Part 2

The earliest film could not capture (document) the sounds of such a scene. The only soundtrack would be live music accompaniment in the cinema provided by a pianist. Even then such sounds could have a profound affect on how an audience received what they were seeing.

In an article in 1917 the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov wrote: "to make a picture the director must compose the separate filmed fragments, disordered and disjointed, into a single whole and juxtapose these separate fragments into a more advantageous, integral and rhythmical sequence, just as a child constructs a whole word or phrase from separate scattered blocks of letters."
From: Richard Taylor & Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents1896-1939 (Routledge & Kogan Paul 1988), p.41.

It is a curious phenomena, but if different images are edited together then it can affect how each of them individually are interpreted. A Russian called Lev Kuleshov first examined this 'effect'.
In his experiment he filmed Mozhukhin, a famous Russian actor and shots of a bowl of soup, a girl playing with a teddy bear, and woman laid out in a coffin. He then cut the bits of film so that the shot of the actor was seen first being followed by the soup, the girl and lastly the dead body. Each time the same Mozhukhin sequence was used. Viewers were asked what they made of what they had seen and many felt the shots of the actor conveyed different emotions, though each time it was in fact the same shot. They praised him for his changes in mood - from thoughtfulness concerning the soup, joy at seeing the child and sorrow concerning the dead woman. In this way Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of editing. It became the director’s belief that inter-cutting film, rather than performance, was the prime basis of filmic expression. And it has to be said, emotional impact on an audience.

That is a bit of background to a key product of careful editing, called montage, in which images are woven together to create suggestive combinations in which the meaning is often far greater than the individual elements on their own.

Documentaries are meant to be attempts to get at the truth. Both the films under consideration here contain a central concern with exposing something fundamental about a complex subject. The Fog of War is focused at blowing away some of that fog so that key principles governing the conduct of nations and those charged to lead them can be explored. Capturing the Friedmans also suggests the idea that something elusive can be caught. Think of and refer to your own examples here.

One of the key ways in which documentaries suggest they are telling the truth is by being made in ‘fly-on-the-wall mode. This requires the filmmaker to create the illusion that the camera (and any other crew) is invisible. Whatever the subject, it then looks as if they are going about their business, as they would do if the camera were not present. Of course, from the earliest days of the cinema, when this mode has been employed, it was always illusory because the often-dramatic incidents these films delivered up to us (as with any feature film) invariably had others present filming or recording sound. It is also the case that careful adjustments of ‘the real’ had to be made to accommodate the earliest camera equipment.