Writers: Camilla Hall, Lauren Saffa and Jennifer Tiexiera
Directors: Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera
This documentary about documentaries isn’t quite as incisive about the art form as the publicity suggests. Subject focuses on a handful of people who have featured in films such as Staircase, The Square, The Wolfpack and, most interestingly, Hoop Dreams to work out if their participation could be seen a exploitation. However, Subject is too celebratory of the genre to really interrogate the ethics involved.
One of the main problems is that we aren’t introduced to Subject’s makers. It seems a strange omission, especially when the film, rightly, explores the colonial aspect of documentary making when white male directors shoot films about minority communities such as in Hoop Dreams. It’s an issue that goes right back to 1922’s Nanook of the North, which depicted the lives of Inuit people in Canada.
In this light, Hoop Dreams can be viewed as very problematic as the struggles of two black poor teenagers to become basketball professionals was produced by three white men. Recently, bell hooks has written on Hoop Dreams saying that despite the filmmakers’ best intentions the film ‘must take its place in a continuum of traditional anthropological and/or ethnographic documentary works that show us the “dark other” from the standpoint of whiteness’. Hoop Dreams was palatable to mainstream audiences because it implied that the American Dream could work for anyone, if they just put their shoulder to the wheel.
But in Subject, we never see directors Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera, and neither do they state their agenda. They also don’t explain why they chose the films that they examine in detail: Why these ones and not others? It’s frustrating that the methodology isn’t presented in a film that calls for transparency in filmmaking. It would be useful to know whether Hall and Tiexiera approached any other people who were subjects of other films and, if so, why they refused to participate or, if they did acquiesce, why they ended up on the cutting room floor.
When Hoop Dreams made a lot of money in the mid-1990s, its filmmakers ensured that everyone who had a speaking part in the film received remuneration, with the two main ‘stars’ getting the same share of the profit as the filmmakers. While this sounds ethical, other directors think paying the subjects of documentaries should be avoided at all costs in case the participants come across as actors. If they seem like actors then the audience will question the authenticity of the documentary: have the participants been paid to make such and such a comment or act in a particular way? With the line between scripted reality TV shows and documentaries becoming increasingly blurred perhaps any monetary reward or non-monetary incentive should be clearly revealed within the film. But it is not disclosed in this film whether the contributors were paid in any way.
Money might seem like a good reason to become the subject of a documentary but it’s not clear why one of the daughters from Staircase appears in Subject. Margaret Ratliff was in her teens when the cameras descended to film every second of her life after her father was arrested for the murder of her mother. She feels exploited by the original documentary in 2004, Netflix’s update in 2018, and now, most chilling, by the Netflix drama series The Staircase starring Colin Firth and Toni Colette. Subject seems to bring Ratliff no catharsis.
The renaissance of the documentary shows no sign of abating and with streaming services ordering their own, questions can now be asked who is control of the story. The subject? The filmmaker? Netflix or Disney+? It’s imperative that films such as Hall and Tiexiera’s Subject continue to probe the various ways that documentaries are made. In these days of fake news when we doubt everything we see, documentaries might be the only rock left to which we can cling.
Subject will be released in the UK by Dogwoof on 3 March 2023.
