The Word, Truth and Form
Culture is the body of knowledge that we assimilate and which contributes to enriching our minds. By culture, therefore, we can not only mean the arts, literature, thought and science, but also the knowledge of human activity in industry, commerce, agriculture, etc.
Perhaps the notion of a ‘cultural documentary’ was spread by mistake. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of uneducated people making documentaries exclusively for their own pocket money and without a minimum of preparation; many documentaries that we used to see in cinemas (today cinemas hardly show documentaries at all) are more an attack on culture than contributions to the enrichment of the spirit.
Visual narrative is, as we've seen, above all image. Words are, more often than not - and we're talking about documentaries - an unnecessary accessory. If cinema is capable of describing the subject through the image, why fill a soundtrack with words? In Portugal (and elsewhere...) words are used and abused. It could be said that certain documentaries are more like a vaguely illustrated (oral) speech than a film completed by absolutely indispensable words.
The text of this type of film or programme, as well as usually being grossly inflated, is also never-ending with adjectives and numbers.
When making an educational film or (programme), not just for children but also for grown-ups, you should start with a simple, clear, objective text. The team responsible for planning the film (in this case, in addition to the director and the author of the text, plus a specialist in the subject to be filmed) would imagine which images could illustrate the text: which images would therefore end up being the film or programme. In the course of this work, it would soon become apparent that part of the text could be suppressed thanks to the imagined image. And then, as it was a teaching film, it would be concluded that, in general, all the images that appeared with the text would be repeated. It's the norm for a didactic work to summarise in an image without voice what has been shown accompanied by an audio explanation. It's the norm because it works pedagogically.
A cartoon (or just a drawn diagram) can be very helpful when explaining something in a teaching film.
But this therefore concerns educational, didactic or scientific films, where the word sometimes plays an indispensable complementary role.
Now, in an ordinary film about any land, you show the square and say ‘the imposing square’, a river and say ‘the beautiful river’, the factory from the outside and with the good in evidence and say that ‘the gigantic factory has a thousand workers and produces thousands of thousands of dollars worth of yarn, with an administration that is the pride of the brave people of the land’... This is not cinema, nor has it ever been cinema; this is an exaggerated publicity stunt vaguely illustrated by some images taken without work.
Who is to blame for these exaggerations? Sometimes they're the fault of the director (and especially the fault of the producer); often they're the fault of the client, who commissions the film and, because he's paying for it, thinks it should be what he wants it to be and not at all what other, more knowledgeable people thought would be smarter.
On the other hand, there is the truth of capture. Earlier I gave the example of the film that showed a square and said ‘the imposing square’, the river and said ‘the beautiful river’, etc? The truth is that often neither the square is imposing, nor the river beautiful, nor the factory modern, nor the people valuable. In that case, it would be better to show things as they are: insignificant, ugly or ordinary. By presenting them in this way, the truth would be utilised, and only this truth is of interest to culture.
Finally, current documentary cinema has to be current in form. Cinema - film narrative - is constantly modernising. People today ‘read’ modern cinema as easily as older people ‘read’ the cinema of the 1930s, and yet the form has changed completely: from camera movements, to angles, raccords and timing. Going to the cinema today to see a ‘snarky’ documentary in the old-fashioned way (even though it's about some modern-day subject) causes a sense of unease that often degenerates into loud laughter and mockery on the part of the audience.