Amy and the Documentary Film

 

Documentary film is frequently associated with 'realism' and 'truth', presenting real world subjects in an authentic manner...BUT documentary is subject to the same directorial choices as fiction film; the length of a take, the framing of a shot, the choice of music or accompanying voiceover, the order of shots, decisions regarding which shot comes before and which comes after, the use of titles, lighting, colour grading etc: perhaps we should ask ourselves not 'Is this the truth?' but 'Whose truth is it anyway?'. Documentary filmmakers, perhaps more so than fiction filmmakers, frequently have an agenda and documentary films are often at least as manipulative as fiction films, and often more so. THINK ABOUT THIS IN RELATION TO AMY!

 

Early silent films often simply recorded something real and showed it to an audience. The example above, the Lumiere Brothers' L'arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat or Train Pulling into a Station (1895), is entirely composed of real life footage of a train's arrival at a station and can, therefore, be seen as an early example of the documentary genre (as can many of the Lumiere Brothers' early films).

The documentary genre has been defined in numerous ways since its inception and documentary films take many different forms, containing a range of conventions. These differing types of documentaries act like sub-genres - so to describe the entire genre in exactly the same terms is arguably unhelpful. Instead, it is worth considering the different types of documentary styles and placing Amy in the context of the style that is most appropriate.

John Grierson, who coined the term, referred to documentary as 'the creative treatment of actuality', which suggests that documentary filmmakers such as Asif Kapadia have a role to play in shaping the film, manipulating audience response and telling the story in an imaginative and creative way. The word 'actuality' implies fact but it is clear that there are questions surrounding the reliability of the form and it is worth considering whether documentaries can ever really present an objective truth. This is certainly the case with Amy, whose filmmaker chooses to present only certain moments in Amy Winehouse's life and edits the film in such a way that creates clear victims and villains. Amy's narrative is shaped by decisions taken by Kapadia and it is certainly important to argue that the film does more than simply present 'factual information' objectively.

The term documentary, then, has multiple contested meanings and as a genre has become increasingly popular with audiences in recent decades. Once considered a niche genre, a genre associated largely with television, documentary's popularity at the cinema (despite comparatively limited theatrical releases) suggests that audiences now regard the genre...

Archival footage to tell a personal story...