Cultural codes

• Introduction
• Non-fiction text types and film
• Structure in non-fiction film
• Representing: place, people, time, ideas

Introduction

The term 'documentary' implies a specific set of approaches within film and media studies. Many people feel that to deal with the 'documentary', one has to know about the Lumière brothers, Robert Flaherty, John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings, Free Cinema, all the way up to Nick Broomfield, Michael Moore, and Big Brother (and this is just the Anglophone tradition). The study of 'documentary' film alludes to a history and set of conventions that may be unfamiliar to many of the readers to whom this pack is addressed: teachers of English. 'Non-fiction' film, on the other hand, establishes a much closer relation with a secure and understandable part of the English curriculum and, in common with our previous packs, we would like to work inside the English curriculum rather alongside it.

For more detailed information go to Non-fiction and documentary films: a history

In focusing on documentary film as 'non-fiction' texts, therefore, we address a range of questions, issues, concepts and teaching approaches that ought to be familiar to English teachers:

• Can 'non-fiction' texts ever straightforwardly 'tell the truth'?
• How can we distinguish between fact and opinion?
• How can we detect bias - either conscious or unwitting, and know which is which?

And we want to ask the same questions specifically of non-fiction film:

• What strategies do films use to persuade us?
• How do they deploy film language to represent ideas?
• What does a fact or an opinion look (and sound) like in a film?

In these pages we link explicitly with the National Curriculum conceptions of non-fiction texts. In the online resource, we also re-present approaches developed in our other shorts packs - Cs and Ss, Basic Teaching Techniques, Key Questions - for non-fiction material.

Non-fiction text types and film

Having pitched our film tent in English, we need to explore how far the non-fiction text types familiar to English teachers actually correlate with non-fiction film. The six non-fiction text types identified in the National Curriculum are texts which: inform, recount, explain, instruct, persuade, and discuss. Of these, the types most clearly exemplified in the films for this pack are the information, recount and persuasivetext types.

Many documentary films or programmes occupy discursive or 'essayist' territory. The World at War (1973), or TheNazis: A Warning from History (1997), current affairs programming, and film documentaries like The Fog of War (2003), in their different ways attempt to analyse a situation either currently or from the past, into causes, consequences, relations, lessons for the future. Of the films in this pack only Housing Problems might be called discursive but since it is also polemical, we will focus here on its argumentative dimension.

Information films

If it were possible to identify 'core' or 'pure' information films, they would probably be those produced by the Central Office of Information, a government department set up to make material warning, for example about crossing the road, or raising health awareness, though even here these shade into the persuasion genre (think of the Aids warnings of the 1980s) or instruction (green cross code films.) (You can see a range of examples on BFI Screenonline, which features a selection of government information films.) Otherwise, information text types probably correlate most closely with natural history programmes, archaeology programmes like Time Team, or holiday programmes and travelogues. The films in this pack closest to informational films are The Urban Savannah, I Love My Nails and Bush Bikes.

The Urban Savannah, produced by undergraduates, spoofs the anthropology or natural history film in ways that illuminate the form. Typically these types of film feature:

• Voice of expert, legitimated by academic position
• Incognito and fly-on-the-wall 'observational' filming
• Explanatory commentary
• Dramatic choice of episodes.

After viewing The Urban Savannah, set up a Venn diagram on a flipchart with three intersecting circles, labelled 'Inform', 'Entertain' and 'Explain', and 'The Urban Savannah' at the centre of it. Discuss with the students:

• Which features of the film do the work of each of these genres?
• Which of the three genres is the hardest to find features of?

Showing and telling

A distinction is drawn in the study of fiction (in print and on film) between the narrative modes of showing and telling. The two categories can be applied to non-fiction study too. Informational film often relies on the spoken word underpinning or anchoring 'illustrative' visual material. Voice tracks often tell us information, while the image sequences show us. Two films in this pack don't feature a voice track (either voice-over or dialogue) at all - Tomorrow's Saturday and Bush Bikes. Films in which the informational dimension is primarily visual can seem less anchored - they tend to show rather than tell.

• View one of films with your students. Discuss: What information are we being 'shown'?
• Ask students to translate Bush Bikes into a piece of prose for an article in a magazine or newspaper. They can choose whether to write the piece as lifestyle, travelogue or international news feature. Then discuss: What is lost in the translation from film to writing?
• Ask students to write the piece as a short story - the story of a day out for three aboriginal teenage boys. Discuss: What is lost between a prose fiction version of the story and the film?

Recount

Though informational in intent, both Bush Bikes and Tomorrow's Saturday are set up as 'recounted' events: any piece of film, as a recorded medium, will inevitably present its subject as 'past' by the time it gets to a viewer. These two films are attempts though to show us snapshots of a present - the present day of late 20th century aboriginal Australia, and the 'vanishing present' of late 1950s Lancashire.

• Ask students to choose an aspect of their lives which they could re-present as a 'general' picture of the life of someone their age, with their background. What would they choose to focus on? How 'generalisable' are they?

There are two other films in the pack in which there is explicit recounting of past events - where the film is about the past rather than capturing the present - and in both the recount happens in spoken language.

Both I Expect Joan Feels the Same and Silence are structured as recounts of past events. In Silence the recount is presented in voice-over with events in strict linear order, and the film structured around it. Thus we see an example of how non-fiction (films) can be sequenced as narrative: the story is no less a story for it being true.

I Expect Joan Feels the Same, on the other hand, is a story shared and structured almost as a conversation: almost, because the interaction is between an interviewer (who is edited out, along with her questions) and two other participants.

• Using Venn diagrams again, ask your students to consider the relationship here between 'interview', 'conversation' and 'story' in the recount genre. Which features of recount are most clearly in each?

Recounting in film doesn't only happen on the voice track however. What distinguishes I Expect Joan Feels the Same, Silence (and Hidden) from recordings of oral history are the accompanying images.

• Ask students: Which aspects of the story of Silence are represented in the animation? What do the images represent that can't be told by the speaker? The students should illustrate their answers with one or two images.
• Students could identify the range of information presented to us in I Expect Joan Feels the Same in visual form. Why has the film-maker included this visual material? What does it add in terms of information, and address to the viewer?

Shots just of Joan and her friend are deliberately chosen so that we empathise as closely as possible, with few mediating devices, with them and their stories. There is no intervening interviewer and their names (except one reference to Joan) aren't mentioned, as if even their names would distract from their story.

The image track on Silence, on the other hand, achieves a devastating emotional impact through entirely other means - drawing what can't be shown in any other way, and doing it obliquely so reinforcing the power of Giancarlo's story.

Persuasive non-fiction film

All non-fiction texts attempt to persuade us of their veracity, their claim to be 'not fiction'. But some films take an explicitly persuasive project as their focus - more than making claims to truth, they set out to argue a case and persuade us to act, or at least take on their point of view. In this compilation, Blight and Housing Problems exemplify this tradition.

Persuasive texts

Here are five features of persuasive texts taken from the GCSE Bitesize pages on studying non-fiction texts in Key Stage 3 English:

Persuasive texts:

• Try to convince us to do or agree with something such as spending money or holding certain beliefs
• Contain a mixture of fact and opinion
• Emphasise key points using subheadings, repetition, snappy memorable phrases and persuasive or emotive language
• Will often use a personal style so the text seems to speak directly to the reader
• Will show clear links between points such as 'if you donate £20 then you will help a destitute family.'

However, one strategy that persuasive texts very often use is to pretend to be another kind of text: 'above all, persuasive texts disguise themselves as something else.' ( Nick McGuinn, 'Teaching the Techniques of Persuasion', Secondary English Magazine, June 2002, pp29-32)

One might argue that Housing Problems is a persuasive text masquerading as an informational one. Again, following the markers from GCSE Bitesize, it has these features of information texts:

• It provides clear information about a subject.
• It is in the present tense.
• It is presented/narrated in the third person or structured by a third person.
• It organises information clearly into (8) sections.
• It uses examples, drawings, models etc.

But it also has the following features of a persuasive text in order to persuade us that clearing slums and building new estates in their place is a good and necessary thing:

• It contains a mix of fact and opinion - although the opinion is disguised.
• It emphasises key points by using emotive shots and repetition (for example of personal testimony) for a cumulative effect.
• It uses a personal style, on three levels: personal testimony of slum occupants speaking direct to camera; 'voice of God' speaking direct to viewer; other experts on the voice track.
• It links the points it makes: slum conditions are appalling - they need to be cleared - new homes need to be built - these new homes are modern, clean, efficient, loved by their inhabitants.
• It doesn't require action of us but is trying to buy our assent to its argument.

Blight is very different in its approaches to persuading us essentially of the opposite point of view. First of all, ask students to, express the position of the film-maker in a sentence. Then discuss with them:

• Is it possible to present this as a sequential argument?
• Which of the persuasive features identified above does it use?
• Does it present its case in a different sequence or structure?

Persuasive texts as propaganda

You could extend this exploration of persuasive texts into looking at propaganda. After students have watched Silence and I Expect Joan Feels the Same ask them to consider how they compare to pro-war propaganda and whether they could be classified as anti-war propaganda. The following questions might help:

• What do we learn about the war in these two films?
• How are emotions expressed? How do the films make you feel about war?
• The visual styles of the two films are different - do you find either or both of them personal or impersonal? What do you think the impact of the films would have been if each had been made in the style of the other (ie animation and narrator for Joan and interview with clips for Silence)?

For contrast, students could view clips from a World War II propaganda film, such as The Lion Has Wings (1939) on BFI Screenonline or view clips from War Work News on BFI Screenonline.

Structure in non-fiction film

An analytical category common to both print and film non-fiction texts is structure. In other packs, built around fiction short films, we cover this as story or narrative. With non-fiction we recognise that narrative is only one set of structuring devices.

It is possible (though maybe debatable) to make the claim that these non-fiction films are richer and more complex than the non-fiction text types typically studied in English. The impact of these films relies on more than one set of clearly identifiable text-type markers - information texts turn out to be persuasive, recounts are discursive, narratives are used to argue. A discussion of different structuring strategies needs to acknowledge this. Here we look at four different ways of structuring a non-fiction film: as argument; as memoir through conversation; as musical composition; as 'day in the life'.

As argument

The force and persuasive power of an argument is only partly in its 'content' - the argumentative moves it makes. Equally as important are the links and sequencing of these moves and the ways in which they're presented to an audience.

Housing Problems is structured as follows:

• Voice-over introducing Stepney Councillor
• Stepney councillor emotively describing 'typical slum architecture' and 'here are examples of sheer neglect'
• Voice-over introducing…
• …four personal testimonies
• Councillor speaking of problems of slum clearance
• 'Voice of God' with architectural models
• Councillor again
• Personal testimony voices over image track of new homes
• Councillor again
• Personal testimony voices with image track of slum living.

This structure functions first of all as information, covering what conditions are like and what the new houses are like, from experiential points of view. But they are framed 1) by the politician, whose job is to persuade the public to support his plan and 2) by the 'voice of God' narrator, an unnamed, uncredited voice of authority without any apparent 'vested interest'. Then the 'voice of God' introduces the councillor to give him credibility as a disinterested party (when of course he isn't), and the councillor introduces the inhabitants to reflect well on himself (as though he's there to help) but also so we know they aren't making this film themselves - they've been given permission to speak directly.

But the structure of the film is also persuasive. In essence, the first half outlines a 'problem' (housing problems) and in the second half proposes a solution. (Problem/solution structures are common in argumentative or persuasive texts.) The solutions are presented by experts and models (the better to see the big picture) and backed up again by personal testimony. The final sequence or move is a kind of coda or recapitulation: personal testimony is cut with scenes of outdoor squalor - instead of a summary by an expert exhorting us, the final voices are left to participants - rhetorically a very persuasive strategy.

• View the film with your students and discuss it. Then consider: Would it be possible to reorganise the structure of the film? Summarise each section on a card and re-order them: Do other sequences work as effectively? 

As memoir through conversation

I Expect Joan Feels the Same is technically a recount: two women recalling their experiences of marrying and losing their husbands in the war. The account features some aspects of narrative recall - it is in the past tense, and clear about timing and order of some events, and it is about real events, with some story markers - but there are two distinctive features. First it is a conversation between two women and an absent interlocutor. Second it is about things like love, loss, memory, the war, and personal experiences of these. The first question and sequence doesn't invite them to start their stories; instead it asks, 'What's it like to be in love?' So, even though the film comprises two recounted memories, it has a series of themes as well.

The conversational structure is also a device to reinforce the thematic dimension. If it were just a recount, one story would be enough. The film is about shared or common experience - the thousands of women who lost husbands in this and other wars - which is why the title emphasises this, and the unnamed speaker says twice 'I expect Joan feels the same'.

• Ask students to try to reconstruct retrospectively the interviewer's questions from the conversation, and then to try to represent the conversation as a linear narrative. What would be lost if either of these reconstructions were carried out?
• Carry out similar exercises with the interview and recount in Hidden.

As musical composition

The features of musical composition are as much to do with orchestration and harmony (the vertical arrangements of notes on a musical stave) as linear development. Blight has more in common, structurally, with music than with argument, narrative or information. This is deliberate, as it was conceived collaboratively between artist John Smith and composer Jocelyn Pook. Motifs are repeated, built up from recorded dialogue. There are different movements - the aggressive opening built around 'kill the spiders'; a lyrical passage built around 'I remember'; the dates and numbers sequence. Rather than building a reasoned case, through logical sequence, it creates a dense series of sense impressions around images of destruction, and sounds of human voices recalling and remembering. The effect is elegiac - a song of loss - rather than polemical. The film makes a persuasive case but this is implicit rather than explicit.

• You could choose one of the other films in the compilation and view it with your students. Discuss: Is it possible to restructure the film using a musical structure? How has musical form been introduced into Silence, for example, or Holiday? How might it be used to restructure Hidden?

As 'day in the life'

The 'day in the life' format has a linear shape but, unlike strict narrative form, events are linked only by their chronological sequence and not by cause and effect. There are two 'day in the life' films in the pack, Bush Bikes and Tomorrow's Saturday. These films differ in what is called their narrative range - the former focusing on the day's activity for a small group of boys, and the latter representing the life - on Friday and Saturday - of a whole town. There is also a kind of 'life in a day' film - Ferment - where several lives (and a death) are presented as intersecting at one moment.

• Ask students to take the narrative events of Bush Bikes and create a cause and effect sequence. They will need to establish a 'problem' for the narrative to solve - a reason for building the bikes, perhaps.

A key question in both of these films is the extent to which they are constructed out of material shot over weeks and months. Tomorrow's Saturday, for example, was shot over the summer months of 1959 and 1960, and then edited to appear as a single continuous day and night.

• View one of these films with the students and ask them to identify the temporal markers in the film that signal to us the passing of time during one day. Do any shots suggest they were filmed on different days?

Representing: place, people, time, ideas

A key category for study of film and media (and, to some extent, for English) has been how texts represent the world. This has tended to cover a number of dimensions of representation:

• What or who is featured/what is missing?
• In whose interest does this representation work?
• Which elements of people/place/idea are highlighted?

In addition, representation is always about argument - either deliberate or unconscious attempts to persuade us that this picture is 'the way the world is'.

Place

A common feature of all these films is in their concerns with place. Apart from wildlife or natural history programmes, non-fiction films tend to focus on place as 'sites of human activity whose histories and potentialities invest them with cultural ghosts, possibilities, and connotations'. (Stibbs quoted in McGuinn, ibid)

The places in these films tend to be populated and/or bear the marks of people. Two films are explicitly concerned with the built, urban environment - improving, renewing, or destroying it. A comparison of Blight and Housing Problems might contrast the ways in which a sense of place is represented through people and people's voices, and how the camera engages with places through the range of camera shots used, for example the aerial overviews of Housing Problems versus the abstract close-ups of Blight.

• I Love My Nails is a portrait of a series of social spaces - shops that help constitute identities of the women who go there.
• Bush Bikes situates a group of boys in specific places: an urban environment where they are marginal (shot of police officer, of bike shop); a pastoral space (river, grassland) where they are 'at home' and a marginal space (the bike dump) where they create their bicycles.
• Tomorrow's Saturday is closer maybe to an 'objective' anthropological film: it is not narrated, nor consciously persuasive, but describes forms of life in a (reconstructed) single place at a specific time.
• Silence is structured around drawings of remembered places - some too sketchy or traumatic to be recalled in details. They are situated in place and time by being edited in with archive footage of 1930s Germany.
• What kinds of places are holiday resorts? Typically 'liminal' spaces, where people go to escape routine and drudgery. Thus the shots in Holiday connote a managed kind of escapism - neat lawns, genteel teas, gentle waves - but with hints of something less controlled and scarier (funfair rides, the House of Horror, the lights at night).
• View one of these films with your students and ask them to re-present the place(s) it depicts. For example, they could write a voice-over to give an Urban Savannah style make-over of Bush Bikes; using iMovie or Movie Maker they could intercut shots of Tomorrow's Saturday with shots of Holiday to contrast two ways of representing working class life in northern England in the late 1950s; or they could do something similar with scenes and shots from Housing Problems and Blight, maybe editing the personal testimony voice tracks of the former with the images of deconstruction in the latter.

People

People are shaped by places, as well as shaping places themselves. But what about the people in this compilation? Who speaks? For whom?

The unnamed voice-over people in Holiday and Housing Problems are all the more powerful for being invisible (what age, and background, are these people?). And then there are the silent - but visible - people, in Holiday, Tomorrow's Saturday, Bush Bikes and the Mitchell and Kenyon films. What would they say if they could speak? Why don't they?

There are lone voices in the films - in Silence, of a woman who takes 50 years to speak out about her experiences during the war, and of Joan and her friend in I Expect Joan Feels the Same. In Hidden Giancarlo speaks but remains unseen, and in fact tries to stay out of the crowd. Individuals come out of crowds in the Mitchell and Kenyon films, but those films, like Tomorrow's Saturday and Holiday, are about the 'mass' of people having singular, common experiences. The horror of Silence and Hidden, and the power of I Expect Joan Feels the Same, lie in the fact that these singular experiences represent multitudes.

• Screen the Mitchell and Kenyon films. Like most early cinema, they were made to show people back to themselves. Ask the students: How close are you to the people in each of these films? Often early film throws out characters or types who are recognisable today, beneath the old-style coats and hats. Can students spot 'doubles' of themselves in these crowds?

• To reveal the partiality of how people are represented, carry out some 'content analysis' of people's actions in a film. For one or more of the films in this compilation, identify by age, gender, social class (if you can) those people who:
• Cry
• Work with their hands
• Wear hats
• Speak
• Drive
• Read.

Do any patterns emerge?

Time

Many of these films record and present different varieties of lost time: Silence, about repressing and recovering memory; Blight, about the connection between place and memory, and the loss of both; I Expect Joan Feels the Same, about the 'recent-ness' of memory, and how it never loses you; Holiday, about living for a week outside of factory time. Two films are future-oriented: Housing Problems, about a vision of renewal, and Tomorrow's Saturday, about anticipating the end of the week. Ferment is a 'time-slice' of the present, almost literally a snapshot which we are given a tour around. Informational films like The Urban Savannah are premised on this being a picture of the present. The Mitchell and Kenyon films similarly functioned as snapshots of the present - they were processed the same day and shown to people as instant records, like moving portraits.

Playing off against represented time is duration, the time spent watching the film. Fifty years are covered in the ten minutes of Silence; eight hours or so in the ten minutes of Bush Bikes.

After you have looked at most or all of the films in the compilation you could ask students to consider: Which of the films cover the longest and the shortest time span? This could provide the basis for exploring how duration is represented in films, as discussed below.

There are five different ways time is represented in film in relation to 'duration':

• Stretch, where represented time is drawn out (in slow-motion, or parallel-edited action in suspense sequences)
• Ellipsis, where redundant time is cut out of the story
• Summary, where time passing is shown to us
• Pause, where story time stops and we're updated, maybe by a voice-over
• Scene, where story time and duration are the same.

When working on any single film from the compilation, see if you can identify examples of each relationship of time to duration.

Ideas

Perhaps the most challenging dimension of studying any kind of text - fiction or non-fiction - is identifying its 'about-ness'. Some films lend themselves quite readily to thematic readings. Blight, for example, is 'about' loss; the connection between place, memory and community and local democracy. There is a range of ideas, themes, questions and issues dealt with in the films in this compilation. The difficulty in tackling this with students is to get beyond the one-word answer to the question 'What is this film about?' 'Death' or 'Love' being the most popular.

• When you have worked with a few of the films, try out some thematic work on them, or, when working on one film, choose a 'theme' to match it to, such as:
• Communities can be blighted by progress
• The poor are always with us
• Necessity is the mother of invention
• All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing
• The past is another country.

• For each, develop the thematic statement into a question and outline how the film itself provides an answer, or answers. For example, if Silence asks the question, 'What are the consequences of good people remaining silent in the face of oppression?', then what answers does the film itself provide? If Blight asks, 'What is lost when houses are demolished?', what answer does the film propose?
• An alternative way into this is to take individual films and pigeonhole them with one-word or one-phrase themes, then to expand these into sentences and questions.