THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE
Walton Green and Ed Spiegel
1971
And
LAND WITHOUT BREAD
Luis Bunuel
1933
The Mockumentary
There are a number of terms like "docufiction" which implies a film which incorporates some fictional elements. A Docudrama is largely a recreation of an event where as docudrama is more in the form of a fictional film presentedd as thought it were real. The terms are often difficult to distinguish and used interchangeably. In all cases the idea is that the material is in some way "faked". In Land witout Bread and The Hellsrom Chronicle there are many problems with what is fiction and what is not. . Another question deals with the nature of "Parody" which is just one of a number of forms relating to approaches taken. Land Without Bread is often seen as a "surreal parody". Words like parody (spoof, send up) make fun of, mock, make lght of , trivialize some workt, author or style. A farce entertains by creating odd or iprobably situations, virtually incomprehensible plots with many twists. A satire (usually ironic) with vices and foibles held up to ridicule) and so on also imply a different emphasis on how material is presented.
The film's defintiion as "a surreal documentary" is involved with these prinicples which involve complex juxtapositions of words against image, along with the style of the narration which introduces the idea of parody into the film.
Bunuel's atheism makes him rather hostile to religion and so there are juxtapositions of the rice (but empty) churches with the poor homes.
There are serious questions about the preentation of a group of real people in this manner and whether or not the film gives them an "image" in the real world which may impact on them. This is why the film raises serious questions about the morality and the ethics involved in documentary film making - especially when the film does not indicate that its documentary statis is rather in question.
Since the film claims to be a film of "human geography: (something akin to ethnography) it raises several questions again about the film makers and their relationships to the data. Should film makers film cultures that are not their own, thereby "skewing" the perception of the data. The skewing of data is a well known problem in anthropology and other social sciences. (see for example Jeffrey Ruoff's article called An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread published in Visual Anthropology Review 14, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), 45-57. It status continues to be questions. Some film scholars describe it as a documentary (sometimes faulty) while others hold, it is in fact, according to film studies scholar Jeffrey Ruoff, an early (some might say prescient) parody of the barely invented genre of documentary filmmaking. The film has been called “a parody. Although parodies usually come when a specific form is dying out (it has been said no one can takle Frankenstein seriously since Young Frankenstein) , this film is very near the beginning of documentaries (Nanook is 1922 and Drifters is 1929)
This leads to the question once again as to form and function. Are there specific styles, or forms which are peculiar to the documentary? One can recognize changes over time in the form of the documentary. Nanook has neither the look nor feel of Night Mail, which does not feel like The Plow that Broke the Plains or The River. Neither A Flock of Dodos nor Intelligence: Expelled from the Classroom seem to have the form of a documentary, but may have the form of a different kind of non-fiction film. The same holds true for the Disney True Life Adventure Series. It is possible to look at these films and try to develop some sort of criteria for these kinds of films as well.
The Hellstrom Chronicle is fraught with problems. It won the academy award for Best Documentary, but it status as a documentary has been criticized.
The question that raises its ugly head here is whether or not this is or is not a documentary. Like the Disney True Life Adventures, where spectacular real photography is certainly the stuff of documentary, the editing and commentary give us some qualms about what is happening with reversing the frames, adding music and getting the animals to move in time to the music. At the visual photographic level the film is documentary. At the narrative and editing levels it may not be. Similar problems occur here.
There is little doubt about the spectacular nature of the photography, but there are other aspects to the film that need to be examined.
The Hellstrom Chronicles do more though. A scientist appears at the beginning of the film and talks about the problems his theory has given him in his personal life (compare Intelligence: Expelled from the Classroom which opens with a guy who has lost his job because of the ID article.)
One serious difference here is that the man who lost his job at the Smithsonian is actually the man who lost it. In this film Nils Hellstrom is being played by an actor named Lawrence Pressman currently according to IMDB with 161 films under his belt, although he had far fewer in 1971, the year he also appeared in Shaft. The film opens with a credit for Dr. Nils Hellstrom and gives him an M.S. and aPh.D. At the end of the film there is a credit for Lawrence Pressman who plays Heelstrom
The film makers were denounced for having “desecrated the documentary realm” for using a fictional narrator
General Problems as they relate to these two films: Narration: In Land without Bread the narration has a particular flat style typical of the time for travelogues. The narration is in an unusual juxtaposition with the visual images.
In The Hellstrom Chronicle the narration is tinged with deceit in 2 ways - (a) there is an appeal to authority but letting the audience believe that the narrator is actually a scientist and (b) the film indicates that the matieral about the insect has been checked by real scientists, but says nothing about the slant put on the material. While the NY Times claimed the narration was inane, one wonders whether much of what was felt to be inane (impact of humans on the environment) might not be so inane and given the information about people losing their jobs over ID whether "Hellstrom's" comments about loosing grants, jobs amd friends are also perhaps less "inane".
Juxtaposition of image against narration is also significant. In Land without Bread the narration often is placed in opposition to the visual images (we are told things but not shown them - cave paintings); we are shown things and the text seems to contradict what is in the film (the young girl whose gums, tongues and tonsils are claimed to be swollen but when seen, they are not). There are staged events which are discussed as though something else was happening (the mountain goat which falls from the mountain was actually shot). One of the things we have been talking about is the relationship betwee speech making and film making. There are diffferent kinds of speeches and different kinds of films which to some degree are aparallel. We have also been talking about the question of whether one can draw parallels between speech techniques (rhetoric) and film techniques. In effect can a film, outide of the dialog, be sarcastic, ironic humerous, and so on. Is the appearance of a oerssn who has "status" the equivalent of footnoting or "citing authority.
We have also been interested in the questions of the problems of the impact of the films made by film makers on the people they film. We raised this question initially with Man of Aran THIS RAISES THE QUESTION OF ETHICS IN ART IN GENERAL AND SPECIFICALLY IN FILM MAKING.
People have talked about the ethical responsibilities of scientists and also of film makers. Scientists have a reputation behind them (not just their own but the general perception of SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS. Performers hold great prestige often and can use that to their advantage. When a major star comes out for a political candidate and says "I am entitled to my opinion", is there a breach of ethics the same way there would be if a person marshals all the forces of science behind them and hides behind a cloak of respectability. Is the "star" in effect pretending that they don't have prestige and special status? Does the star argue that their position gives them no status beyond being "just any person"? Would that be honest?
APPEAL TO AUTHORITY
In a global community – WHOSE ethics are they anyway?
The question of ethics has been a problem in both fiction and non fiction. Questions have been raised about whether or not authors of artistic works should be held responsible for things that result from them. The Believers, for example seems to have motivated a group of Mexicans in Matamoras to a string of murders.
The function of the narrator is, in documentary film. in the beginning, usually reading from the film maker's script and has a kind of "omniscient" position. Following that, the natives are interviewed by the narrator, but as one film (The Passenger) an African "medicine man" who has been to Oxford is asked by a newspaper reporter whether he can interview him He agrees but says "You questions will say more about you than my answers will about me". The person who asks th questions therefore controls what get said and structures the nature of the conversation. So the next steps i to let the natives talk (but the film maker still edits) or there is no dialogue and the view is left to the own devices to figure out what is going on. In ethnographic film, if you are lucky, an anthropologist tries to "translate" the culture rather than letting the viewer try to figure out from a 80 minute edited document. This is seen by many as "colonialism in disguise".
Since we know that people may operate successfully in their own language and culture they are but they are not really capable of analyzing what they are doing. A native speaker can not make explicit the grammar of the language, any more than a native speaker of English can make clear the grammmatical rules of English. Francis Hsu in a paper about "Prejudice in Anthropology" in a AA issue he said he wasn't talking about whether minorities got hired, but rather whether there was a prejudice in the perception of cultures. He argues that one can only see another culture "through a glass darkly" and one can't see their own culture because "they can't see the forest for the trees" . He was rather taken aback when I pointed out that this idea means you can't analyze your own culture or other cultures his argument leads to the conclusion that anthropology can't work.
This makes for complicated problems in ethnographic film. As the author of the article points out, in some ways the film substantiates that what the anthropologist writes is real - no matter how odd the ethnography may seem, the film gives it reality. With/Land without Bread/, he holds the opposite is true. The people look so crazy that the ethnography tends to substantiate the film - but only barely. The author points to serious differences between the ethnography who is religious which seems to argue that the solution to the problem is to build more churches;. Bunuel who is an atheist seems to delight in making the church look mildly crazy.
The author of the paper is looking for a role for the visual anthropologists now many people from other cultures have their own equipment and make their own films (this of course goes back to the Worth/Adair work with Navajos and having them make their own films).
Since some of the film is staged (and it isn't clear how much is - the killing of the goat and burro were. The goat is shot and the burro that was sick was smeared with honey to get the bees to attack it). Whether there were several people and more burros killed that way before is up for grabs. There is certainly no visual evidence any more than there is for the "cave paintings" which are found in the caves which are in abundance all around the area (according to the film). The film almost makes odd statements about "the deadly adder" whose bite is 'usually not fatal"! Why is it a "deadly adder" then?
The film looks and sounds more like a travelogue than an ethnographic film. The surreal aspects of using a flat unemotional voice to describe the situations and the Brahms music set different styles up against one another which lead to the peculiar feeling the film has. The AAA books on film in the classroom take it as being a "faulty documentary" (a term also applied to In the /Land of the Head Hunters/) but do not talk about the narrative and the visuals are clearly not in tune with one another (I don't mean the sound is not in synch) but one really has to wonder whether the film (video) documents some truth ans some acting, but the narration may be spurious.
The film with /The Hellstrom Chronicle/ which has similar problems An actor (Lawrence Pressman) plays Dr. Nils Hellstrom who is credited at the beginning as having an MS and Ph.D but we find at the end he is fictional. His narration has much accurate information about insects set against some spectacular photography, but the "message" is difficult. The NY Times called the narration "inane", but much of it is not. Some of it may be even more acceptable today than it was in 1971 when the film came out.
The whole question about whether there is really any difference between a documentary and a fiction film becomes open here. Compare a documentary with a fiction film which loos at the same topic. Consider the list of definitions of art gotten at the beginning of the term. One definition says "If a person presents something as art, it is art". If you look at peaple walking around on the street not one comments on the artistic nature. But the same thing put on stage is presented as art and is then evaluated in those terms. If you present something as a documentary people tend to take it as a different kind of film than a fiction film. So when someone makes a mockumentary or even a parody and doesn't say so, there is a problem about whether people actually believe this. It is only contradictions in the film that MAY make you suspicious. When he says that the people in the film were unknown until the roads were built not long ago - there is a question as to how there is a play about them in the 1700's! The same problem is there as mentioned before about The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River where we are told repeataedly in The Plow there there is no water in the area, whereas in The River we are told about how the rivers in the area flood regularly.