Observational Film Making And Mrs Carey’s Concert

In 2008, documentary filmmakers Bob Connolly (Rats in the Ranks) and Sophie Raymond approached Sydney’s MLC School to document in film the work of Karen Carey and her Music Department as they led the girls over fifteen months to the, now traditional, Biennial Opera House performance in 2009. Bob Connolly and Sophie Raymond went on to make the stunning Mrs Carey’s Concert – creating a unique dramatisation from unrehearsed moments as girls and teachers prepared for their big night. On Tuesday 7 August, Bob Connolly, Sophie Raymond and Karen Carey addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss how the film was made and the importance of music education.

OBSERVATIONAL FILM MAKING AND MRS CAREY’S CONCERT

BOB CONNOLLY

Question: what do Mrs Carey and the schoolgirl stars of Mrs Carey’s Concert have in common with a Canadian Inuit who died nearly a century ago? Answer, the Inuit’s name was Nanook, and he too was the subject of a feature documentary, the first ever made, called Nanook of the North.

The American oil prospector Robert Flaherty began filming Nanook exactly 100 years ago, on location in the remote wilds of the Canadian Arctic. I go on all the time about how hard it is to make these films, but compared to Flaherty we had it easy out at MLC Burwood.  After a year of cold and privation, Flaherty returned to New York and began editing his 70,000 feet of rushes. Movie film was highly inflammable in those days, and one day Flaherty carelessly dropped his cigarette on some of his rushes and the whole lot went up in smoke. Flaherty barely escaped with his life. Undeterred, he went back and shot the whole thing again. This time in the editing room he watched where he put his cigarettes, finished the film and it was a smash hit in cinemas across America and Europe.

Flaherty went off to Samoa next, and made a film about life in paradise called Moana. Reviewing it in the New York Times, the Scotsman John Grierson used the term “documentary” for the first time, defining it as “the creative treatment of actuality.” But was it actuality?

Nanook and Moana certainly portrayed real people in real locations, but because of the difficulties and restrictions imposed then by primitive camera equipment in outside locations, most of what happens was acted out for the camera, staged. True observational documentary had to wait until the late 1950s and early 1960s to come into its own – finally made possible  by the development of lightweight, hand held 16mm cameras, high speed film stocks and compact, portable crystal synchronous tape recorders.

A pioneering example was Primary, an inside look at the lead up to the 1960 presidential campaign. In a pivotal moment, Democratic candidate John F Kennedy takes a hurried back route to a stage somewhere in America, with the film maker and his sound recordist hurrying with him, stopping when Kennedy stops, eavesdropping on his whispered conversations, emerging onstage with the candidate and swinging round to show the rapturous audience. Sounds straightforward enough today, but in 1960 it was revolutionary.

I had Primary in mind when using the same following shot in my New Guinea film Joe Leahy’s Neighbours and there’s a similar backstage shot at the Sydney Opera House in Mrs Carey’s Concert, which like all observational films  today draws direct inspiration from a long line of pioneers going right back to Flaherty.

But observational films aren’t the only documentaries. Think of The Sorrow and the Pity, Bowling for Columbine, The Thin Blue Line, An Inconvenient Truth. All these essay films sit within Grierson’s broad definition “The creative treatment of actuality” but they’re vastly different in style and content to observational films. Essay film makers construct their vision of reality. Observational film makers observe it.

I’ll tell you why I love making observational films, why for the past 30 years I’ve only made observational films. In reviewing Rats in the Ranks a few years back, Helen Garner wrote of one scene: “A writer would give her right arm to have made it up. But it springs from a realm of reality beyond the power of ordinary invention.”

Garner is not just re affirming that truth can be stranger than fiction; she’s saying that observational documentary offers the same cinematic possibilities as fiction – to enthrall and enlighten, to portray intensely dramatic, intensely emotional experiences and relationships, constructed not from the fiction writer’s imagination, but from real life. If you doubt this cinematic potential, go find Molly Deneen’s Home from the Hill; Murray Lerner’s Mao to Mozart, Ira Wohl’s Best Boy. Steve James’ Hoop Dreams. For that matter, think of the fearlessly sassy Iris Shi in Mrs Carey’s Concert, telling Mrs Carey just before the concert she’d rather be someplace else thanks … or the extraordinary moment at the concert when the wayward Emily Sun overcomes her demons and nails the Bruch Violin Concerto.

How do you capture scenes “beyond the power of ordinary invention?” Helen Garner’s definition suggests serendipity, and to some extent it does depend on chance. But when I teach documentary I always quote the golfer who said after holing in one: “Isn’t that extraordinary …the more I practise the luckier I get.” In other words, it’s about making your own luck – through choice of subject, acute analysis, sensitivity, patience, commitment, observational skills, compassion, respect and an open mind. What counts then is not flights of imagination, but buckets of perspiration – at least in the shooting phase. Editing is a different kettle of fish, as Sophie Raymond will explain.

The technical term for the five observational films I’ve made, with my late partner Robin Anderson and now Sophie Raymond, is “uncontrolled narrative verite”. Essentially, this involves unearthing and documenting a narrative by means of the uncontrolled observation of unfolding natural events; and then shaping this material through editing into a story, much as a sculptor shapes a block of marble. Essentially, it’s no different to a fiction drama, except that the characters and story are drawn from real life.

Verite of course is French for “truth”. When you set out to make a narrative verite film like Mrs Carey’s Concert, you can’t make things up like a fiction scriptwriter, you can’t invent dramatic developments. Most times you haven’t the slightest idea what’s going to happen from day to day. So in observational film your muse is not creativity so much as uncertainty. But in order to embrace uncertainty and all it implies, it helps to have a methodology,  a set of rules to work by. My methodology boils down to two words: control and uncontrol.

You must control everything that enables you to make the film without compromise, so that paradoxically, you can then relinquish that control. What do I mean by control? Well, the first element is time: the average shoot/edit production time of a documentary in Australia is six  months or less. But to make a feature length, narrative verite film like Mrs Carey’s Concert you must be prepared to film for years if necessary, to maximise the possibility of a narrative not only emerging, but playing itself out over time into some kind of denouement, offering dramatically satisfying closure. And the story has to emerge organically, from the successive sequences, just as it does in a fiction drama. There’s no voice of god narrator in Mrs Carey’s Concert to paper over information gaps. In other words, there are no short cuts, you have to put in the hard yards. Our shooting time on location is rarely less than 18 months, and the same goes for editing. So Mrs Carey’s Concert took three years to shoot and edit.

Another control element is analysis. When your raw material is unfolding real life, you’re constantly analyzing what’s happening so you know what to shoot, and more importantly what not to shoot. Shooting without focus over 18 months would be like bushwalking blindfolded, a recipe for disaster. We were very disciplined on Mrs Carey’s Concert, but even so we still shot 263 hours. That’s a lot of material to edit down to 90 minutes.  We looked at those rushes eight hours a day for 33 days. And that was before we started editing!

The next control element is often the most problematic: autonomy. You must be able to operate as independently as possible, without costly overheads, without bureaucratic interference. Several hundred people work on the set of a typical fiction drama. In an observational documentary, it’s usually two – in this case Sophie and me, and we do just about everything.

Maximising the number of skills you can bring helps you retain control over the process and so avoid compromise, realise your vision. I’ve a hard and fast rule: at the end of a film I must be able to say: “That’s as good as I can do. I have no excuses.” That sounds obvious, but it’s probably the exception rather than the rule in Australian documentary. Films cost money, and whoever controls the money typically influences how the film is made, not always to its benefit. I view lots of films nearing completion. Most are not as good as they could and should be, because their makers have been forced to compromise.

So, only when you’ve achieved complete control over the production process can you then take the vital step of relinquishing that control in the field … of launching yourself onto the unexplored river, the chaotic, unpredictable arena of real life; totally led by the unfolding events, never telling anyone what to do or say, never repeating action. Doing nothing to interfere with the unfolding situation; just being there, watching, listening, absorbing it all, continually analysing. If you’ve made the right subject choice and follow the rules; and if you don’t take sides, a story will emerge and gradually unfold, and those serendipitous moments will occur – right in front of your camera.

Think of the naughty girls who sabotage Mrs Carey’s computer in her absence. We had no idea that was going to happen, but it was no accident we were in that classroom. And why did those girls feel they could do that in front of my camera and Sophie’s microphone? Sure Mrs Carey was out of the room. But we were there. So why did they ignore us, and do what would normally get them into trouble? Well, first of all they didn’t ignore us. How could they? We weren’t hiding, and we weren’t flies on the wall. We were sitting right next to the computer. But because we’d followed the rules I’ve earlier listed, and were content to observe and never interfere, we’d become part of the furniture. Secondly, by that stage they trusted us not to take sides, not to snitch. And they were right too. I’m honoured to have Karen Carey as a friend, but I’d never for love or money have ratted on those kids. Mrs Carey didn’t know what they did to her computer until she watched the finished film two years later, when the kids in question were about to leave school

Not taking sides: that’s worth examining more closely, because it carries greater implications than simple loyalty to your subjects. Documentary has a long tradition of taking sides. It emerged in the depression years and came of age during the Cold War and many never questioned, still don’t for that matter, that its primary role was to take sides, to teach or preach. I worked on David Bradbury’s Oscar nominated anti Pinochet film Chile Hasta Cuando, and I’m proud of it. The dictator Pinochet was a murdering tyrant. David Bradbury makes films to help set the world right. And there’s no doubt which side he’s on. Al Gore’s the same, in An Inconvenient Truth, and Michael Moore in Sicko.

My first film with Robin Anderson was First Contact, about the 1930s penetration of the New Guinea Highlands by Australian gold prospectors. Like Bradbury’s work, First Contact was a filmed historical essay, marshalling its material to critique an episode of Australian colonialism.

After First Contact we went back to New Guinea to make observational films about contemporary society – two of them over six years and in the process developed the methodology I’ve just been describing. And in the confused tribal melee of post independence PNG we learned a lesson I’ve never forgotten: if you want to make an observational film that has something significant to say, you cannot afford to take sides.

Joe Leahy’s Neighbours looked at the fractious relationship between wealthy mixed race coffee planter Joe Leahy and his subsistence level tribal neighbours who sold him his land and who live all around him. It’s true we were initially drawn to making the film by the obvious disparity between the two, but had we viewed Joe as some kind of neo colonial exploiter, we’d not only have been guilty of gross oversimplification: we’d have very likely missed the real story running through his fraught relationship with the Ganiga tribe.

Joe  Leahys  Neighbours had a theatrical run in America. “’Adapt or die’ is the message” said the New York Times Review. “But it is a message delivered with grace and understanding by Mr. Connolly and Ms. Anderson, who never editorialise, never blame, never explain too much. They have the good sense to allow their characters to express themselves in all of their confused truculence, so they emerge neither as heroes nor villains but as wounded humans struggling to prosper and to understand.”

I cannot tell you how proud I was when I read that. In observational film there can be no imposed political or ideological framework through which you view people and unfolding events, no polemical intent, no villains or victims, nothing but a total attempt to understand what is actually happening in front of you. What counts is acute observation, vigilance against conscious bias, awareness of unconscious bias, no axes to grind. The approach, if you like, must be psychological not political, novelistic not journalistic. That’s the discipline, the power and the promise of the genre: throw away your megaphone and loftier vistas will open up, both artistic and intellectual.

In the mid 1990s, we made a film about Leichhardt Council and its mayor Larry Hand, both highly regarded at the time by the Left. But sections of the Left were outraged when Rats in the Ranks revealed the brutal politics surrounding the 1994 mayoral election. Many colleagues thought I’d let the side down. The film is now universally valued for what it says about political number crunching and is a favourite draw card at ALP fund raisers.

Someone once asked what our political intentions were in our 2001 film Facing The Music. I said we had no such intentions, we couldn’t afford them. Intentions political or otherwise can be dangerous in observational film work. They tend to produce tunnel vision, characters who dance to your tune, missed opportunities. I’m coming to the view that the only framework that can be safely applied to observing the world in all its unpredictable complexity, is curiosity.

Facing The Music‘s central character is the composer Professor Anne Boyd, head of Sydney University’s Music Department during the Coalition government’s economic rationalist squeeze on tertiary funding. Yes, this issue influenced our decision to camp in Boyd’s office for 15 months, but that’s not why we made the film. That would have put the cart before the horse.

Anne Boyd is why we made the film. I love the way she evolves from prissy, blinkered reactionary to fiercely partisan activist, picketing the university, leading downtown protest marches. Her activism is spectacular but brief, bringing on the emotional crisis which forces her into making a choice: persist with the self destructive but ego enhancing bureaucratic game of keeping her department afloat, or try to rekindle the creative drive that’s been suppressed for years, the composing that gives her life its real meaning and purpose. I think that’s both novelistic and cinematic … a deeply satisfying process to document and dramatise in a film which draws its raw material from unfolding real life.

Public versus private is a deeply divisive issue in Australian education. MLC Burwood, the setting for Mrs Carey’s Concert, is a privileged, single sex, unashamedly elitist private school. We didn’t give that a second’s thought. What drew us was a feisty remarkable woman in rampant pursuit of excellence, and a bunch of feisty remarkable schoolgirls to work her will upon. Others can argue the merits or otherwise of our education system.

We settled into MLC in 2008 because it ticked all the key boxes: interesting people out of the spotlight, potential conflict, something at stake, beautiful music. Sufficient justification to once more launch ourselves onto that “unexplored river.” And talk about serendipity. What writer could conjure up in his or her wildest dreams an Iris Shi? And Iris was merely the counterpoint! As David Tiley wrote in Screen Hub: “We watch a bunch of modern young women confront themselves, test their courage and find emotional resources to open their hearts to the music, their destiny and a civilisation.”

When Mrs Carey’s Concert was screening in cinemas, Sophie and I used to hang around until the end and watch people coming out, more often than not red eyed and sniffling. This I noted with considerable satisfaction, because when I lecture on observational documentary, I end by saying to my students that if they want to teach or preach, fine. But if they want to make films that move people, that last, they should never forget Kevin Brownlow’s definition of the film maker’s overriding responsibility: to hold people spellbound in darkness, to make them laugh and cry.