Uploaded 15 Septmber 1998

Background to the Scheme

Film and (later) television production have been important sites for debates about the “Australian experience” for one hundred years. That period has seen regular attempts by governments, and their cultural agencies, to intervene in the developing industries of cultural production, of which the Documentary Fellowship Scheme was a particularly interesting example. While the particular case under study is Australian, it should be viewed in the context of institutional developments in public service broadcasting around the world, and which have implications for the production of socially concerned documentary in many countries.

Parallel to the increase in Australian feature film production of the early 1970s there was an increase in the production of independently produced documentary films with a greater variety of styles developing with the influence of direct cinema and cinema verité. Despite the increase in production, some prestigious awards overseas, respectable overseas sales, and some degree of recognition in Australia, documentary production tended to have the economic status of a cottage industry with filmmakers having very low incomes, and being hampered by limited distribution outlets for completed productions.

While there had been for some time a recognition of the role of television in exhibition, the public service broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), had often been criticised for its lack of support for independent local documentary production. In the late 1970s a group centred on documentary filmmaker Tom Haydon and composed mainly of independent filmmakers began to press for greater support, by lobbying various film agencies and making submission to government inquiries such as the inquiry into the ABC conducted on behalf of the Federal government by Alex Dix.

The Documentary Fellowship Scheme (DFS) was proposed as a means of encouraging “the pursuit of excellence and innovation in documentary film by supporting experienced film makers who have demonstrated a capacity for excellence and innovation”. [1]

My concern here is with the form and content of the films which resulted from the DFS; the way in which this mode of funding affects the resultant product; and with the demise of the original scheme in the face of changing institutional conditions in the Australian media. [2] An analysis of the scheme is perhaps even more timely with current developments in the field of documentary and its context on television and the growing importance of multimedia as a context for the production of non fiction forms.

Origins of the Scheme

The Documentary Fellowship Scheme was initiated by Malcolm Smith, who was then General Manager, Film Development, at the Australian Film Commission (AFC) – a government agency concerned with policy development for the Australian film industry, and with the funding of certain forms of film production. Tom Haydon was employed to implement and develop the scheme and it has been generally associated with Haydon’s name. The details of the proposed scheme were laid out in a report produced for the AFC by Tom Haydon in March 1984, and which became substantially the basis of the guidelines of the scheme in April of that year.

The scheme, as envisaged by Malcolm Smith, had three purposes:

1. To reward a body of work which was widely perceived to be marked by excellence. The award of a fellowship was envisaged as a reward for a “track record”. Haydon suggested the scheme would offer filmmakers with a body of work behind them the chance to make a film, of their own, totally free of any of the constraints of the prevailing system of assessing and funding documentary films in Australia. In this sense the scheme could be seen as primarily concerned with the filmmaker and the product rather than with questions of audience

2. To move documentary into the forefront of discussion and to raise the profile of documentary in the film and television industries and in the Australian community in general. While not an explicit recognition of the need to produce audiences this aim is implicitly concerned with the production of audiences for documentary. Linked to this is an implicit recognition that “documentary” is itself a discursively produced category shaped by a process of debate within institutions and within communities.

There was a view at this period, and it was certainly Haydon’s view, that film financing arrangements then in place were ruining documentary: “Traditional financing in Australia … has called for written research reports, written treatments, even written scripts, in advance of a commitment to finance production. Such an approach has influenced our documentaries to be conservative, even bland.” [3]

Malcolm Smith sought to encourage discussion of broader issues surrounding documentary, especially the ethics of documentary production, and its intellectual framework; to break down the insularity of film. To this end panels were to be established to select from the field of applicants those who were to receive the fellowship. In the operation of the scheme these panels altered each year (with Tom Haydon remaining as chair and as the element of continuity), but importantly each panel was to contain, along with a number of filmmakers, two members who were not directly from the film and television industries. In the first three years of the scheme one of these was “a person respected for his/her concern with and knowledge of film, but who is not presently a filmmaker”, while the other was “a person respected for his/her concern with ideas and their creative expression, but who is not directly or constantly involved with film”.[4] It is worth noting that the wording here refers to film as opposed to television – an emphasis which pervades the scheme in its first three years. [5]  It was this move to include people who it was felt would bring to the process a wider understanding of the intellectual context of documentary production which made the process different from peer review panels in operation in other schemes.

Smith envisaged that this panel system would be enriching for panel members and filmmakers alike, as it would be the first time in Australia that the “cream of Australian documentary filmmakers” [6] were meeting, having their works judged, and getting feedback through formalised discussions with their peers, thereby bringing to bear a wider range of discourses on “documentary”.

3. A third purpose of the scheme was to alter the prevailing documentary orthodoxy, especially the television documentary. This was related to a requirement to be innovative. This problematic concept seems to have been open to a variety of interpretations by both filmmakers and panel members. Indeed Malcolm Smith prefers to talk about a process of enrichment of the filmmakers rather than placing too much emphasis on a requirement to innovate. There is no mention of the notion of the television documentary in early documentation of the scheme. Although Malcolm Smith refers to television documentary in his discussion of the purposes of the scheme, [7] (7) television documentary does not explicitly enter the documentation until 1989.

Smith argues that from the start he envisaged three key elements of the scheme which related to his purpose of gaining wider exposure for Australian documentary films:

• To get the ABC involved. In the early 1980s the ABC was not doing nearly as much for Australian filmmaking (in both drama and documentary) as the AFC wanted.

• The reaching of a wider audience than was possible through specialised theatrical exhibition, [8]  and

• The television audience was seen as imposing a “necessary discipline” on filmmakers. This seems to be in contradiction to some of the other aims, and to some of the comments by filmmakers about the scheme in its early days. Perhaps the scheme was always torn by this contradiction. The problematic nature of institutional views of the television audience is dealt with later.

The need to engage a television audience was never intended to be a constraint. Indeed in the early guidelines there is no such requirement, although in the 1989 guidelines a requirement to “engage with a television audience” was introduced, altering the nature of the scheme. Smith believes that from the earliest days of the scheme there was a notion of two versions of the finished product: a television cut and a theatrical cut. Nevertheless this was not apparent from the budget allocated to each film within the scheme, and was not made explicit in the guidelines. Such an explicit requirement to produce two cuts of the finished product would have been a recognition of the existence of more than one audience.

Recognising that to alter the form of documentary it was necessary to alter the conditions under which documentaries are produced, it was envisaged that the award would allow optimum conditions for developing and completing suitable projects. To solve the problem of long production schedules, adequate living costs of $A30,000 for twelve months would be provided, [9]  as would be $A60,000 in production costs. Production costs of another $A50,000 could be raised through a conditional presale of the film to the ABC which could be discounted to obtain further working capital. Thus the nominal budget of the film would be about $A110,000, with an additional $A30,000 in living expenses. The AFC would provide about $A90,000 and the ABC $A50,000, and private investors could also participate. (These figures rose in later years of the scheme). At the time they were introduced the Fellowships were hailed as a major breakthrough in getting innovative work by individual filmmakers to a mainstream audience. Other funding of documentaries through AFC assessment would not be curtailed, but the commitment to the Fellowships appeared to offer some certainty of ongoing support for the documentary.

Interpretation of the aims

The aims of the scheme were interpreted by Tom Haydon according to his own interests and his own understandings of documentary. Fellowship holder John Hughes interpreted Haydon’s aim as: “On the surface … filmmakers are entirely free within the scheme to do whatever they like”, [10] while Barbara Chobocky (fellow in 1989) saw it as freeing the filmmaker from the pressures of “the market”. Successful applicants were no longer under pressure from funding bodies to alter the project in order to find the funds necessary to complete the work. This is a particularly relevant concern in the 1990s, when there is increasing need to find overseas pre-sales of films in order to complete the funding package in Australia. Ironically the situation facing documentary filmmakers in Australia in the 1990s is very much that described by Haydon in 1984, prior to the implementation of the scheme. While there is much wider dissemination of documentaries on television in the 1990s the plethora of “written research reports, written treatments, even written scripts, in advance of a commitment to finance production … has influenced our documentaries to be conservative, even bland.”

The Documentary Fellowship Scheme sought a less bureaucratic model for film funding, although one of the major weaknesses of the scheme was the lack of attention to exhibition and distribution arrangements for completed films. Nevertheless the scheme sought in its early days to free a select group of filmmakers from precisely the type of bureaucratic problems which beset documentary production today.

The guidelines were left as vague as possible, perhaps to ensure that any one style of documentary would not be favoured. In 1984 the aim of the scheme was “the pursuit of excellence and innovation in documentary film by supporting experienced film makers who have demonstrated a capacity for excellence and innovation”. In 1990 this aim was basically unchanged:

The overall objective of the AFC and the ABC in undertaking the Fellowship Scheme is to encourage and support experienced filmmakers to pursue innovation and excellence in documentary film. [11]

The candidates would be assessed on the “degree of excellence” [12]  in their “body of work”[13]  , and the “capacity for innovation” [14]  in their work. The guidelines altered over the years of the scheme, and some changes in emphasis did occur, most notably, the later inclusion of an expectation that “Fellows will take advantage of this valuable opportunity [provided by the participation of the ABC in the Documentary Fellowship program] to interact with television audiences by attempting new and unusual approaches which have specific relevance to the television medium and which acknowledge the advantages and restrictions of that medium” [15]

As these terms seem to be crucial to an understanding of the scheme they are the basis of the discussion which is to follow.

The guidelines also specified that “a candidate shall be a person or persons and not a partnership or corporate body” [16]  although the benefit and responsibilities of the Fellowship (may be) assigned to a partnership or corporate entity controlled by the Fellow, with a guarantee of performance by the Fellow [17]

Thus the candidate (or group of candidates) must be identified and cannot be subordinated to any other controlling body. This point is an indication of the auteurist assumptions that underlie the major focus of the scheme to be discussed in the next section.

Three major focuses of the scheme

(1) Reward for a body of work
Although this was not later the case, at first the award of a fellowship was seen as a reward for a body of excellent work. It was not necessary at any time in the period of the scheme to present a proposal for a film. To quote the guidelines: “candidates will not be assessed…in terms of a specific proposal for a film” (original emphasis) [18] . In fact it seemed to some filmmakers that there was a positive preference for people with no planned project, as it was envisaged that fully worked out proposals should be presented by the normal means to the Australian Film Commission, to seek alternative forms of funding.

Instead applicants for the Documentary Fellowship Scheme were required to submit, in advance, copies of their past work and to discuss this work at some length with the panel. Some filmmakers enjoyed the invitation to analyse their own work and were prepared to theorise their work in some detail while others felt the experience was uncomfortably like a job interview or even, in at least one case, a trial. One panel member likened the role of the panel to that of an examining magistrate.

The emphasis on a body of established work privileges the concept of a personal vision. Haydon’s interim proposal and the 1984 guidelines dogmatically state that “most of the successful documentaries (measured in both artistic and commercial terms) of recent times have been the work of filmmakers best described as auteurs or authors of their films”. [19] The 1989 guidelines state: “documentary filmmaking depends on a personal, authorial activity by one person or a small team.” [20]  This was the basis of a distinct line of inquiry at panel discussions. Successful applicants Tom Zubrycki and Gil Scrine both remember their respective panels being very concerned to try to work out the actual responsibility of each member of the crew in the films submitted. In the case of Kemira: Diary of a Strike (Zubrycki, 1984), a film both had worked on, there was much discussion seeking to establish whose “personal vision” was embodied in the film.

The emphasis on the personal vision potentially could be seen to disadvantage a number of types of people, for example, women who had identified themselves as working in a collective. [21]  One (woman) panel member felt that some women applicants were disadvantaged by the emphasis on the personal vision, while another (male) panel member was not aware of this being the case on his panel. In the latter case the panel was later in the scheme. One (male) filmmaker felt anyone (male or female) who had worked in an institutional or collective situation previously would have found it very hard to prove a personal vision.

Several panel members reported that it was necessary to be of a particular personality type to achieve an award. It was a distinct advantage to be seen as someone who “gets things done”, to be able “to crash through”. Both of these tend to be characteristics of people (more likely men) who have been making films for some time. However while some of the recipients of fellowships do have strong personalities, this is by no means the case with all. In fact in at least one case this factor worked against the applicant on at least one occasion.

It is likely that because of the makeup of panels there were variations from year to year, despite the continuity provided by Tom Haydon and despite the force of Haydon’s own views.

(2) Innovation
The requirement to be innovative was perhaps the most problematic aspect of the scheme, especially when it became increasingly linked to the requirement effectively to engage with a television audience. By the final years of the scheme these two requirements can be seen as being contradictory, although this need not necessarily have been the case.

The guidelines and other published material alter in the way this issue is dealt with over the years. Haydon’s notion of innovation began as a revival of cinema verité, however a form of verité which was influenced by the work of Michael Rubbo, an expatriate Australian documentary maker who had a strong interest in the fostering of a personal vision which he saw as being stifled by the requirements of television. At a forum at Sydney Film Festival in 1980 he spoke scathingly of the way, as he saw it, the ABC sought to excise personal vision from any project they took on.( [22]

Haydon’s interim proposal and the 1984 guidelines both contain a number of statements which suggest that Haydon had in mind a model drawn from overseas experience with cinema verité or direct cinema. In a discussion on the “distinctive nature of documentary” Haydon argues that Australian documentaries to that time had tended to concentrate on “nature, wildlife, scenery and exotica”. “Much less evident in Australia have been documentaries which follow and explore the lives of people in an intimate fashion, where the ‘subject’ evolves as the filming progresses.” He feels that the government funding of documentary has worked against “the spontaneous, evolving real-life documentary”.This apparent espousal of the direct cinema model is linked to the auteurist model: “Like the literary author, the documentary author conceives and develops a film, ‘writing’ as it were, first with the camera, and then with the editing. […] especially in the kind of documentary which unpredictably follows the twists and turns of real-life human situations [following] people into the living rooms of everyday life”. [23]

The first three filmmakers awarded fellowships had worked in the area of observational cinema previously and made films which were predominantly observational in style as their fellowship films. Gary Kildea, whose previous work included Celso and Cora (1984), made Valencia Diary ; Tom Zubrycki who had previously made Kemira: Diary of a Strike (1984) made Friends and Enemies (1987); Brian McKenzie, who had made I’ll Be Home for Christmas (1984), made The Last Day’s Work (1987). A number of fellowship applicants and panel members from the first two years of the scheme remember Haydon equating “innovation” with direct cinema.

Apart from this emphasis in Haydon’s personal thinking there is no clarification of the notion of “innovation” in the first program. It is worth speculating heuristically on implications of the requirement before examining the guidelines and the implementation of the scheme for clues as to the actual implications for filmmakers. Ways in which it is at least theoretically possible for a project to be “innovative” could include:

* Dealing with totally new subject matters. These might range from dealing with political or social issues not previously dealt with to dealing with more abstract ideas than have previously been dealt with in conventional documentary. The move over relatively recent times into what is often called the “essay” film may be seen as an example of the latter.
* Exploring new ways of researching, and shooting projects.
* Creating new ways of working, either with the subject matter, or with other people involved in the production. In the latter case the project may be produced by a closer collaboration between a group of filmmakers or by a greater collaboration between the filmmaker(s) and the people about whom the film is made. The comment by John Hughes (below) is pertinent here.
* Creating new ways of structuring the finished product. This may take the form of creating new relations between elements of the film (sound and image, image to image, sound to sound, sequence to sequence).
* Creating new forms of relationship between audience and film. Much discussion of documentary (especially at the superficial level of reviewing and publicity material) concentrates on “content” to the total exclusion of any discussion of the structuring of the film itself, or spectator/text relations. The attempt to construct new spectator / text relations recognises the active role of audiences in the production of meaning and recognises that audiences are produced by texts. It is also linked, like the previous point, to a view of documentary which rejects the “transparent” “realist” view. In doing so it challenges the epistemological assumptions that underlie many critical and theoretical discourses on documentary.
* A further possible form of innovation which is at least potentially available is the creation of new forms of exhibition and distribution. This requires experimentation in the production of new audiences.

It is possible to discern some of these forms of innovation in the output of the Documentary Fellowship Scheme. Perhaps the best example of attempts to deal with new subject matter is Sarah Gibson and Susan Lambert’s film Landslides(1986), while the exploration of new ways of researching the film can be seen in the case of Maria (Chobocky, 1991), Landslides or most controversially in The Good Woman of Bangkok (O’Rourke, 1992).

New ways of structuring the finished product could be seen in The Last Day’s Work in which the film comprises a number of sequences which formally differ from one another, but are related through musical rhythms and metaphors both to one another and to the broad topic of work. In Landslides the film experiments with relations between sound and image, image and image, and sound and sound. All That is Solid (Hughes, 1989), like Landslides, uses a range of formal devices and their relationships to question the very basis of the truth claims advanced by documentary film.

In raising internal questions about the nature of documentary film, and its truth claims, films such as Landslides and All That is Solid sought also to open up a much more active role for the audience in exploring the possible meanings of the film. In this sense they were much more “difficult” films and aroused some criticism at the time of their television screening. This issue will be taken up below.

Evidence of rewarding epistemological innovation – the ways in which documentary films seek to produce knowledge – is more difficult to find. The emphasis on the content and relatively superficial issues of form is based on the assumption that the role of documentary is to be transparent. The film which draws attention to its constructed nature, or which is structured in such a way that the audience may need to work to make connections between elements of the film is seen as drawing attention away from “what it is about”. However, no film can offer an unmediated view, but always views the world through particular sets of cultural assumptions about “the real world” and how it should be represented.

This raises questions about mode of address – about how the film assumes a position in relation to its audience and its subject matter – how in a way it defines or places its audience. How it constructs the kind of knowledge that, as “documentary” it claims to have, its relation to claims of truth. [24]

Seeing documentary as transparent is particularly strong among critics and filmmakers with a journalistic background, where the predominant paradigm is a communication model based on an empiricist view of the world, and on the assumption that the journalist or filmmaker possesses an unproblematic truth to be passed on to the audience. If one works on this assumption questions about form are basically questions about how best to “engage an audience” (which is seen to exist externally to, and prior to, the text) through narrative structure, clarity of exposition, character or personality, conflict and controversy, and arresting images and sound track which are referentially related to the subject matter or produce apposite metaphors about the subject matter. Such assumptions about the nature and form of documentary and its relation to its audience are incompatible with films which question the epistemological assumptions of documentary, or which seek to produce much more poetic treatments of their subject matter. Such films posed a significant problem for the ABC.

Industrially the scheme could be seen as an intervention which sought to increase the possibilities of diverse production; an attempt to deal with some of the difficulties with production already alluded to.

Critically it appeared to encourage filmmakers to engage with questions of the form of documentary which had increasingly been under discussion in film co-ops and journals. However the precise parameters of formal innovation were to be left up to discussion between the applicant and the panel.

When the question of innovation did arise in discussion at panels it was seen to relate predominantly to form, however it was recognised that it could relate also to subject matter, or to production practice. In the 1985 guidelines there is an attempt to clarify the issue of innovation:

The Documentary Fellowships are intended to foster innovation in the relative sense of encouraging the production of films which are unfamiliar, new and fresh in comparison with other films made in Australia to date and/or in comparison with other films made by the filmmaker concerned.

Innovation involves a high financial risk and is difficult to fund from conventional sources, since innovatory projects often defy precise description in advance of production. Under Fellowship funding, a filmmaker enjoys considerable freedom in being able to choose the form and content of a film and in allowing it to evolve during the shooting and editing process. [25]

After commenting that “the goal of this program is ‘not innovation for its own sake'” these guidelines go on to describe the “wide spectrum of approaches” which may be seen as innovative. Interestingly, even this list is not particularly rigorous in defining what it means by innovation, preferring to name exemplary films than to discuss in detail the way in which each category is innovative. There are five broad categories of innovation listed: [26]

(i) Original concept: a film which does not fit existing forms or cover conventional subjects of documentary or which, at least, is original in the Australian context…
(ii) Transcending conventional boundaries: a film which combines genres.…
(iii) Formal experimentation..
(iv) Extraordinary dedication and effort in researching and marshalling evidence on an issue of social concern: Over-exposed issues may need an original angle or approach, so that the subject seems unfamiliar, new fresh; but under-exposed subjects and issues can afford a more conventional approach, because the information they provide is unfamiliar, new, fresh.…
(v) Consciousness of the documentary form with an attempt to explore and stretch the definition of the form: A film which acknowledges documentary’s traditional concern with “reality”, truth, honesty, responsibility to subject and responsibility to viewer; yet through “stretching” the form, raises questions about personal and political analysis, filmmaking conventions, viewers’ expectations and the nature of film.

The 1989 guidelines reduced the above detail to:

A film may be conventional in form but innovatory in content, eg in its choice of subject, in the originality of its concept, in the breadth of its research. [27]

In practice at panel meetings the discussion of the nature of innovation depended very much on the composition of the panel and the interests of the filmmaker being interviewed.

For John Hughes (director of the fellowship film All That is Solid (1989) and later One Way Street (1993) and After Mabo (1998):

I thought the brief was to make a work that was addressing the conventions and possibilities of the documentary form. … However that doesn’t necessarily imply an auteurist approach … so I tried to implement a collaborative process.

I would like to have begun with a body of research material from scratch and have a musician, a composer, a writer, and performers, documentary participant characters, working in a workshop context for six weeks …

I was a bit suspicious about the term innovative…about the auteurist implications…

My interpretation was that what was required of us was to contribute to the manufacture of an aesthetic sensibility, of a mode of reception, of a construction of an audience, which was compatible in some ways with other aspects of the transformations of the social formation that we were experiencing during that period of the time…

So the procedures, and structures and the subject matter of [All that is solid] actually derive from a critique of the context of production itself. [28]

Hughes moved the concept of innovation beyond the realist paradigm which seems to underlie the notion of innovation in the various guidelines themselves, seeking to raise epistemological questions about the nature of documentary as Sarah Gibson and Susan Lambert had also done in their fellowship film, Landslides.

Generally discussion remained within the realist paradigm, within which the process of production itself may be personally innovative. For example, Barbara Chobocky considers the production process on her project Maria (1991) to have been innovative because it involved working in ways which had been foreign to her, and, by its very nature the project involved so many unknown factors that it would have been impossible to provide neat answers to the questions of an assessment panel under normal funding arrangements. One of the major advantages of the Documentary Fellowship Scheme was that it allowed the filmmaker to take risks which might not normally be possible -both personal, aesthetic and production risks. This conception of the project as personally innovative is clearly given warrant by the guidelines encouragement of films which are “unfamiliar, new and fresh in comparison with other films made … by the filmmaker concerned” but does not necessarily imply the same degree of risk on the part of the exhibitor as those films which challenged the epistemological assumptions of documentary and required the production of different audience positions.

Haydon was keen to foster a degree of risk on the part of the filmmaker which he saw as being discouraged by the funding processes of the early 1980s. For Haydon innovation was linked to risk and the opposite of preconception. “Present funding methods in Australia are predisposed to favour documentaries which are conventional and ‘safe’ in their ambition and style.” [29] This element of risk appealed to Tom Haydon about the production of Kemira: Diary of a Strike. [30] Tom Zubrycki believes that Haydon was impressed by the way in which that film was produced: leaping into the middle of an unfolding series of events and seeking completion money later. It seems likely that in the first year of the scheme Haydon had in mind this form of innovation in methodology as a model other filmmakers could follow. Ironically Haydon concludes this discussion of the dampening effects of current funding models on innovation with the following comments: “the growing need for TV presales hands the real power of decision to TV managements and these are conservative – perhaps inevitably so. TV generally opts for those kinds of films which have enjoyed past ratings success.” [31]  The encouragement of innovation in exhibition and distribution of documentary was not sufficiently addressed by the Scheme and has yet to be sufficiently addressed within the institutional context of broadcast television.

(3) The requirement to engage with a television audience
In 1988 there was a break in the continuity of fellowship awards resulting from negotiations between the Australian Film Commission and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation over the continuation of the scheme itself. These negotiations indicated ABC disquiet over a number of aspects of the scheme and a perception within the AFC that the scheme was too expensive. There had been a number of administrative problems with films taking longer than two years to complete and with budget blowouts . [32]

One response to these administrative and budgetary problems was a reduction in the size of the panels. In May 1988 it was proposed to delete the fifth member of the panel: “a person respected for his/her concern with ideas and their creative expression, but who is not directly or constantly involved with film”. In the past this position had been filled by historian Humphrey McQueen, playwright Stephen Sewell, journalist and biographer David Marr and novelist Frank Moorhouse.

The impact of this decision was to reverse one of the original purposes of the scheme as envisaged by Malcolm Smith: breaking down the insularity of documentary film. This appears to have been done for primarily financial reasons, as a memo of 11 May 1988 raises concerns at the costs of getting panels together. [33]

However, at the same time there were negotiations with the ABC in relation to their concerns with the scheme. The ABC had not been happy with a number of the films produced under the scheme, feeling that they were unsuited to television. [34] The ABC sought to have greater input into the composition of the panels, and to have greater say in the final product. Discussion between the AFC and the ABC in early 1988 proposed that “the basic, and direct, responsibility for the Fellowship Program should be shared between the Director Creative Development and the ABC’s Head TV Documentaries”. At the same time it was proposed to alter the panel so that it comprise:

(i) someone with an existing knowledge of the aims of the Documentary Fellowship Program, who could be any one of the following -Tom Haydon, Director Creative Development or a previous Fellow;
(ii) ABC’s Head TV Documentaries;
(iii) A person who is an experienced and highly regarded documentary-maker; and
(iv) a person respected for his/her concern with and knowledge of film, but who is not presently a filmmaker. [35]

The result of this change was that the ABC now had a more direct role in the process of selection of the successful candidate and in the determining of the direction of the scheme and the criteria to be applied to proposed projects. There was now a more clear link between the proposed project and the market. While this no doubt makes sense in a market model, and certainly did bring questions of audience into the discussion, it also watered down one of the perceived strengths of the scheme for filmmakers: that they were freed from the constraints of the market.

In a letter to Tom Haydon in early 1988 attention is drawn to the wording of a memo from the Controller of TV programs:

We (The Controller and the Director of Television) note that you have managed to arrange several important contractual positions which will ensure that the ABC has a strong editorial voice in the making of this product for transmission as television documentaries and not just a film exercise.

and the comment is made that “the changes to the Fellowship Guidelines are regarded by the ABC as important and had much to do with our decision to continue our involvement.” [36]

Films were now “to be innovative televisiondocumentaries of 50 to 58 minutes duration.” (Original emphasis) [37]

When the scheme resumed in 1989 there was a new requirement on fellowship holders. Section (4) of the guidelines is a requirement to “engage with a television audience”. The guidelines of October 1989 state:

it is expected that Fellows will take advantage of this valuable opportunity to interact with television audiences by attempting new and unusual approaches which have specific relevance to the television medium and which acknowledge the advantages and restrictions of that medium. [38]

The guidelines do not give much guidance as to how this may be done although the previous paragraph gives some indication:

documentary programs comprise a staple and significant component of Australian television programming, with conventional wildlife, sport and travel themes predominating. In addition, serious current affairs television increasingly adopts the techniques of documentary. [39]

This move is a recognition that theatrical exhibition of documentary had contracted throughout the 1980s, and it remains true that in the 1990s any documentary filmmaker who wishes to have their output seen by a significant audience must turn to television. [40]  The audience for a single documentary slot on ABC television could well be much larger than for a whole theatrical season. It will also be a wider and more diverse audience. The move is consistent with the original aim of the scheme to raise the profile of documentary. At the same time there are inherent contradictions for the scheme, especially around the term innovation.

The wording of the guidelines does recognise that audiences are not necessarily fixed and unitary. It does take for granted however, an assumption that television documentary is a category different from “documentary” or perhaps “theatrical documentary”. The assumption seems to be to do primarily with audience and with audience address. The television audience is assumed to be more conservative than that for theatrical documentary. In discussion of the relationship of the program to the audience reference is made to the “charter obligations” of the ABC. [41]  The Charter which governed the ABC at the time is in fact quite vague on questions of audience but perhaps this is the section alluded to:

In each year there are a number of series included in the above figures, including the childrens’ series Lift Off. These figures come from Get the Picture (1992, 1993) Australian Film Commission, Sydney.

The Corporation shall take account of … the responsibility of the Corporation as the provider of an independent national broadcasting and television service to provide a balance between broadcasting programs and television programs of wide appeal and specialised broadcasting programs and television programs.

This section of the Charter seems to have been taken as requiring the building of as wide an audience for programming as possible, but it has also been taken as a warrant for applying a relatively normative set of criteria to funding proposals submitted for presale. An orthodoxy has developed in which the form and audience address of documentaries regarded as acceptable for different strands of documentary programming have become relatively fixed. The goal is to build as big an audience as possible, and it has to be acknowledged that the ABC had a major success turning 8.30pm on Sunday night into a successful documentary slot and had clearly built an audience for documentary here. Though this policy has since been abandoned, there had also been a strategy of building documentary audiences for other time slots, which may be seen as more, or less, “adventurous”.

However, there appears to be a limited recognition that television audiences areproduced by the intersection of institutional and textual discourses, or as Ien Ang puts it: “televisual discourse constructs a variety of types of involvement for viewers.” [42]

The concept of “television documentary” itself is at the intersection of several discourses: discourses on documentary which have in the past been discursively constructed largely in terms of cinema; discourses about television – both institutional and textual: and the discourses of television. The contradictions inherent in these multiple discourses abound in the guidelines, for example:

Historically in Australia, independent documentary-makers have found difficulty in securing access to television audiences. They have instead distributed their films non-theatrically, or in exceptional cases via art-house cinema release.

In the same guidelines the section on “authorship” speaks several times about “the documentary film” and “documentary filmmaking”. Television on the other hand has not had a strong tradition of privileging the supposed “auteur” of the work. There are exceptions, usually writers, such as Dennis Potter in drama; and the ABC has used the names of controversial Australian documentary makers Dennis O’Rourke and David Bradbury as well as the nature film making partnership the Parers in marketing documentary “specials”. [43] Nevertheless the problematic notion of the “personal vision” has been less strong in television than in film.

The predominant view of documentary in television is that it must be transparent — a model based on the journalistic origins of many of the people who work in television documentary, with its strong links to current affairs. The audience tends to be seen as an extra-discursive essence waiting out there to receive the truth which will be presented by the program.

So there is a contradiction in the requirement to engage, on the one hand, with the conservative notion of television audience which seems to prevail within the ABC, and the concurrently conservative model of documentary; and, on the other hand, with the requirement to be innovative. The latter requirement is confined within the realist, journalistic paradigm of television current affairs inflected through television drama – a model that stresses transparency, dramatic conflict, and the construction of interesting characters – or at least personalities. The institutional codes of professionalism by which documentaries are evaluated and assessed for funding, and exhibition are based on a model which assumes a unified discourse, images which validate the argument in a totally closed fashion, and a lack of any concern to foreground the epistemological assumptions of documentary in general, or in particular cases. The audience is presumed to be unwilling to engage with a program which challenges the conventional mode of address of television, or to challenge the epistemological assumptions of television and documentary.

The Documentary Fellowship Scheme in its original guise is no longer. Some of those interviewed in the course of this research mourned its passing, and some felt that it had outlived its usefulness. Those who mourned its passing tended to be filmmakers, and those who felt it was no longer necessary worked in funding organisations and the ABC. Perhaps this dichotomy is inevitable, and perhaps the DFS could not exist under the present conditions in the film and television industries in Australia. It is certainly true that there is more documentary production now than in the 1970s, and there are now larger audiences for documentary. On the other hand there is now a new orthodoxy and predictability about much documentary production which is encouraged by the bureaucratic procedures by which funding is arranged, including the necessity for presales. As a result there is much more documentary on television, produced by a wider range of filmmakers, but produced within a still confining set of conventions.

Television operates within a different political economy than film. The broadcast model which operates for the present (but probably not for the future) assumes a mass audience. The economics of broadcast television require the maximisation of audience. In a political climate which has seen the shrinking of the public sphere, even a state broadcaster such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is required to seek the largest possible audience for its programming. The ABC has shifted from being an organisation which had the central role, like the early British documentaries, of building a public sphere and a sense of national identity, to being a publicly owned broadcaster which is required, as a priority, to build audiences.

The voracious appetite of television to produce new products for the market place accentuates the process of hybridisation of television forms. New styles of non fiction television are being developed which tend at present to leave documentary as perhaps the least formally innovative area of non-fiction. The challenge now is to develop audiences for documentary which are more responsive to forms which are innovative, not in the sense of merely providing new commodified forms of knowledge, but epistemologically; and to do so without any existing scheme such as the Documentary Fellowship Scheme. The scheme is important as one institutional intervention in the process by which television has become the dominant site of exhibition for documentary in Australia, as it is in many other parts of the world.

Footnotes:
[1] Aims of the scheme, as detailed in guidelines produced in April 1984, p4. A more detailed account of the background to the scheme has been written by Ian Stocks in an unpublished article. Ian’s thinking on this topic and his generous sharing of his ideas and his time helped provided valuable background to the research for this paper.
[2] In the mid 1990s there was a new scheme also called the Documentary Fellowship Scheme, but it seems to bear little relationship to the first scheme.
[3] Haydon, Tom,(1984, 12 March) “An interim proposal for a documentary Fellowship Fund” Sydney: Australian Film Commission. This wording is repeated in the Guidelines for the scheme published in 1984. The guidelines were substantially rewritten for the 1985 round.
[4] AFC Information Update, number 14, June 1984, p 1. In this period the first category included film writer and researcher Annette Blonski, film academic Freda Freiberg, and film academic Liz Jacka; while the second included playwright Stephen Sewell, journalist and writer David Marr, and historian Humphrey McQueen.
[5] The shift to television as the basis of exhibition and distribution is a crucial feature of the final two years of the scheme, but was little in evidence in the initial thinking.
[6] Malcolm Smith, personal interview, Sydney, November 1992.
[7] Malcolm Smith, personal interview, Sydney, November 1992.
[8] Malcolm Smith, along with Mark Hamlyn, Harry Bardwell and Jonathon Holmes (all formerly from the ABC documentary department) all feel this has been achieved now, although more through recent changes at the ABC and in the various funding bodies than through the Documentary Fellowship Scheme.
[9] On the assumption that 12 months was an adequate period of time to produce the project. In some cases, most notably Gary Kildea’s Valentia Diary, this was not the case.
In a number of places in this essay amounts are given in Australian dollars. To get an approximate 1998 $US equilvalent value multiply all figures by 2.7.
[10] The extent to which this freedom was an illusion will be discussed below
[11] Documentary Fellowship Guidelines AFC 1990, p 2.
[12] Guidelines, p2.
[13] Guidelines, p 7.
[14] Guidelines, p 7.
[15] Guidelines, 1989, p 3.
[16] Guidelines, p 5.
[17] Guidelines, p 5.
[18] Guidelines, p 7.
[19] Haydon, ‘Interim proposal’, p3.
[20] Guidelines, 1989, p3.
[21] A number of women who had worked in this way never received fellowships, although it is by no means certain that it was their collective work which eliminated them.
[22] Rubbo also presented a weekend seminar at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in 1984, which is the subject of a training video produced by Aviva Ziegler. My thanks to Maree Delofski formerly of AFTRS for pointing this out to me.
[23] Haydon, p2.
[24] John Hughes, personal interview, Melbourne, January 1993.
[25] Guidelines, 1985, p2.
[26] For the sake of brevity I have omitted the names of exemplary films listed in each category.
[27] Guidelines, 1989, p3.
[28] John Hughes, personal interview.
[29] Haydon, p2.
[30] The film made by Tom Zubrycki before the DFS commenced
[31] Haydon, p2.
[32] The most notable problem arose with Gary kildea’s film Valencia Diary which was the subject of some dispute between Haydon and Kildea.
[33] Although as one fellowship holder, mourning the passing of the scheme, points out, the entire scheme cost less than an average feature firlm, and less than the AFC’s investment in a number of feature films!
[34] In interviews with panel members, filmmakers, and ABC personel, the films which were regularly named as “difficult” were: The Last Day’s Work, (Brian McKenzie, 1984), Landslides (Sarah Gibson and Susan Lambert, 1986) and All That is Solid (John Hughes, 1989).
[35] Megan McMurchy in memo to Greg Ricketson, 15 January, 1988.
[36] Letter from Jonathon Holmes, Head of Television Documentaries to Tom Haydon, 2 February, 1988. Holmes’ letter ends with a joke about a fiftieth birthday party commenting that “if it had been produced for television, we might have needed to cut it a bit here and there!” (Original emphasis). The comment is instructive as an “in-joke” referring to some of the ABC objections to previous films.
[37] Memo from Michael Ross re meeting with Jonathon Holmes, Megan McMurchy, Tom Haydon, Michael Ross at ABC, dated 20 January 1988.
[38] Guidelines, 1989, p3.
[39] Guidelines, 1989, p3.
[40] In a survey period in which the AFC estimates of documentary production show ‘a fairly consistent level of production of about 100 productions’ the figures for theatrical release of documentaries by year are:
1988 – 21, 1989 -12, 1990 – 5, 1991 -16, 1992 – 6, 1993 – 5.
Documentaries screened on Australian TV for 1991 and 1992 respectively were 201 and 194.
[41] A comment made frequently by Harry Bardwell, Jonathon Holmes and Mark Hamlyn of the ABC documentary division in a personal interview with the present writer.
[42] Ang, Ien (1986) ‘The battle between television and its audiences: the politics of watching television’. In Drummond and Paterson, Television in Transition, London: BFI. See also, for much more detailed discussion of the institutional construction of discourses around television audiences Ang, Ien (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience, London: Routledge.
[43] While as Maree Delofski pointed out to me, David Attenborough is presented as the pre-eminent documentary ‘auteur’.