The work of documentary relationships

Interpersonal characteristics of documentary relationships

Perhaps the most striking distinctive feature of the relationships between documentary-makers and their subjects is the degree of intensity involved. Whereas a journalist might typically share a fleeting phone call with the people they write about, and talent- and talk-show the producers’ interactions largely revolve around studio days, the process of making a documentary tends to be more protracted (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Palmer, 2017). Several of my interviewees described enduring relationships, lasting longer than many marriages – 10, 20 or even 40 years and counting. One of my interviewees, for example, began filming a long-running documentary series as an unborn baby in utero. Now in her 20s, cameras have documented every stage and major event of her life. The production team, she told me, are ‘like family . . . we just trust each other totally’.

This intensity does not seem to be generated by longevity alone. Documentary-makers film in people’s homes and personal spaces. They witness the major events of people’s lives, asking searching questions, inviting their subjects to explore their inner selves. Even within briefer encounters, the act of filming itself engenders close emotional connections by creating a discursive space for self-examination and reflection, which is uncommon in everyday life. One director told me:

I have some of the best conversations ever if there’s a camera there . . . In normal life . . . the emotional intensity is socially unacceptable . . . I really like it when people actually focus and go right down the mine shaft with you. The camera makes them feel like they should do that, or can do that.

Documentary relationships are peculiarly imbalanced – not only in terms of power, but also the unidirectional flow of attention: the one-sided nature of the intimacy. The norms of the interview format, which organises so much of documentary filming, dictate that the subject will speak while the documentary-maker asks questions or listens. One director I interviewed described her role within this process as:

Facilitating, listening, and asking gentle kind questions that will help someone come to their own conclusion. No one ever does it back [laughs].

Interviews are prevalent in many media genres and formats, but this asymmetric dynamic is particularly pronounced in documentary filmmaking, where a clear audio recording is required, and subjects must speak without interruption, in a manner that is neither conversational nor reciprocal. Because the material is edited before transmission, interviews can last for many hours and are often repeated at several stages throughout the production. While the contributors’ emotional lives are laid bare, the documentary-maker has often disclosed very little about themselves. In this respect, scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives have compared the experience of participating in documentaries to a therapeutic encounter. Psychologist Emmanuel Berman (2005: 221) writes:

I think that there are some similarities between the two processes . . . like analytic or psychotherapy patients, [documentary contributors] come to a place where there will be a lot of attention to their story, hopefully in an empathic, sympathetic, interested, respectful way, and some wish for the other, the director or the therapist, to be the spokesperson, to be the one who will help crystallize one’s story, will help one understand and see things.

Several of the contributors I interviewed made the same comparison. One described the interview process as ‘a conversation with myself’. She told me:

I could verbalise and hear reflected back to me the kinds of things I was experiencing . . . just the recognition that emotions you’re having are valid and have a legitimate platform for expression – I’d say it seemed to legitimise it.

But however much the filming process might feel like a counselling session, it is, in many ways, the polar opposite. The definition of therapy offered by the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy is that it provides a ‘safe and confidential space . . . to talk to a trained professional about your issues and concerns’ (BACP, n.d.). One of Paddy Scannell’s (1991: 1) characteristics of ‘broadcast talk’ is what he calls its ‘double articulation’. Participants’ speech is simultaneously articulated to the documentary-maker who is present, and to the audience who are absent. Their words are spoken in one context, but heard in an entirely different one – and in this second articulation, they may not find a similarly sympathetic or respectful listening space. As one of my interviewees joked: ‘It’s like counselling in front of 5 million people’. But while counsellors are extensively trained and supervised, documentary-makers are performing a quasi-therapeutic role without necessarily having either the time or skills to do so responsibly (Rees, 2019).

Because documentary relationships are inherently instrumental and strongly tend towards being manipulative, there is a lingering sense that they are manufactured and false. Arlie Hochschild (1983: 35), however, makes the distinction between ‘surface acting’ and ‘deep acting’. In surface acting, the gesture or expression is superficial or uncommitted, and is easily detected as false. In daily life, when our instinctive emotional response does not fit the situation, we instead employ deep acting, exhorting the requisite feeling or retraining our imaginations to match the appropriate response. Because the kind of close attachments involved in documentary relationships cannot be easily faked, they have to be internalised and truly felt; pretence is simply not convincing. For the relationship to be successful, it has to be genuine. An executive producer I interviewed agreed: ‘It is a real relationship even if it starts off formal or contrived’. Scholars have tended to characterise the filmmaker–subject dynamic as manipulative and exploitative, but if we consider that relationships filmmakers build with contributors might be genuine as well as instrumental, the dilemmas they face become more ethically complex.

Such tensions mean that the boundaries of documentary relationships are inherently slippery and difficult to manage. Many of the documentary-makers I interviewed told me they found it difficult to know what limits can reasonably be placed upon their obligations to their contributors. They described fielding phone calls at 3 am, performing a role that can feel more like being a social worker or a counsellor than a producer or director. When work life and personal life have such permeable boundaries, it can be hard to distinguish where the worker ends and the private self begins. One director told me:

The problem is you start allowing people to get away with treating you badly in your life. You’re so used to like, ‘You do your worse, I will remain calm, accept everything you chuck at me’. It’s your job. And then you realise you’re doing it in your life as well. That’s not very healthy.

As these comments suggest, the utilisation of intimacy, which has such obvious benefits for broadcasters and production companies, can have negative consequences for the people who must perform it, which are not confined to their professional identities. However, it is also clear from my research that documentary relationships can be a source of pleasure for filmmakers and contributors alike, in many cases outlasting the productions which initiated them, and continuing for months or even years afterwards. One director emphatically told me:

I’ve gained more than it’s cost me. I’ve gained understanding, knowledge of people, and love from people – relationships with people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, who are almost family.

But despite the apparent mutuality and voluntarism with which these relationships are conducted, it’s important to recognise that they are not incidental to the project of making the text. Several documentary-makers told me that relationship-building is the most fundamental skill of their job, and can only be achieved through a huge investment of off-camera time:

Getting stories, getting people to talk . . . that’s about making a relationship and spending time with people. If you cut those corners, you’ll never make a good film.

Intimacy is a mechanism which is utilised to collapse the distance between the intimate life of the subject and the mass anonymity of the audience, and as such, is deliberately cultivated and managed as an integral part of the process of documentary production. Therefore, in order to build an understanding of documentary relationships, they need to be theorised as a practice of creative labour, performed within the context of the media industries.

The practices and procedures of relationship work

Having described some of the key characteristics of documentary relationships, in this next section, I want to consider how they are put into effect as a component of the creative process – what are the procedures that make and maintain these relationships, and in what ways do they impact upon the people involved?

To perform the kind of emotional labour involved in documentary-making ‘requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild, 1983: 7). Documentary-makers must manage their emotional responses to situations and limit their self-expression: ‘either pretending to care . . . or trying not to care too much’ (Grindstaff, 2002: 132). One director I interviewed described her interactions with contributors as providing ‘an emotional service to that person’. When I asked her to clarify what being an emotional service meant, she told me: ‘Your emotions are not important, is how I think of it’.

The management of inconvenient emotions is harder to accomplish when filmmakers’ feelings towards their contributors are ambiguous, or even negative. Many shared stories about people they found difficult to work with. One producer/director described a film she made about women who sold kiss and tell stories to the tabloid press:

Everyone in that film was well dodgy. They were! They were lying, manipulative; they would sell their granny. They were making money out of selling stories. They were morally corrupt . . . I didn’t trust any of them.

Another director lobbied for years to make a film about gay parenting, after being repeatedly told by commissioners that ‘gay doesn’t rate’. When she finally convinced a broadcaster to finance the film, the contributors who were cast were people whose views she found ‘appalling and offensive’:

I’ve always found it hard to make a film about someone I didn’t like, or even love . . . I’m making this film that’s going to represent queer parenting with some of the worst people you’re likely to meet in the gay community. What the hell am I doing?

The director described the resulting internal conflict she experienced between what she views as her ‘responsibility to let people be the real extent of themselves’ and ‘giving them a free reign on misogyny’. A tense shoot culminated in a huge row which jeopardised the whole production:

There was too much time together, too much proximity, and we got quite fed up with each other. . . I thought I’m not doing this; it’s a nightmare. We probably had silence for a month, then I wrote to him and said this is what I think happened. I just backed down because it’s my job . . . I wanted to finish the film.

In circumstances such as this, filmmakers are required to self-edit, suppressing aspects of their own identities in order to get the job done. Ultimately, Hochschild (1983: 56) claims, performing this kind of affective work can result in the estrangement of the self from one’s own authentic feelings. Our emotions are a form of ‘pre-action’, which help us to orientate ourselves within the world. Without emotional authenticity, our autonomy and capacity to act is fundamentally undermined.

One of the main purposes of the emotional labour of filmmakers is to elicit emotional performances from their participants, who are often required to give access to their inner lives, that is, making intimate disclosures, sharing revelations and self-discoveries in ways that can make them feel exposed and vulnerable. As one interviewee described it:

I’m putting my whole life out there; literally, my whole life is out there.

Such performances can be moving and powerful for the audience, but they also carry a risk for the participant’s wellbeing. Contributors have tended to be portrayed as the passive partners within documentary relationships, but my research suggests that when such tensions arise, their agency finds expression in acts of resistance and ruptures, which documentary-makers must then manage and appease.

One contributor I interviewed was filmed for more than 2 years as she underwent a gender transition. She described how her attitude to the relationship she built with the producers started from a place of straightforward trust and acquiescence:

In the early stages, it was like . . . whatever you want to do, whatever you ask: we answer.

As the shoot progressed, her compliance became gradually replaced with a more complex appreciation of the documentary relationship and her position within the production:

I learned over the course of the two or three years: it was their job, they weren’t my friends – well, they were my friends, but they were my friends doing a job. And I had to remember that they were manipulating me.

Part of this shift in attitude was motivated by a growing awareness of the power she had to set boundaries and exert control over how she was represented:

They needed me more. I started to realise that – I wouldn’t say play them, but I kind of knew the rules of the game . . . When they were talking to me and buttering me up and being nice and persuasive, I could tell they were doing it. I would go, ‘Do I want to do this or don’t I? . . . No. [I’m] not going to do that’. Even sometimes in the middle of filming . . . I would say, ‘I’m not answering that question. No’. . . . [I] got braver at not being sucked into it . . . [I] got wise to it. The crew are still our friends. They weren’t superficial and shallow. They were genuinely lovely, nice people who [I] loved working with, but [I] realised it was all a job at the end of the day.

In this example, a firmer grasp of the dynamics gave the contributor a sense of empowerment and allowed her to start calling the shots. In other cases, ruptures in the relationship are manifested not so much by out-and-out refusals but through minor acts of resistance. Another contributor told me how she and her colleagues began to use the knowledge of production they had gleaned through the course of the production to assert themselves:

We’d put things in the conversation we knew they couldn’t put on TV to try to stop them using that footage . . . a lot of the time we would go other places for meetings and take the mics off, because there are some things you don’t want people listening to.

In contrast to the perception of contributors as powerless partners in the documentary relationship, my data found ample evidence of them learning how to effectively express their agency and leverage control. Power has often been characterised as a force of domination, weighted heavily in the favour of filmmakers, but my research suggests a more complex and fluctuating balance, which tips in different directions at different stages of the production process. As contributors learn how to express their agency, documentary-makers can find themselves in a tight corner, caught between increasingly assertive or uncooperative contributors, the perceived needs of the audience, and the demands of funders and broadcasters. My data suggest their ability to prioritise their contributors above other considerations, and the scope of their possible responses to minor rebellions is very much dictated by the commercial context. One director told me:

The more gear you have, the more the daily cost of the shoot, the more uncompromising you can be about those things. If someone rings up and says ‘I’m a bit ill, I’ve got a headache’, and you’re thinking shit, I’ve spent £5,000 in air fares to get here to do this – that’s one response, or the other is: ‘Well, I’m just here so I can wait a few days’ . . . My experience is that the bigger the film has become, the more my relationship with the contributor has become less personal . . . I think the more money there is in a production, the more the thing becomes contractual.

Documentary-makers’ loyalties are divided between their contributors, their employers, their audiences, and a fidelity to the truth. This alignment can shift in sudden and unexpected ways. Executive Producer Peter A. Gordon told me about a documentary he made in the 1990s with West Midlands Police for the ITV current affairs series, First Tuesday. Gordon was granted access to film in a police station, and was monitoring the output of a remote camera when he heard a detective threatening a man in custody:

He was being picked up by the mic in the custody area. You couldn’t see it, but you could hear him in the cell saying, ‘Well, we can do this the hard way or the easy way, mate’.

Having taken legal advice, the production company decided there was a clear public interest in broadcasting the footage, but they had contractually agreed to show the film to the police force prior to transmission. Gordon described an excruciating viewing, sitting right next to the people he had implicated: ‘We turned the lights on. They were just white. They were incredulous’. The police force tried to get an injunction to stop the broadcast going ahead but were unsuccessful. When a developing narrative is being filmed, unforeseen events can cause the agendas of the filmmakers and subjects to diverge unpredictably. Although this situation was awkward on an interpersonal level, Gordon could not withhold the footage without becoming complicit in the wrong-doing he had uncovered:

It wasn’t easy but I didn’t lay awake at night thinking, ‘Oh my god what a terrible person I am’, and ‘I’ve betrayed these people’, because they’d broken the law and they’re policemen.

Gordon’s story is an extreme example of a dynamic, which more often plays out in less dramatic fashion, but it demonstrates how unanticipated developments can make the mutuality of both parties slip out of sync, bringing their agendas into conflict. The work of documentary relationships requires filmmakers not only to build close bonds with their subjects, but also in some cases, to sever those connections and break that trust.

Having described the kind of affective work involved for individual people in forging and maintaining documentary relationships, I now wish to bring the organisational context back into focus, and consider how this challenging aspect of the job is supported or complicated by media employers and institutions.

The industrial organisation of relationship-work

While some support for participants from external psychologists has been formalised and funded by the UK television industry after a highly publicised policy review (Ofcom, 2020), the emotional labour of filmmakers continues to go largely unacknowledged and unrewarded. As the filmmaker and scholar Daisy Asquith (2019: 15) claims, ‘Any meaningful responsibility assumed by documentary filmmakers is overwhelmingly a personal undertaking’. A striking example from my research is the producer Claire Lewis, who has made the highly acclaimed Seven Up series since the early 1980s. It’s Lewis’ job to stay in regular touch with the cast, to maintain productive relationships and to keep them on board. The series could not be made without this labour, but as a freelancer, Lewis told me that she only gets paid for it once every 7 years during the few months when the series is in active production:

I’m there – day or night. That’s what it involves . . . and I’ve never been paid for that, never.

Along with a lack of pay and recognition comes a lack of structure and support. Recent research suggests there is a high possibility of filmmakers’ encountering trauma throughout the whole scope of factual production, including seemingly ‘lighter’ programmes with apparently innocuous subject-matter. For filmmakers who specialise in more challenging documentaries, ‘the terrain of suffering may be their primary area of work’ (Rees, 2019: 2). Of course, documentary-makers are far from unique in that their job brings them into close contact with other peoples’ trauma, but unlike therapists, teachers, nurses and other caring professions, there is a lack of appropriate training and professional guidance as to how they should conduct themselves. The media industries have scarcely recognised that performing such labour might have an effect on their workforce.

Vicarious trauma is a known risk for journalists who witness acts of violence and suffering, but less attention has been paid to the effects upon workers in the broadcasting industry (Melzer, 2019; Newman et al., 2003). During the making of her doctoral documentary project, Kym Melzer (2019: 44) describes ‘sobbing uncontrollably’ in her car after interviewing veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and their carers; the effort to suppress her emotions in order to maintain a ‘veneer of professionalism’ leaving her feeling ‘exhausted and dejected’, and overwhelmed by ‘intense feelings of guilt, sadness, powerlessness and helplessness’.

Director Sue Bourne told me that during the making of A Time to Live, a documentary which followed the stories of 12 people with terminal illnesses, she had to pressurise the broadcaster to recognise that their duty of care should extend to the production team:

I said, ‘Well actually, you’ve got a duty of care to us’ . . . We were on the road together . . . going in and out of dying peoples’ houses for four months. Our best contributor died the weekend before we got there . . . We had to put our emotions in a box and get through it.

It was clear from my research that becoming so closely entangled with human suffering, trauma and distress is a great responsibility which can take a heavy toll. Documentary-makers feel if they do not provide unpaid emotional support, the people they work with will suffer. One director told me, ‘I am the duty of care!’ I asked if she found it emotionally stressful or draining:

Well, I got cancer. Of course it is. No seriously, it is – it’s exhausting.

Over the course of a career, the burden becomes hard to sustain. My sample included some of Britain’s top documentary makers, yet there was a palpable sense of disillusionment in many of my interviews. ‘I’m just tired of fighting for everything’, one told me. ‘I can’t go on getting treated like this. You get no support at all’.

There is a human cost for creative workers who perform this distinctive type of emotional labour, but the people who are most let down by the neglect of affective labour are the participants themselves. The disparity between what they need and what the industry provides them is often most apparent around the time of transmission. For contributors, this can be a life-changing event, when they are exposed to very public representations of themselves, and along with it, the reactions of family, friends, the press and judgemental strangers on social media. By contrast, documentary-makers are rarely kept on the payroll to oversee transmission. As such, any ongoing support they offer to their former contributors will be a matter for their individual consciences. When documentary-makers withdraw from the relationship as the project comes to its conclusion, their participants must come to terms with a variety of different losses – not only the loss of control over how their material will be edited and received, but also the loss of a confidante, whose attention is closely focussed upon them. One of my interviewees described her ambivalence as a filming process she had found intrusive and challenging came to an end:

It was a relief, but it was also very final. In a way, it was hard to adjust . . . I just felt deflated. Weird . . . You get used to people being around and then they’re not there.

The confusing mixture of personal and professional means the end of filming can feel like being ‘abandoned’; the abrupt cessation of the relationship casting new light on the nature of the intimacy that was shared:

I felt used . . . You spend a lot of time with these people. I might think we could be friends, we’ve got friendly, maybe she genuinely cares, then suddenly – film’s out. Bye! . . . Part of you is like, was I only ever just a documentary to you?

Piotrowska claims the presence of transference-love is one of the reasons why so many people feel aggrieved at its loss, but there is also a sense of guilt and shame about its transience. The instrumental nature of the relationship becomes uncomfortably exposed by the way it is shrugged aside. What was happening was something ‘slightly inappropriate and yet necessary, in order to make an ‘intimate’ film’ (Piotrowska, 2013: 75). Another interviewee told me:

The producer just disappeared . . . In hindsight, it feels like they were being quite fake . . . they were really chatty . . . then it just stopped. I guess that’s the nature of their work, but it makes you feel like you’ve been played.

The absence of after-thought about what happens to participants once filming has wrapped is a failure of duty of care, which in itself has the potential to cause distress. Daisy Asquith (2019: 15) claims:

It is possible that the damage done to those filmed is done when filming stops, when the attention is withdrawn and life returns to banal ordinariness.

Without proper training, regulation and support systems in place, contributors are being asked to put their emotional wellbeing in the hands of people who may not have the time or skills to care for them responsibly.