THE TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY THAT GIVES YOU TIME TO THINK
There is no particular anniversary or other television trigger
for Angus Macqueen’s epic documentary about Stalin’s political
imprisonment machine, Gulag (BBC2 Saturday 10 July 9:00). The
reasons for the programme’s existence are more important than
that: we are living at the end of the twentieth century and the
programme maker has spent years studying the subject. At three hours
it is ludicrously long for television, not because it a difficult or
boring - it is neither - but because few people’s Saturday
evenings have three hour gaps in them. Nonetheless, if you can, see
at least some of it, because there is something special about Gulag.
What makes it special is not the subject matter, nor even the
depth of the excellent research, it is the way that the programme is
made. The established style for most historical documentaries is to
recount a story in chronological order, using a commentary to tell
the hard facts and introduce snippets of interview which provide the
more anecdotal stuff. The programme typically finishes with some
conclusions about the peccadilloes of whoever of the great and the
good has been held up for examination. The credits roll and we are
left unsurprised by the discovery that some newspaper magnates have
been philanderers, or that not all novelists are nice to their
children. In Gulag interviews alternate with music, there is
no comment, there is no conclusion.
Anyone who has tried even to reduce the amount of commentary in a
factual television film will know how robustly the established style
defends itself. One of the reasons for this is that commentary has a
practical advantage for series producers, executive producers, heads
of department and others who have an editorial say. A commentary is
tractable, you can take it home and think about it. Together with
the transcripts of the interviews it will give you a reasonable
representation of what the film is about. If, on the other hand, a
film has no existence as a written document the executives can know
about it only from the, necessarily infrequent, viewings. This has
the net effect of returning control of the programme to the
programme maker, with all the risks that entails. BBC Documentaries
and Executive Producer Olivia Lichtenstein are to be congratulated
for letting this one go on the loose.
Gulag resists joining the dominant documentary genre by
allying itself with another one: the Russian feature film. Its
gentle pace and lengthy shots (a typical 50 minuter has more shots
in it than this three hour film) interact with plangent Russian
music to produce an almost meditative atmosphere. The film opens
with a lengthy aerial shot of the Russian forest and music full of
patience and suffering; only when it has been held long enough to
establish that there are going to be no introductory words are we
shown a caption. Deliberately chosen for its imprecision, it tells
us that estimates of the number of people killed under Stalin vary
from 20 to 50 million - we are not watching a simply factual
programme. Films have to declare early on what they are and what
they are not: it is very hard to concentrate on anything which
offers one thing and then delivers another.
Once it has been established that commentary is not going to
encumber the pictures they develop stronger meanings of their own.
Cutaways, those non-specific shots which cover the edits in an
interview, become in themselves rich and ambiguous comments on the
people we meet. The ship passing through a canal lock becomes a
focus for horror when it follows a woman who describes how she saw
the bodies of dead workers thrown into the concrete during
construction of the Dmitrov canal. The frequent shots of water
become the cleansing and distorting medium of Tarkovsky’s Mirror.
The protracted shot overflying a city in dull grey sleet which
introduces a visit to the prisoner-built city of Norilsk becomes an
image of hell by way of the surface of the planet Solaris.
Its effect is to make us concentrate on the sequence to come. Purely
visual breaks have become invitations to think.
Gulag’s strength is the ambiguity which its style allows
it. Freed from the need which commentary imposes to draw
conclusions, it can accommodate episodes whose meanings are if not
opposed to each other then at least orthogonal. A man tells how he
was trapped, realising that as soon as he protested against the daft
verdicts passed on his fellow Russians he would meet the same fate.
His wife at another time remarks that the kind of people who were
arrested were natural born complainers - ‘they went on whingeing
in the camps.’ The senior NKVD member who all but ran Norilsk who
remarks that "Prisoners were the only solution given the drive
to industrialise" and is feted to this day on the local TV
station. The woman prisoner who gives every impression of being
happily married to one of the guards. The interrogator who talks
about the technique of breaking a prisoner down and the prisoner who
talks about being raped. Victim, perpetrator, and observer all still
live together, all breathing the same air. The film gives us an
image of the confusion of the former soviet people - at times it
seems as if one is seeing them for the first time.
Ironically it was during the Stalin era that Eisenstein tried to
develop a socialist cinema that would represent the people as a
whole, without relying on stars or on making one character seem more
significant than another. This is exactly what Gulag does:
the interviewees speak for themselves but come together into one
picture. The programme represents all their contradictions and
uncertainty without itself becoming confusing. This is difficult
enough to achieve in a television programme but it might also
incidentally a necessary condition for a decent society: everybody
has to have a say but none too much. The Russians must have needed
it so much they eventually invented a new term, derived from their
word for voice, to describe what it was they were after - Glasnost.
In the final scene an old woman in Norilsk, who was imprisoned
along with the rest of her family by Stalin, buries her sister. She
tells the handful of mourners attending the open coffin, ‘Papa
told me, "When the time comes demand that the truth be told -
our truth."’ Most television documentaries make a sincere
attempt to tell the truth, sometimes however the listing of facts is
counterproductive - to understand the truth you have to think.
Gulag should remind all of us that television as a medium
is disastrously under used: by adopting a different style you can
make it do very different things. It is not the case that viewers
are unable to cope with innovation. They have never been more
sophisticated - they are able to decode complicated and allusive
advertisements that would have baffled them a decade ago. The truth
is that their responsiveness to the power and subtlety of medium
often far outstrips the willingness of television programme makers
to use it. Gulag represents only one way in which the power
of film to invite people to think, what is remarkable about it is
that it uses this style to deal with a political subject which might
easily have been given a conventional treatment. What should give
heart to all programme makers, and incidentally despair to all
despots, is that when people are invited to think they often do.
