I took my seat at Toronto's Bloor Cinema for a recent press screening; the lights dimmed, the film started. It was a documentary entitled Foodies that began with a solitary diner anticipating a gourmet meal, discussing for the camera the glass of champagne a waiter had just served him. The scene shifted and then, a startling thing happened: a disembodied voice came through the speakers into the theatre. This was not the voice of the diner with his champagne glass nor of any other player in the film; it was a bigger voice, smooth and confident, explaining to the audience that the top international food bloggers travel the globe to eat in the world's best restaurants. This was the voice of the narrator.
Voice-over narration has so completely disappeared from serious documentary film that merely hearing it surprised me. Who's that? What's he saying? Of the half-dozen other documentaries I have seen at the Hot Docs festival thus far, Foodies is the only one that uses a narrator.
Narration is still routine in documentary material presented on television – Ken Burns's documentaries about American culture and history are heavily narrated, often constructed as spoken texts illustrated with still images – but the film world has made a fetish of not using voice-over, equating it with poor storytelling and false authority. In the bad old days, plummy male voices (and they were almost always male) would tell us what to think about everything from a 16th-century painting to a toxic-waste site. Television may stick with such a suspect modus operandi and its god-like voices, but the independent doc maker is above it.
The only current use that appears permissible is first-person narration as the filmmaker recounts the process of getting the story. Michael Moore famously used that technique in Roger and Me, his 1989 doc about layoffs at General Motors in Flint, Mich.; Alex Gibney's new film Going Clear, an exposé of the Scientology movement, which he narrates, is a more recent example.
But the third-person narrator is missing in action, first driven from the documentary business in the 1960s, when cinema verité and direct cinema aimed to make the camera an observer rather than interpreter of events. Such classic Canadian documentaries as Pour la suite du monde, created by Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière and Pierre Perrault for the National Film Board, or Allan King's A Married Couple, allowed viewers to arrive at their own conclusions about the subjects. There was no authoritative narrator to give you the history of the long-abandoned beluga hunt in the St. Lawrence, now revived for the NFB camera, nor an impartial outsider to explain the context of Billy and Antoinette Edwards's troubled relationship. The viewer was a fly on the wall.
American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who is speaking at Hot Docs on April 29, remains a master of this form, creating highly detailed observational documentaries about the inner workings of public institutions such as France's Comédie Française, the University of California at Berkeley, or London's National Gallery. Wiseman has rejected the term cinema verité – he points out that he edits scenes to create a dramatic arc – but the minutiae provided by his lengthy films make an audience feel it is getting an uninterrupted, maybe even unmediated, view of the place. Wiseman, who spends months at the institutions he profiles, captures so many telling moments on film he can subtly shape a story without much need for interviews, let alone narration.
Not everyone, however, is a Wiseman. My Hot Docs viewing often left me puzzling over questions the films had failed to answer, or distracted by what seemed to be non sequiturs, as the documentarians eschewed any external explanation. Around the World in 50 Concerts, which follows Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to South America and South Africa, left the charming relationship between a pair of Dutch musicians and a Buenos Aires candy store clerk unexplained. Milk, a Canadian doc about breastfeeding, had me reading complicated title cards about UN health policy, but didn't tell me whether a struggling Filipina mother who had run out of baby formula had previously breastfed. Catalogue descriptions of Original Copy, a lovely German film about the dying art of movie-banner painting in Bollywood, makes more detailed claims about the situation of the struggling Mumbai theatre featured in the film than could ever be gleaned from viewing it.
Not that Foodies did not also leave me with niggling doubts, as the narrator gave us the broad strokes without answering small but difficult questions the film had raised about the influence and independence of food bloggers.
These may all sound like picky complaints about the films, and so they are. They represent minor lapses in relaying the facts to the audience, small failures of journalism as the documentaries balance themselves on the fine line between fact and artful storytelling. They are confusions that could, however, be avoided with the right kind of voice-over narration, a technique that seems ripe for some creative reinvention.
Kate Taylor