1967 and Titicut Follies, his controversial film about inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Bridgewater (shot by John Kennedy Marshall), Wiseman has been recognized as the quintessential observational filmmaker. Accomplished and often brilliant, Wiseman has focused on a wide range of American institutions—institutions in a broad sense of the term—in dozens of feature films, including such cine-landmarks as High School (1968), Law & Order (1969), Hospital (1969), Welfare (1975), Near Death (1989), and Belfast, Maine (1999). Wiseman’s work, a staple of American public television for a generation, has provided, and continues to provide, a remarkable panorama of contemporary institutional life. Wiseman’s films are distributed by Zipporah Films, Wiseman’s distribution company in Cambridge.

      Another major Boston area contribution, or really a continuing series of contributions, to modern documentary has resulted from the long-term commitment of Boston’s television station WGBH to well-crafted informational documentaries. Since The Negro and American Promise (1963), WGBH has been a pioneer in television programming about race. One of WGBH’s signal series, of course, is Eyes on the Prize, produced by Henry Hampton, who moved to Boston in 1961, where he founded Blackside Productions. For the two Eyes on the Prize series—the first, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), which premiered in 1987 on PBS; the second, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads (1965–1985); it premiered in 1990—Hampton assembled a group of researchers and filmmakers, many of them African Americans, who compiled a wealth of documentation of the civil rights movement and interviewed many of the individuals who had participated in or witnessed crucial events in this history. The fourteen programs in the two series provide the most extensive and gripping cinematic record of one of the major social transformations in American history. Among the most powerful of the Eyes on the Prize episodes is the thirteenth program, The Keys to the Kingdom (1974–1980), which was produced, directed, and written by Harvard graduate Paul Stekler and the late Jacqueline Shearer, a lifelong Bostonian: this episode chronicles the clash in Boston over school busing. Boston University graduate Orlando Bagwell, who directed the third and fifth episodes of Eyes on the Prize, has gone on to make a series of documentaries about African American history, including the four-part, six-hour, WGBH-produced Africans in America (1998).

      ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM AND PERSONAL DOCUMENTARY

      The Boston area continues to be a remarkably active center for nonfiction filmmaking, though the modern development of two particular genres of documentary seems more precisely a product of Cambridge, and in particular of the MIT Film Section and the Peabody Museum, the Film Study Center and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. One of these genres has come to be called “ethnographic film”: originally, the term designated the use of film to document information about preindustrial cultures, particularly cultures on the verge of collapse or transformation. During recent years, “ethnographic film” has come to have a much broader cinematic application.

      

      The other genre of documentary Cambridge has nurtured is what has come to be called “personal documentary”: the cinematic chronicling of the filmmaker’s personal and/or family life. This genre of documentary needs to be understood, at least for the purposes of this study, as distinct from the various forms of “personal filmmaking” that have been developed by “avant-garde” filmmakers since the 1940s. These include the “psychodrama”—dramatizations of disturbed states of mind: for example, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947); the personally expressive cinema of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, and Nathaniel Dorsky; and the diaristic work of Jonas Mekas. In this study, “personal documentary” is used to refer to those explorations and depictions of the personal lives of the filmmakers during which family members, friends, and others are recorded in sync sound, or with the illusion