Budgets are the bane of documentary filmmakers, as well as their biggest constraint
I’ve watched a few films by Elizabeth Deane, who has made a number of documentaries for PBS. In the special features for one of her films, she once lamented that “We have Hollywood ambitions, but we don’t have Hollywood budgets.” That sums up the primary problem with most re-enactments in the documentary world: they’re terribly low-budget. You’ve probably seen this kind of thing in your high school history class. Your teacher shows you a documentary film, and you see a couple of guys in period uniforms going across the screen in slow motion (isn’t that exciting). Even though it’s in color (and modern audiences love color), the kids are bored by the spartan quality of the re-enactments. In fairness, this is understandable for a generation that’s grown up on some expensive Hollywood re-enactments. Academy Awards have been won (and well-earned) by delivering high-quality re-enactments for a major historical movie. But the ones that we see in documentaries are seldom all that impressive – although they can sometimes still be helpful despite this.
The problems that can come when the re-enactments lack historical accuracy
Of course, Hollywood has sometimes opened itself up to criticism by botching various historical subjects. Sometimes they may even botch the sets and the costumes, although their batting average is somewhat higher here for these visual parts of their stories. By so doing, they may (sadly) give viewers a false impression of what the period might have looked like. This is another criticism of using re-enactments in documentaries. If they’re poorly done, they may mislead or misinform the audience about certain historical subjects. It can be hard to dispel myths that are popularized by a Hollywood movie, although Hollywood has sometimes done a great service to the history. (More about that here.) Nonetheless, certain Hollywood myths about history are a force to be reckoned with, with which serious historians must contend. If that’s the case, then, a question might be asked. That is, are there some times when it actually makes sense to use re-enactments in a documentary film? The simple answer seems to be “yes.” This is because some re-enactments are much better-done than others. They may also fit better into some subjects than others (or be more necessary). And they may even have a place in documentaries that otherwise use period photographs and footage, since the sound is often re-enacted in the background. Perhaps this would be a good place to start our discussion.
Sound re-enactments can often help to bring old silent footage to life
One of the best filmmakers of modern times may be Ken Burns for PBS. He’s a master at using archival material, such as period photographs and footage. Much of the footage is silent, even for relatively modern subjects like World War II. Thus, World War II documentaries with somewhat bigger budgets will often re-enact the audio part in a sound studio. Ken Burns’ “The War” even has the thunderous sounds of period artillery, which can sound quite realistic with a good surround-sound and subwoofer system. The subwoofer vibrations can make you feel like a shell just landed there in your living room (albeit in a way that’s more tolerable than the real thing). Technically, this kind of sound counts as a re-enactment. This is because such sound is not contained in the original footage. You have to guess at what the original footage might have sounded like, and you have no way of knowing if your guess will be any good. But, in an entertainment context, a good guess is likely to be better than nothing – unless you would rather just use some music (which, at times, may actually make sense). Ken Burns is a master at adding the sounds of crowds, car engines, insect humming, and other ambient sounds. Such things can do wonders to bring the silent footage to life. It makes you feel like you were there when the footage was being shot.
They can also help to bring paintings and still photographs to life as well
But most impressive in these Ken Burns films … is his ability to bring the paintings and still photographs to life. Ken Burns’ landmark series “The Civil War” was a master of this technique. To paraphrase his own words, he actually liked it better (in some ways) to use still photographs. This is because you could then use whatever audio you wanted to use in the background. He also wanted not just to look at a photograph, but to listen to it. What sorts of sounds were probably there, when the photograph was being taken? He offered us the sounds of horse-drawn carriages on a city street, for example – allowing us to feel like we were there. When you combine this with the camera moving across the photograph, or zooming in and out as needed, the old photographs had a way of coming to life. In recent times, Apple even named one of their picture effects after him: the “Ken Burns” effect. But most relevant here is the sound effects part. In his film about the boxer Jack Johnson, the silent footage was dramatized with the sounds of one formidable boxer punching another. In his “Baseball” series, we heard the bat hit the ball, as a particular player was connecting with the ball on the screen. Even with a still photograph of a nineteenth-century baseball game, you could hear his sound re-enactments of the game, increasing the emotional impact of the picture.
The pros and cons of using re-enactments alongside of real photographs and real footage
I’m sometimes a little more critical of using re-enactments alongside of real photographs and real footage. As Jeremy Isaacs once said, this can cheapen the realism of any archival material that’s being used. But this can actually be somewhat less of a problem, if you go out of your way to make onscreen distinctions between reality and re-enactment. If the original images are in black-and-white, this makes it particularly easy to distinguish between the black-and-white archival material, and the presumably-color re-enactments. The History Channel film “Battle 360” used some great computer animation of Pacific War naval battles. This allowed them to get images from weird (but dramatic) angles, which would not be available in the real footage. This animation is actually quite realistic, but they nonetheless do some things to show that it’s still an animation – making one less likely to confuse it with the real footage, even at the times when the real footage was originally in color. So long as the audience knows that they’re watching a re-enactment (animated or otherwise), this can be a legitimate documentary technique, which can enhance the storytelling without compromising the film’s educational value.
If the re-enactments are too good, does archival material become comparatively boring?
There’s another reason that some filmmakers don’t like using visual re-enactments. If your story is primarily dependent upon paintings and still photographs, then your period images may look somewhat boring, next to a re-enactment that may be particularly well-done. This is another reason that some of these films stick with relatively simple re-enactments, at the times when they bother to do any re-enactments at all. If the re-enactments are simple, people may be more likely to get into the period images used alongside of them. This is an artistic decision, and I understand why some people do it. But PBS’s “Ulysses S. Grant” (a film made by the aforementioned Elizabeth Deane) had some good-quality re-enactments, of a young Grant working with some horses on the Midwestern frontier. Personally, I thought that they looked fine, next to the black-and-white photographs of the subject himself. Thus, there can sometimes be a place for relatively good re-enactments, even when used alongside of relatively simple still images from the time. Some directors are masters at getting the most out of a limited re-enactment budget. As with other aspects of filmmaking, it’s partly an aesthetic decision – and it is to be expected that aesthetic tastes will differ somewhat from person to person. I am of two minds about this subject, and I care more about the historical accuracy (not to mention the quality of the storytelling) than I care about these decisions regarding the re-enactments.
Some things were never visually recorded, and re-enactments can depend on intangibles
Re-enactments may tend to work best, for moments that were never caught in either films or photographs – and which, likewise, were never recorded by the period’s artists or sculptors. They can be used to fill in the gaps in a visual record, or tell stories for which few (if any) period images are available (assuming that they even exist at all). For example, the History Channel did some pretty decent re-enactments for its series “Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire.” No period photographs exist for this subject, of course – although you can actually take some modern footage of the places where these things happened. This can be done fairly cheaply, in a way that adds much to the presentation. Even for some World War II battles, there may be some critical moments that were never caught on film – or for which only certain angles are available. That is, these angles may not always tell you everything that you’d like to know. One may also lack visual records of some top-secret planning meetings, where crucial strategies and tactics were being discussed. Thus, I continue to have mixed feelings about the merits of re-enactments in documentaries. It depends upon a lot of factors, including a number of intangibles that would be difficult to explore in any sort of helpful way here. It’s hard to define it or describe it, but “I know it when I see it.” This is admittedly rather vague and imprecise, but art is sometimes like that – and such problems can even be unavoidable. Given the limited budgets of mainstream documentary films, I sometimes don’t have the luxury of being picky about these things. In part, this is because some of these subjects (such as Ancient Greece) are scarcely ever depicted in any other kind of films. Visual alternatives can be few and far between, where they exist at all. I’ll be happy to get almost any kind of films about some of these subjects, regardless of the choices made about the use of re-enactments therein. But I offer this as the opinion of a passionate documentary consumer, about when re-enactments are likely to fail, and when they’re likely to succeed brilliantly.
Improved special effects (such as computer animation) may help future documentaries
If filmmakers take notice, I hope that they’re able to make even better decisions about when to use re-enactments, and what kinds to fund when they do. Much can depend upon squeezing the most benefit out of a limited re-enactment budget, and some documentary filmmakers (again) are already masters of these techniques. I also hope that certain special effects (particularly computer animation) will become somewhat cheaper, allowing later filmmakers to offer things that previous generations could only see in Hollywood movies. We’re already seeing some good developments in this direction, and they may well be benefiting the documentaries of the current generation. Documentaries are likely to improve even more in the future as a result. Thus, I continue to love documentaries, and have much hope for their future. I don’t expect that many of them will become popular. However, some of them (such as those of Ken Burns) may indeed reach a wider audience – thus allowing the films to better educate people about the history itself.
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