Ordinarily So
Gillian Wearing and documentary film-making
There was a time when the purpose of British documentaries was to chronicle reality - to tell the truth. Britain led the world in truth-telling. Our documentaries, particularly the fly-on-the-wall sort pioneered by Paul Watson and Franc Roddam’s The Family (1974), were revered across the world. Although the director and the crew were crouched hugely in the corner of some beleaguered household, mouthing: ‘We’re not here! Don’t look at us!’ whenever somebody forgot to ignore them, these films purported to document real life.
Of course, mutations of this form of documentary have been occurring around the world - in a small and habitually ignored manner - for some time, but almost invariably outside of Britain. Jean Rouche did it - in France - with Chronicle of a Summer (1961), in which he wandered around asking people if they were happy. Leni Riefenstahl famously turned the study of people into a study of beauty and resilience: an examination of the human form as demagogue. And in Sherman’s March (1985) - my vote for the finest marriage between documentary and art - Ross McElwee was commissioned to make a historical documentary about the American Civil War. A week into shooting, however, his girlfriend left him. So he spent the money he’d been given tracking down his old girlfriends, chatting up new girls, wondering what went wrong and whether he should shave off his beard. Once in a while, feeling guilty about not pursuing the historical documentary he set out to make, he lazily films a monument or two. Eventually - and this is a long film - these two disparate strands begin to mutate. It was the women of the Deep South who conspired to demolish General Sherman’s bloody Unionist march. It is the women of the Deep South - with their efficacy and their fortitude - who take Ross McElwee into their homes and tell him where he’s going wrong.
But in Britain, the documentary’s emphasis has historically been on facts, rather than form. We have always been a reticent, bottled-up nation, so when the public was given permission to let it all pour out, they did. This wasn’t theatre. The Americans, by all accounts, lie through their teeth to get onto Oprah: they give themselves ailments and predicaments they didn’t even know existed. But British truth was - and is - something far more genuine. Indeed, in the glory days, so much truth poured out there was no need to distil reality through the filters of metaphor or symbolism. There was no need to turn things into art.
In the mid-60s, Michael Apted began filming a series of documentaries charting the progress, at seven year intervals, of a bunch of British children. By the time I saw them, he had made three: 7-UP, 7+7 and 21-UP. I was at Jewish summer camp, and they showed us all three in one go. Some of the children in the films were privileged. Some were working-class. One wanted to be a jockey. One ended up, at 21, sitting in a horrible cafe in the middle of nowhere, staring out of the window, hardly breathing, like a statue.
This was extraordinary for us, watching 14 years flash by in three hours, watching disappointments germinate, the seemingly arbitrary handing-down of prosperity and failure. Of course, there was nothing arbitrary about it. Michael Apted’s films were about the inevitability of destiny. We watched 14 years go by on screen, and we saw them go by, in reality.
For Gillian Wearing’s recent film, 10-16 (1997), she taped seven children, from the ages of 10 to 16, talking about the world around them. With characteristic childish innocence, the youngest child recalls climbing trees with his cat. Pretty soon, though, things start to disintegrate. An eleven-year old says: ‘First I hit people on the arm and then I kick them in the legs and then I punch them in the belly… I don’t think many people like me that much.’ The 16-year old talks about his stretch marks and his acne: ‘It was like I’d been given this horrible mask to wear, and some kind of clown’s body.’
Seven adult actors were then employed to lip-synch the testimonies. So the identities of the children are concealed, and the whole thing becomes something else. In the adult frames - the likes of which these voices will one day occupy - we see reminders of their futures, and our pasts. When the 16-year old is lip-synched by a man in his 50s, one gets the startling sense that it could be the adult talking. The fuck-ups that germinate in our teenage years stay with us forever.
Essentially, Wearing’s and Apted’s films cover the same territory. With both we experience a similar heady feeling of time rollercoasting by, telling us a compressed, concentrated version of a similar truth. But although both films are dealing with reality, Wearing’s is a deformed reality. We aren’t really seeing the years shoot past our eyes. She is an artist. She didn’t need to spend half a lifetime with her interviewees: she uses her imagination, and she allows us the opportunity to use ours.
This is, of course, a rather stock observation of what art is all about, but it is something that we journalistic documentary makers are not allowed to do. There is a fine line, in our world, between using our imaginations and getting sued for libel. The truth is, I think artists have it easy. When was the last time you saw an episode of Brookside in which all the characters stood around muttering: ‘There’s a scum of the earth contemporary artist hanging around outside. Why can’t they just leave us alone?’
But the Brookside characters have a point. If we journalists were good people we would do everything we could to not be unfair to the people we chronicle. But we pretty much always fail. We fail for two reasons:
(a) Because there is an all-pervading urge to turn people into metaphors or symbols, and people are not metaphors or symbols, they are people.
(b) We want to put the best bits in. And our interpretation of the best bits almost never correspond with our interviewees’.
I remember sitting in an editing suite with Neil Crombie, who I made a series with called The Ronson Mission about five years ago. We were looking through the rushes of some film featuring a man who had named all his budgies after members of the Nolan Sisters, if I remember rightly. And we were cutting him up and splicing him about. And in the midst of this, I said: ‘Neil. Are we being fair to this man, or are we just making him look stupid?’
And Neil said: ‘Jon. Look at it this way. One interviewee suffers, but millions are entertained.’
If you give the words ‘suffers’ and ‘entertained’ (and ‘millions’) their broadest possible definitions, I think that this pretty much sums up what documentary makers do.
The problem is, we have power. I am not a naturally despotic sort of person, and Wearing doesn’t seem overly despotic either. But unless you give away editorial control (which I wouldn’t do), the power remains entirely in your hands, and you are condemned to upset your interviewee, whether you intend to or not. Imagine spending a year being filmed by someone. Then imagine sitting down excitedly with your family to watch the film. Unless you are inhumanly hard-shelled, you will feel as if you’ve been mugged. This is what watching yourself - or a version of yourself filtered through the perceptions of another - does to you.
There are naturally despotic documentary film-makers: film-makers who assume an inherent superiority over those they are chronicling. I have met them, and you can see it in their work. Despotism can be most commonly found, I think, in the following popular documentary genres:
1. The ‘Institution’ Film. The Golf Club or The Proms or The Hairdresser or The Funeral Parlour or whatever, in which our randomly picked institution - and those within them - become an incisive and bathetic metaphor for, most commonly, ‘90s Britain in decline.
2. The ‘It’s Okay To Cry If You Want To’ film. Usually, the interviewee is dying, or someone close to them has just died, or they’ve just got divorced, or they are infertile or bulimic or bankrupt, or whatever. I don’t like these films. I can imagine the director nodding and whispering with sincerity: ‘Go on. It’s okay. Go on. We can stop any time you like’. And the Crying Interviewee will bravely reply: ‘No. I’ll go on’.
People stop being people when they become documentary subjects. They become clues, or points of discussion. At worst, they become complicitous in their own slide into caricature. If you ask Paul Watson to defend his notorious series Sylvania Waters (1993), about a hysterical and ridiculous Australian housewife, he will say that - in the midst of her lavish and boisterous complaints about her portrayal - she asked to be signed up for a second series. If you point a camera at some people, they will become their own stereotype. They will confess all.
There are many confessions in Wearing’s work - confessions and symbols and metaphors. Indeed, the artist herself says: ‘I don’t want too many ethics or morals in my work. I think they stop things from happening.’ In Confessions (1994), for instance, a man in a mask talks crazily about the evils of ‘brother-sister snogging’. He saw his brother and sister kissing each other, and he wants to know if this is normal. He cannot have sex because of it. And so on.
In other pieces, a City boy holds up a placard that reads: ‘I’m Desperate’. Bad singers sing karaoke, and air guitarists play air guitar. These are things you’d see on Modern Times, or even The Word. But what is far more interesting, and what makes Wearing’s work more important than its ostensible counterparts, is that her morality - and the moral relationship between the chronicler and the chronicled - is central to her films.
Her confessions, whatever she says, are not presented in a moral vacuum. Implicit in her work is the acknowledgement that documentary is exploitation. When she becomes her subject matter - when she attempts to inhabit the body of her subjects (a running theme in her work) - she is both striving to understand someone else’s truth, and admitting that this is impossible to do.
For example, in the video Homage To The Woman With The Bandaged Face I Saw Yesterday Down Walworth Road (1995), Wearing impersonates someone she has seen in the street and walks down to her local shops, her face bandaged up. It is as if she needed to become repellent to understand the feelings she experienced on seeing the woman. Similarly, in Dancing In Peckham (1994), Gillian places herself in an extraordinarily humiliating situation in an attempt to understand what it is to be the very bad dancer she saw one night at the Royal Festival Hall. For some reason, she says, she found herself completely in awe of that very bad dancer. She wanted to film her, but she didn’t have her camera. What she wanted to do - she says - was ask the woman for her telephone number so she could arrange a time in the future when she could film her dancing really badly. But that would have been patronising. So instead, she filmed herself dancing really badly - and without musical accompaniment - at a shopping centre.
Even when she is chronicling other people, she says she is intensely nervous. ‘Standing there,’ she says, ‘asking people to write something on a placard, you feel the biggest outsider of all. It was painful. I’m standing there, thinking to myself: “I’ve got to ask this person”. And then, when I’m on the tube going home, I look around the carriage and I think: “these people are safe from me.”’ I think this is a feeling that all documentary makers experience. The real fun is when you are sitting safely in the editing suite, cutting your interviews up, rewinding and fast-forwarding. The actual gathering of the material is invariably a nerve-wracking and unpleasant experience.
Being an artist who makes documentaries must be a liberating experience; the truth is, we journalistic documentary-makers are slightly jealous of Gillian Wearing and her kind. Hunter S. Thompson summed it up when he said: ‘Why must we let the facts get in the way of the truth?’ But perhaps, in the end, we don’t. Certainly, we are forever getting sued: a sure sign that - somewhere in the windowless world of the editing suite - we allow ourselves to invent truths, to mess with truth, to discover a greater truth. I don’t think, however, that this line of defence would stand up in court.
Jon Ronson
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