Showing it as it is: the facts and the fiction

IN 1896 George Milihs filmed two days of storms on the Normandy coast. Back in Paris, his autobiography recounts, this sequence "thrilled the public. The ones who were familiar with the sea exclaimed, That's it, exactly!" and the ones who had never seen the sea felt they were standing on its shore."

This wonder suffuses the first part of Faber's valuable survey of writing on the documentary form. By the end of the book, of course, everyone has seen the sea and the discussion has moved to why the documentary is in "crisis", how commissioning editors for television behave, whether verite has been reduced to "the line of least resistance" - whether magic has given way to seminar.

Of course fervent, often anxious discussions about factual film making predate our media pages, and the Film Studies boffins. "This sense of social responsibility makes our realist documentary a troubled and difficult art, and particularly in a time like ours, wrote John Grierson, the leader of the British Movement, in 1934. Grierson, incidentally, takes a respectful swipe at Robert Flaherty's romantic, individualistic legacy: horribly sentimental, he fears, "in lesser hands". Flaherty remains the most commonly referenced film maker in the collection.

Less abstract philosophical concerns are also a constant. In the most surprising section of the book, the chapter on Asia, Japanese film maker Shohei Imamura is asked by his subject to obtain a cleaver to kill his brother. Imamura stalls him for technical reasons and is relieved when he changes his mind. One thinks of the recent, mordantly funny "mockumentary" Man Bites Dog, in which a Belgian crew are drawn into direct complicity with the serial killer protagonist in their supposed "observational" film.

At the heart of all these debates the two variables of control and selection do battle with the biggest imponderable of all, reality. "Essentially," says David Maysles, half of the Maysles brothers who included (and repeated three times) a murder at the Rolling Stones Altamont concert in their Gimme Shelter film, "we are allowing things to happen rather than controlling them. We feel that things that really happen are more exciting." His naively sounds breathtaking to anyone who has ever lumbered into the "real" world with a film crew - and yet he expresses the aspiration of most documentarists and their audiences.

If we just want to see/show "things that really happen", why the outrage of an audience at Warhol's Sleep, an eight hour passage of a man sleeping? One of the book's most entertaining pieces is a Los Angeles cinema manager's report of the first screening. "Someone runs up to screen and shouts in sleeping man's ear, `WAKE UP!' Audience getting bitter, strained." An hour later the lobby is full of people demanding their money back, one of them offering a thirty second deadline before "We'll all come out here and lynch you, buddy!"

MacDonald and Cousins have also packed their fine portmanteau with more epic confrontations between film makers and those who would censor them. John Huston's Let There Be Light, portraying war veterans in a psychiatric hospital, was banned by the War Department which commissioned it. In the dying days of the Weimar republic, a workers' film society answered the ban on its own films by splicing together sequences from old, approved newsreels. They juxtaposed images of luxury with those of poverty and produced a savage and unbannable indictment of German society.

Bila Balazs, a refugee from the Nazis, describes the co op's audacity, observing that "single pictures are mere reality. Only the montage turns them into truths or falsehoods." The great American documentary maker Fred Wiseman is altogether more cynical: "Documentaries - like plays, novels, poems - are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility." As long as enough of its practitioners stay in the crisis between the heroic and the agnostic then the documentary will survive it. {CORRECTION} 97042800041