92 | Sight&Sound | April 2020BOOKS
The book recounts the wonders of
great documentary films, and the
lingering question of their
cultural power and potential
SAY WHAT HAPPENED
A Story of Documentaries
By Nick Fraser, Faber & Faber, 416pp,
ISBN 9780571329564
Reviewed by Nick Bradshaw
British documentary watchers
will know of Nick Fraser
as the co-creator and, for
17 years, series editor of
Storyville, BBC2’s invaluable
showcase for long-form
documentaries. The role has
given him both a box seat to
witness the rising energies
of documentary filmmaking and a backstage
pass to mingle with its players. Now, like the
Ancient Mariner, he wants to tell you what he
has seen. Say What Happened recounts some
filmmaking hopes and struggles, a little learned
wit and wisdom, but mostly the wonders of
great documentary films themselves, their
creative distillations and bottled lives and
mercurial truths, and the lingering question
of their cultural power and potential. It’s less
memoir of a life in docs than testament to a life
with docs: “I do know that documentaries, taken
individually, resemble a group of old and new
friends,” he writes, and draws out the tussle of
choice and chance that makes documentary art
analogous to living. “That’s the only real way
to make a documentary film – by setting out
what you believe to be true, or beautiful, and
destroying any certainty by implying that, yes, it
could have been described in a myriad of other
ways. This comes down to having a strategy
for life, while being prepared to abandon it.
What other way is there of staying alive?”
Fraser takes his title and cue from a late
Robert Lowell poem hymning the undervalued
art of description as the path to illumination
(“Yet why not say what happened? / Pray for the
grace of accuracy...”), and his book expounds
an old-fashioned British sceptical empiricism.
Theory is verboten, but Fraser loves to sociologise
his fellow doc travellers: the mostly left-idealist
filmmakers, the fashion-bound critics and old
liberal or new hipster audiences, the old guard
of patrician commissioners now displaced by
“sabre-toothed technocrats”. His chapter on the
prime of British public broadcasting (his second
history chapter, following a rummage through
the innovations of filmmakers in the first half
of the 20th century, such as Dziga Vertov, John
Grierson, Joris Ivens and Leni Riefenstahl),
is magnificent, bringing together his own
memories and reappraisals, encounters with
players like public-television exponent Dennis
Potter and producers/executives Jeremy Isaacs
and Alan Yentob, and apposite quotes from their
colleague Peter Dale, BBC historian Jean Seaton
and the art critic Robert Hughes. Fraser describes
the pre-Thatcherite culture of enlightened
institutional paternalism, liberated filmmaker
curiosity and benign executive disengagement
that produced the Up series (1964-), Isaacs’s The
World at War (1973), umpteen strands and series
and even Peter Watkins’s form-pushing historical
docudrama Culloden (1964) and his suppressed
nuclear prophecy The War Game (1966): but he
does not undersell the establishment pressures
that pushed individuals like Watkins out,
and never let many others in. (He also takes totask a number of sanctified classics of that era,
from Tony Essex’s The Great War in 1964 to
Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, 1969.) He quotes
Dale on these works as “appointments to view
for a post-war society keen to explore new
ideas, faces, ways of living – a sense of what it
is to live in a liberal and tolerant society,” and
Seaton on public broadcasting’s claim to be
like national glue, keeping people together.
“More importantly,” Fraser adds, “[television]
afforded a path to self-education. It created
the illusion that an educated citizenry living
in a democracy would always survive.”
From there, Fraser pursues his story throughthe innovations in independence of Jean
Rouch and the French Left Bank essayists; their
American Direct Cinema pioneers (with apt and
moving attention paid to Frederick Wiseman);
the rise of the authorial reporter, from Edward
Murrow to Nick Broomfield, Michael Moore
and Mads Brügger; the further iconoclasms and
formal forays of latter-day masters like Werner
Herzog, Errol Morris and Adam Curtis; and this
century’s explosion of nonfiction filmmaking
beyond the West. Fraser also devotes a chapter
to the art of documentaries of genocide, from
Leslie Woodhead’s Bosnian War report A Cry from
the Grave (1999) to Sydney Bernstein’s German
Concentration Camps Factual Survey (shot in 1945,
released in 2017), Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog
(1956) and the crescendo of Claude Lanzmann’s
1985 Shoah. (Though nothing on Cambodia’s
long-time genocide chronicler Rithy Panh?).
The recognition of historical obligation and
aesthetic challenge in this section finds Fraser
at his most expansively European (he also gives
a fond account of Marcel Ophüls, the director
of The Sorrow and the Pity, the landmark 1969
study of the French experience of occupation
and collaboration in World War II).
Which brings us to our present moment
of disunity, institutional exhaustion and
dismantling, rising intolerance and post-truth
populism. Fraser doesn’t push the point – who’d
bet on the future now? – but his story is laced with
a premonition that documentary itself may be at
risk, that its art of description and illumination
is as fragile as it is powerful; that we will struggle
harder for Lowell’s “grace of accuracy”, and
Fraser’s story of documentaries will prove
more of a memoir than he would wish.A touch of class: Michael Apted and Paul Almond’s Seven Up! (1964)Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (1989)Reviewed by Nickfd tfi