Brian Winston,
Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries.
BFI Publishing, 2000.
ISBN 085 17079 7 (pb)
186 pp
£14.99

Uploaded 1 December 2001

Exploring the unstable ground of media ethics, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries begins with an account of the moral panic surrounding Britain’s 1997 “fakery” scandal when The Guardian published revelations gleaned from a disgruntled documentary researcher which eventually led to ITV production company Carlton Communications being fined £2 million for failing to label re-enacted sequences in a documentary. The Connection, an expose of Colombian drug running to Britain, contained a sequence featuring a “fake mule”, supposedly carrying heroin “fingers” in his stomach. The Independent Television Commission (ITC) found the programme was a breach of its written codes because it “misled” the audience by failing to acknowledge the re-enactment and because footage from two flights was edited as one. Although decrying the “mendacity”of these particular documentary makers, for “downright fabrication” rather than re-enactment, Winston takes the regulators to task here, not simply for this seemingly draconian punishment for a victimless “crime”, but, also for their simplistic interpretation of documentary as evidentiary reality, and apparent disregard for the legacy of documentary practice. However his strongest criticism is levelled at content regulation per se. He sees the ITC penalty as a curb on free expression, which, he observes, necessarily implies freedom to mislead. When damage can be proved to result from such deception, he argues, existing laws provide opportunities for redress. In the “fakery” scandal, Winston suggests, the real scandal is that the right of the filmmaker as artist was sacrificed for the vagaries of “public trust”. It is territory rich in ironies, ambiguities and humbug and Winston is adept at teasing these out, with systematic and relentless rigour.

Structured as three parts, “The state of documentary”, “Regulators and Documentarists”, the book touches on issues that concerned the author in his earlier work on documentary, a reassessment of the Griersonian legacy, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited [1] . These issues included the vexed tension between social responsibility and authorial expression; between documentary’s “creative treatment” and “actuality” implicit in Grierson’s long standing definition of documentary; between public service paternalism and emancipatory goals, and between claims of public education and verifiable social outcomes. In this latest work the quest for viable ethical guidelines for documentary making, rather than issues of definition, draws Winston’s attention towards the ambiguities of documentary practice and the regulatory codes underlying the power of broadcasting authorities. The regulatory codes of British broadcasting are considered in relation to freedom of expression, the latter being posited as a bottom line for media freedom in a democratic society. New areas of contention arise in the process. It is not the public’s “right to know”, Winston argues, that should govern documentary practice, but integrity in the relationship between documentarist and social actors that should take precedence. Noting the “dumbing down” effect of the increasingly competitive and commercial multichannel environment and its American origins Winston nevertheless prefers the essentialism of the First Amendment to the old world’s protective regulatory structures and the licence they offer officialdom. His preparedness to take a stance on contentious matters, always founded on clearly iterated fact and reason, makes for engaging reading.

In part one, “The State of Documentary”, Winston lays the foundations for the arguments he presents in parts two and three. Dissection of the issues at stake in the “fakery”scandal and comment on the impact of the relegation of documentary to the category of factual programming leads to an examination of television documentary from various perspectives: as journalism, as docudrama, as public service – in both Britain and the United States – and lastly as populist television fare in Britain. Since direct cinema’s “fly-on-the-wall” approach and assumed transparency has all but displaced documentary’s authorial imperative, he wryly observes that documentarists, as flies, no longer have the prerogatives of artistic licence claimed by the “authorial” school. The result is that reconstructions are now restricted to the fictionalised form of “docudrama”. Winston draws on documentary history to illustrate the global scale and antecedents of the genre’s “fakery” conundrum implying the “problem” may lie elsewhere:  Roger and me (USA 1989), Michael Moore’s craftily edited “satiric polemic against the logic of late capital” much criticised for its non chronological history of the shutdown of the General Motors plant in Flint, a re-rendering of events that Winston defends;  Nanook of the North (USA 1922), Flaherty’s romanticised reconstruction of an extinct lifestyle, and the burgeoning sub genre of “mockumentary” with its challenge to public gullibility. The current search for documentary “authenticity” he finds positions documentary as “public service” and so justifies a more restrictive regulatory regimen that that imposed on the Press. But he is careful to differentiate between structural and content regulation, indicating support for the first but not the second and reflecting on the hypocrisy of the system set up under the Thatcher and Major governments:

the issue of the ITC’s documentary fines reveals that the latently oppressive structure of the regulation of “fairness”, put in place total opposition to the dominant laissez faire ideology governing the development of broadcasting infrastructure is still very real. Its ineffectiveness as a control over taste masks its potential as a control over “controversy” (111).

Part two, “Regulators”, covers law and regulation in separate chapters exploring the inherent tension between the “demands of freedom” protected by the law on the one hand and the “social responsibility” applied through broadcasting codes on the other:

regulation implicitly assumes that the common law is insufficient … because it has failed to balance the old right of free speech against new mass media and their attendant intrusive technologies (87).

Although many in the industry voice support for regulation as a way of keeping broadcasting honest and of countering the populist pressures of commercial competition, it is the risk of official abuse, and of censorship through these extra legal channels with their ill-defined terminology, that most concerns Winston.

“fairness” and “truth” are too much in the eye of the beholder to be anything other than a potential licence to censor (90).

The notion “breach of public trust” he finds an invented “quasi judicial offence” since the regulations require no proof of “legally defined damage”, as is the case in law. This assertion of viewers’ rights is at the expense of those of documentarists. Winston also reveals the humbug of such avowed concern for viewer rights in the face of so little for those of participants. The ambiguity underlying legal definitions of “privacy” and “consent” means that freedom of expression for documentarists invariably takes legal precedence over participant’s rights. In both broadcasting regulation and the law “consent” is simply assumed to include understanding. Thus there is no legal or official mandate for ensuring that participants are fully “informed” before giving their consent, which routinely means signing away any further rights regarding how they are represented in the production concerned. The ethical complexities of this issue are reflected in Fred Wiseman’s film  Titicut Follies, the notorious but little seen expose of the inhumane treatment of inmates in the hospital for the criminally insane at Massachusetts Correctional Institution, Bridgewater. Described as “a situation of extremes in both subject vulnerability and directorial accountability”the film’s suppression, in order to protect its subjects, also protected the institution’s brutalising staff. [2] Winston’s exploration of where the documentarist’s primary responsibility lies finds a final complication within the terms of employment under which documentarists work, since broadcasters as employers and exhibitors have final control. That these shortcomings exist in spite of regulation, Winston argues, indicates the failure of such constraints.

Part three, titled “Documentarists”, begins with a chapter on Free Expression exploring possible ethical approaches, comparing the Medical Practitioners’ code with its detailed definition of “informed consent”, alongside journalism’s objective “truth telling” and the panoply of “creative” documentary practices. Both the medical and journalistic codes raise obvious problems for documentary. While imposing the stringent ‘informing’ requirements of the code of medical ethics would be impracticable and likely to turn prospective documentary subjects off the whole idea, the truth telling objectives of journalism are at odds with the creative, authorial viewpoint that has informed traditional documentary practice. The feeling of many practitioners is summed up in a comment by American documentarist, Fred Wiseman, quoted by Winston in an earlier article on the subject:

I couldn’t make a film which gave somebody else the right to control the final print. [3]
Of this awkward triumvirate – ethics, freedom of expression and truth – Winston finds only the second identifiable and enforceable. The other two, he suggests, must be left to the discretion of individual conscience and judgement in order to serve this.

Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries is just as provocative, readable, and scrupulous in its research as Claiming the Real, Winston’s earlier work on documentary. [4] It is a book that should be on the list of anyone interested in the fate of television documentary or the problematic field of media ethics.

Mary Debrett

Endnotes

[1] Brian Winston, 1995, London, BFI Publishing.
[2] Carolyn Anderson and Thomas W. Benson, ‘Direct cinema and the myth of informed consent: the case of Titicutt Follies, Larry Gross et al, (eds) Image Ethics, New York, Oxford University Press, p. 59.
[3] Cited in Brian Winston, 1988, ‘The tradition of the victim Griersonian documentary’, Larry Gross et al, (eds) Image Ethics, New York, Oxford University Press, p.35.
[4] Winston, 1995, London, BFI Publishing.