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Aug 20, 2014

How Cinema Has Become The Home Of Documentaries

by Abi Weaver

For decades television seemed to be the natural home for documentary makers. The gradual switch from film to video in the late 1970s and 1980s meant that capturing images outdoors or in tricky locations with a relatively small crew became easier and consequently cheaper. Throughout the 1980s television in Britain featured many documentaries which were not simply one-offs, but sometimes moved into the series format, something that previously had been the domain of drama. Fly-on-the-wall style was in vogue and – despite exceptions like Nick Broomfield who continued to use film and put himself in front of the camera – the public’s appetite looked like it would never wane for this sort of broadcasting. Even as recently as twenty years ago, cinema was the place to go for a feature film and television was the medium for documentaries. Or so, conventional wisdom had it.

The rise of reality television in the 1990s blurred the lines between fly-on-the-wall style documentaries and other genres. Some subjects of documentaries complained that they had been egged on or inappropriately edited to give a skewed picture. As TV moved away from serious and responsible documentary making with very honourable exceptions, including BBC Bristol’s natural history output, the love affair with so-called ‘reality’ continued to rise. This left a niche which film makers have been filling in ever-increasing numbers. These days, more and more documentaries get distributed in cinemas in North America and Europe. Sometimes, this is down to a star film maker, such as Martin Scorsese, turning his hand to a documentary. Sometimes it is down to the subject matter. Either way, whilst television executives increasingly feed the clamour for reality subjects, film makers have turned to the documentary as their big screen medium of choice.

If you look at Scorsese’s recent documentary output, it is easy to see why the silver screen format works best. Still making feature films, he has produced documentaries on Bob Dylan, George Harrison and ‘The Blues’. Given the outstanding sound systems that these musical subjects deserve, it is hardly surprising that the documentaries enjoyed great success with cinema audiences – where audio is generally much better than with broadcast TV. Equally, his ‘Letter To Elia’ which was about the life and works of director Elia Kazan only really worked on a big screen, where the clips of Kazan’s work – from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ to ‘East Of Eden’ – were being shown in the format for which they were originally designed.

Scorsese is not the only big name director/producer to be using cinema as the chosen format for documentaries. Steven Soderbergh’s 2010 documentary about Spalding Gray, for example, had its UK premier at LIDF. Roman Polanksi is another director who is probably better known for his feature films but is one who has turned to documentary production in recent years.

Nowadays, it is not just big name directors who get involved with the trend for cinema-based documentaries. Hollywood’s leading actors are also keen to lend their names to them, particularly in the form of narration. No less a star than Tom Cruise, for instance, narrated Space Station 3D – a movie that used three dimensional imagery in the IMAX format. Morgan Freeman has narrated a similar 3D documentary, one that looks in to the stunning natural history of Madagascar. This IMAX documentary movie is to be released in the UK later this year. It is perhaps in this format, more than any other, that television can no longer compete with cinema. If you look at the IMAX showings from a successful chain like Cineworld, then at least half of the viewings will probably be of documentaries at any given time. Although television does have some capacity for both high-definition and 3D broadcasting, it certainly lags a long way behind the immersive visual and auditory experience that the IMAX can afford.

Perhaps there is one more point to be made about the advantage cinema has over television, in terms of documentary making. Cinema, unlike home-based TV viewing, is a collective medium that is watched in the company of others. Touching and humorous moments, which documentaries certainly bring to audiences, simply have more impact when you watch them in a picture house rather than at home. As more and more film makers are discovering, cinema really is documentary’s new home.

 

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Posted in: Director's Blog

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