■ Archival Research

The first step in beginning to do research is to know what your documentary is really about. This is related the film’s hypothesis (Chapter 1). It is important to get as specific as you can. Otherwise, your historical footage risks seeming generic, and will add little to the story. As Bennett says,

Once you have a clear idea of what your story is and what role archival material plays in it, you can develop a research strategy and start looking for material. While a quick search using an Internet search engine may be a first step, it will only scratch the surface. The next step is to get a real sense of the historical situation you’re dealing with, and this requires deeper research and detective work. Who were the major players? Where did the events take place? Who was covering the story at the time? Who or what group was involved or affected by the events? What were the lasting ramifications? Often your local library is a good starting point. Are there good books that deal with the subject you are focusing on in your film? Read the book, or at least the relevant chapters. Definitely look at the bibliography, where you may find the sources of actual photos, documents, or moving images that you may be able to feature in your film. Archival research can be thought of as a spiral or a series of concentric circles, getting both deeper (gathering more detail) and wider (learning new aspects related to your topic) as you explore the territory. You will find yourself constantly returning to older sources armed with new perspectives that can take you closer to your goal.

Your local public library is only the first of a broad spread of public institutions that can be sources for a vast array of material. After the library, you can move on to city and state historical societies, and national collections such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington DC. The advantage of these archives is that many of their materials will be in the public domain (p. 333) and can be used for free. Public university and museum collections can be good sources as well.

Every country has some sort of government archive where scholars, journalists, and documentary filmmakers can conduct research for archival materials. More and more, these collections are available online. One example is the European Film Archives online database (www.filmarchives-online.eu), which focuses on a broad cross section of non-fiction material including documentary and educational films, newsreels, and travelogues from half a dozen European sources including the British Film Institute and sources in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. The French Cinématèque (www.cinematheque.fr), started by the legendary archivist Henri Langlois, offers the largest collection of audiovisual media resources in the world. How you access these resources, and what uses of the materials are allowed, varies widely. The US National Archives, for example, is committed to putting a variety of material online that can be downloaded and used in documentaries without paying any rights or having to visit Washington DC. A more comprehensive list of archival sources is included on our companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/Anderson).

In addition to public institutions, there are several major stock houses with large collections of archival footage and stills. These are large corporations, such as Corbis and Getty Images, that are in the business of collecting and licensing images. While their collections are large, so are the prices they charge. A producer on a medium- or low-budget documentary will typically try to keep the amount of commercially obtained material to a minimum.

Another significant commercial source will be the archives of television networks and local TV stations. Trouble the Water (2008), discussed in Chapter 18 in detail, depended heavily on this sort of material to give a broad historical context to the story of its main characters during and after Hurricane Katrina. This type of material is found by contacting the networks directly, and it can also be very pricey.

The third important group of archive sources are nongovernmental cultural institutions, such as art museums, historical societies, private universities, and special collections focused on particular content areas. These include collections such as the Walter P. Reuther Labor Library and Archive, housed at Wayne State University in Detroit, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and the Film Stills Archive at the Museum of Modern Art.

While newspapers are commercial enterprises, their back issues can often be accessed through libraries and through online databases such as Lexis Nexis. Large newspapers like the New York Times are obvious resources, but local newspapers, the community press, and even defunct publications can offer material that is sometimes more relevant to the events you’re researching.

While any research should include these types of sources, it is important to remember that for the particular story you are telling there often exists a trove of valuable historical material found in personal archives like family photo albums, vacation videos, ephemera, or other documents or objects. Local institutions, such as schools, churches, and community centers, may have their own archival collections as well. These unofficial sources, exactly because their contents never been seen before in a film, will have greater impact than footage that has been in a dozen other documentaries.

It’s critically important to look at other films on your subject. You may want to actually license some of their footage (or outtakes) for your own film. More often, you will see what archival material they found, and can consult the list of archives in their end credits to get a sense of where you might go to find what you need.

Talk to Somebody!

Another key aspect of doing research is to actually en gage with people face-to-face. While online search engines can do a great job, they can never suggest lines of inquiry you haven’t thought of, and they will never ask you follow-up questions. A librarian, an archivist, a scholar in the field, or even a neighborhood resident or unofficial community historian can suggest routes to imagery (not to mention potential interview subjects and more). The knowledge actual people have may extend way beyond the limited information on a catalogue entry. Much archival material is also in lots or boxes with only the vaguest of references to what they contain (Figure 20.1). Often the librarian is the person who knows what the archive holds beyond the bare catalog descriptions, and speaking with her can open doors to visual evidence and information that speak to the heart of your story.

■ Figure 20.1 Coauthor Martin Lucas doing archival research at the International Center of Photography for his historical documentary Hiroshima Bound (2015).

■ Figure 20.2 This image from the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion event, held at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture in New York, suggests the value of the “crowdsourced” archival approach used by the Through a Lens Darkly team. Photo by Natalie Shmuel for Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, LLC

■ Ways of Using Archival Material

Documentary films use archival material for a variety of reasons. Probably the most common is that archival materials—whether still images, documents, moving images, or audio—provide visual evidence to back up your storytelling goals. This combination of visual imagery from archival sources and a knowledgeable narration is the “bread and butter” of many historical docs.

But history is not fixed, and in fact is constantly being rethought, reevaluated, and recontextualized. Documentary films are often at the forefront of debates about the meaning and significance of historical events. In a strategy that uses humor to devastating effect,

■ Getting Creative with Archival Research

In the Trenches with Archivist and Producer Ann Bennett

Ann Bennett has done archival research and producing for more than a dozen documentaries, including Soul Food Junkies (Byron Hurt, 2012), Africans in America (WGBH, 2008), and People like Us: Class in America (Center for New American Media, 2001).

We talked with her about her work on Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014), directed by Thomas Allan Harris (Bennett was also a producer on the film). Through a Lens Darkly explores the role of photography in helping to shape the identity of African-Americans from the time of slavery to the present. Based in part on the pioneering work of Deborah Willis, particularly her book on black photographers, Reflections in Black, the film is built around a rich history of hidden and forgotten images. It complements these images with interviews with important African-American visual artists including Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson.

Bennett says there were several important lessons learned during the process. One was the value of a crowdsourcing approach to find images and documents that have never found their way into an official archive.

As we began research, we found that black photographic content within mainstream institutions was sometimes nonexistent, very inconsistent, and certainly not as thorough as we would have liked. But we knew that within black communities, in addition to having a black doctor, mortician or business leaders, there was always a photographer. And even people with modest means had photo graphs taken. So you have to go to the people who actually commissioned work from those photographers, and say, “Do you have a photograph of when you were in school?” “Do you have wedding photographs? Births? Funerals?” That’s how we started the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project (http://1world1family.me/category/tald/). We real ized we had to take another tack and speak to individual scholars and librarians and community members who were helping us tell our story anyway, and ask, “Are there images that could help us understand this story?” The people who have images are very proud of them, so once you put the word out, people will come to you. When we did our first event in Atlanta, there was one woman who literally came in with a steamer trunk full of photographs! ²

While many documentary films have a website, for Through a Lens Darkly this actually meant creating an Internet-based archive that has a life independent of the film. And as Bennett suggests, it has meant not just putting the word out, but doing events including a Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow in Atlanta, GA. Director Harris projected scans of the photographs that people had brought to the event, and audience members reacted with their own insights and observations (Figure 20.2). While involving the public in this way is unusual, it was essential for creating an archive of images that otherwise might never have been seen and shared. And it certainly provided rich visual evidence for the film.

Doing Thorough Research

According to Bennett, one key to finding great archival material is to strive to know your story intimately, and to keep thinking imaginatively about your search. For Catherine Arnaud’s film Sidney Poitier, an Outsider in Hollywood (2008), Bennett was able to locate an image of the actor Sidney Poitier and singer Harry Belafonte delivering bail money for jailed marchers in the Selma civil rights marches of 1965, led by Martin Luther King (Figure 20.3):

■ Figure 20.3 Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte in Sidney Poitier: An Outsider in Hollywood.

The producers were looking for images from this event where Poitier and Belafonte had gone down South to deliver some bail money. The filmmakers knew that Poitier and Belafonte had given a press conference right before or after they had come from delivering the bail, but they couldn’t find any visual material. The only way I was able to identify it was by going to a written history of the civil rights movement, and I found a written history of the civil rights movement, and I found a reference to Poitier and Belafonte going to deliver this money. It was a 1,000 page book, but in it I was able to find the details of the date, the location and the airport where they’d given the press conference. Only then was I able to go to NBC and find the footage. So it’s all about knowing your story and your subjects thoroughly. That will help inform you when you have to broaden your search and to really dig deep.³

Thinking Historically about Categories

When thinking about archival footage, it’s essential that you understand the people, places, and events in their historical context. Sometimes the names by which events are known today are not what people called them at the time. The same is true for social categories. For example, before the 1930s, the term “unemployment” was not a social category. People would be termed “without means of support” or perhaps “jobless.” So a search for images of the unemployed from an earlier era should reflect the categories of the period. This means putting your own mind back into another era. As Ann Bennett explains:

Oftentimes what you’re looking for may not be listed under the name of the event as it’s become known. Now we have the “March on Washington” or “Watergate” or the “Tet Offensive.” But they didn’t have titles when they happened! We were looking for content to help us illustrate black LGBT culture for Through a Lens Darkly and I found, at the Drama Library at Yale, they had a collection of African-American culture, and within that there was a small vaudeville collection. In this collection there is all of this amazing stuff of different acts, but a good chunk of those acts were drag acts, material from the ‘20s, ‘30s and ’40s. It wasn’t just one guy in a dress— there was a lot of material! Finding that really informed all these other searches for things that we now call “gender and identity.” It’s been there all along, but it just wasn’t categorized as such.⁴

Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty’s Atomic Cafe (1982) repurposes educational and propaganda material from the Cold War to paint a compelling and darkly funny picture of a nation caught up in a “nuclear fever” that needs to be experienced to be believed. Burt the Turtle, in order to train children to crawl under their desks as soon as they see the bright light of an Atomic blast, demonstrates how he ducks and safely covers himself inside his shell whenever a firecracker explodes nearby (Figure 20.4). The framing of this cartoon with footage showing the terrible devastation of the bombing of Hiroshima shows the vast gap between the dangers of nuclear technology and the way it was framed for the public. The film helped define a genre characterized by its appropriation and repur posing of archival material for social commentary. It also contributed to a contemporary dialogue about national priorities during the Reagan Era.

■ Figure 20.4 Atomic Cafe repurposes an archival Civil Defense film to ironic effect.

Some filmmakers have used archival material to explore the complex links between collective history and personal memory. An example is Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991), a personal essay about the Japanese-American internment during World War II. The film uses footage of the Pearl Harbor attack from the fiction film From Here to Eternity (1953) to launch a complex narrative that counterposes national wartime jingoism with the traumatized silence of her own family in the postwar era, creating a critique of an American society that implicitly condones a racist policy. In the film, she finds government footage of internment camps and even discovers a wide shot of a crafts class at Manzanar Camp that shows her own grandmother painting a carved bird that her mother had saved in her jewelry box for decades (Figure 20.5).

■ Figure 20.5 This archival still from the National Archives, featured in the documentary History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, shows interned Japanese-Americans including filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s grandmother.

Metaphorical Imagery

Sometimes the relationship of archival imagery to your story is completely metaphorical. In Alan Berliner’s film Nobody’s Business (1996), about his father Oscar Berliner, we hear Oscar telling Alan, “I’m nobody. I’m just a regular person.” This argument over whether Oscar’s story is worth telling is one of the central themes of the hour-long documentary, and the images reflect this tension. We see black-and-white archival footage of a press conference, where photographers are taking pictures of people who presumably matter more than a “regular guy” like Oscar Berliner. In another scene, Alan and Oscar are heard sparring over whether Alan should make a film at all. We hear the starting bell for a boxing match, and see an old black-and-white film of a fight (Figure 20.6). These images are not of Alan and his father. Rather, they are metaphorical images that ask the audience to open up an active space for reflection about not only the relationships in the film, but documentary truth itself.

■ Figure 20.6 Archival images act as visual metaphor in Nobody’s Business.

■ Organizing Your Material

The advent of digital archives, where material can be searched online and even downloaded straight to your edit suite, has big advantages for filmmakers. It has presented a couple of big problems as well, however. One of them is that it is incredibly tempting to pull images off the web and put them in your cut without knowing or worrying too much about where they originated. This separation of content from context is of concern for anyone who is interested in reality-based storytelling. To start with, an image may not be what it purports to be. A photograph identified as being from one battle may be from another, or even a complete fake. The other problem is that you can have a great image, but no idea whether you have rights to use it (p. 331). The best solution is to keep careful track of where you obtain images, and what their provenance is.

An additional problem is that you may end up with several versions of an image. Typically, archives and stock houses will have “screener” versions of material, either in low resolution or sporting a watermark (like the company’s logo). It’s common for the editor to use this temporary material until picture lock. At that point, though, you will need to know where to go for the high-quality versions of the images you’ve been using. In addition, you will need to develop a clear sense of which images you must pay for. Sometimes it takes a fair bit of research just to locate the rights holder, and it always takes time to negotiate licensing. If you are on a tight deadline for a festival or broadcast, be sure to start this process very early. You also need to keep careful paperwork, image by image, so that when you go to a broadcaster or distributor, you can prove that you own the rights to all the images in your film.

A good practice is to create a database of some kind for your images. This can be very basic, like a spreadsheet with columns for source, description, provenance, file type, image quality, etc., or you can use database software, such as Filemaker Pro or OpenOffice.

Using Metadata

One organizational tool you should be familiar with, especially for still images and audio files, is metadata. Metadata can include copyright info, what website you got the image or sound from, and more. Typical software such as Photoshop for images and Audacity for sound files make it easy to add such information. Having the data in the file gives you an easy way to keep track of an image’s source. At present, it is more difficult to embed metadata in moving image files, but that is likely to change in the near future. Moving image files will always have some basic information imbedded in them, such as the format and the creation date. In Premiere Pro, you can add metadata in the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) format on a Metadata Panel (Figure 20.7).

For still images, it’s a good idea to assign each image a number that is unique. In other words, NEVER give two images the same identification number or file name! Depending on how many images you are working with, you may decide to give each category of images a certain numerical range. For example, everything from one geographical area could have a number between 1000 and 1999, while material from somewhere else could start at 2000. When you import the images into your NLE, you can create keywords and categories in the project window that can help you find things easily.

■ Figure 20.7 The metadata logging panel from Premiere Pro.

■ Who Owns an Image? Copyright and Fair Use

While the topic of ownership of creative work and intellectual property is a complex one, here are some helpful guidelines that will help you negotiate this difficult terrain. The key is that intellectual property is protected by copyright. Copyright laws vary from country to country, but in all cases they ensure that the owner of the copyright has rights to determine where the image can be seen and especially into which works it can be incorporated. If you want to use a copyrighted image in your film, you will likely need their permission. You obtain these rights by licensing the image or footage in question. Music rights are another story and will be dealt with separately in Chapter 21. If you don’t secure the rights, you risk at the very least a “cease and desist” letter from a lawyer, not to mention a lawsuit. In either case, you will end up going back to the editing room to change a film you thought was done.

As discussed in Chapter 5, though, our society is also based on the idea that culture is a shared field, a common patrimony that artists can draw on. This balance is achieved legally through fair use doctrine, which limits copyright in certain contexts. The complete ins and outs of fair use are outside the scope of this book, but the basic idea is that even copyrighted material can be used in a documentary under certain circumstances. These conditions are far from a blanket permission, and need to be examined carefully.

The Center for Media and Social Impact (CMSI) at American University has for many years been a key institution in developing a clear understanding of what fair use means in the context of documentary filmmaking.

CMSI’s Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use lists four main categories that could qualify your use as fair use⁵:

Category 1: Employing Copyrighted Material as the Object of Social, Political, or Cultural Critique

This class of uses involves situations in which documentarians engage in media critique, whether of text, image, or sound works. In these cases, documentarians hold the specific copyrighted work up for analysis.

Category 2: Quoting Copyrighted Works of Popular Culture to Illustrate an Argument of Point

Here the concern is with material (again, of whatever kind) that is quoted not because it is, in itself, the object of critique but because it aptly illustrates some argument or point that a filmmaker is developing—as clips from fiction films might be used (for example) to demonstrate changing American attitudes toward race.

Category 3: Capturing Copyrighted Media Content in the Process of Filming Something Else

Documentarians often record copyrighted sounds and images when they are filming in real-life settings. Common examples are a poster on a wall, music playing on a radio, and television programming heard (and perhaps seen) in the background. In the context of documentary, the incidentally captured material is an integral part of the ordinary reality being documented. Filmmakers argue that only by altering and thus falsifying the reality they film—for example by telling subjects to turn off the radio, take down a poster, or turn off the TV—could they avoid using this protected material.

Category 4: Using Copyrighted Material in a Historical Sequence

In many cases the best (or even only) effective way to tell a particular historical story or make a historical point is to make selective use of words that were spoken during the events in question, music that was associated with the events, or photographs and films that were taken at that time.

These categories offer legal protection but, like all laws, are subject to interpretation. In general the first two categories are stronger, meaning that if taken to court you are more likely to win than if you are relying on the last two categories. If you have a popular song playing in the background of a scene, you may have a hard time convincing a court that you have rights to leave it in if you could have asked the subjects to turn off the radio. Clips from movies, news footage, and music are most likely to present problems for a fair use argument.

Even if you meet one or more of these categories of use, the courts will still consider the nature of the use. This refers to how much your use will impact the value of the original. If you are taking “the heart,” or most important part of the work, this will weigh against fair use. Finally, it’s important that you use as little of the copyrighted work as is absolutely necessary to make your point. If using 5 seconds of an image or sound will suffice, don’t use 7 or 10.

Because fair use is so integral to so many documentaries, it is essential that documentary filmmakers become familiar with best practices in this area. As attorney and producer Andrew Lund says,

Lund makes the point that every filmmaker should be familiar with CMSI’s Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. Why? If you are well-versed in these common practices, you will make more informed choices throughout preproduction and production instead of just confronting rights issues in postproduction. Also, if you do consult with an entertainment attorney when you are in postproduction and trying to resolve your rights issues, you will make a good impression and save yourself some money by having done much of the preparation for the legal work. Finally, fair use is based on legal precedent, and in making decisions the courts consider standard industry practice. So by being informed of the best practices and following them yourself, you are actually contributing to shaping the law so that it is more responsive to the needs of documentary filmmakers!

There is an extremely limited analogue to fair use in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries called “fair dealing.” Its application is narrower in scope and it varies from country to country, but generally it allows for some use of copyrighted material for review, research, or news reporting as well as parody and satire. The EU has, in the form of the European Copyright Directive, similar protections. In the United Kingdom, one useful source of information and discussion can be found at www.own-it.org, which offers “intellectual property advice for the creative sector.”⁷

Public Domain Materials

Fortunately, many images are in the public domain, which means they can be used without clearance. The public domain includes images and footage that are out of copyright either because of their age or because they were created before copyright existed. In addition, images that were created by public institutions are in the public domain. Thus material produced by the government is considered to be free for use (although specific institutions may impose their own restrictions). For instance, in History and Memory, Tajiri uses archival material produced by the US government for wartime propaganda purposes (Figure 20.8). Since it was made by the government with taxpayers’ money, anyone can access it and put it in a film. This area is obviously of great interest to filmmakers, and it includes material located in some of the nation’s biggest collections, such as the US National Archives and the Library of Congress.

■ Figure 20.8 This image of interned Japanese Americans taken from a 1944 propaganda film produced by the Office of War Information is in the public domain, and used in History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige.

Clearing Rights

If you are planning to use material that may be covered by copyright, then you will need to license it. There are different approaches, including royalty-free, which means that you pay a flat one-time fee. Certain clip art or stock shot libraries may also fall into this category, as well as needle-drop music libraries (Chapter 21). A rights-managed approach means that you pay for rights that may be restricted by time (a certain number of years) or platform (broadcast, theatrical) or market (national, international).

It’s important not to leave clearance to the last minute. Often, beginning filmmakers will throw anything and everything into their film, with the assumption that they will clear the rights when they need to. This is a dangerous practice, because once your film is finished and mastered, it will be expensive and time-consuming to go back into postproduction just because you got a broadcast or other distribution deal. Also, it’s much easier to clear rights before your film has become a success and you have been offered a distribution deal. At that point, your negotiating power with the right holders is much weaker than it would have been at an earlier stage.

■ Creative Commons: An Alternative to Copyright

For filmmakers who see the creative space as a shared one, there are several alternatives to copyright with its “all-or-nothing” approach to intellectual property protection. The most popular of these is Creative Commons (Figure 20.9). Creative Commons is a licensing system that offers a variety of options for creators. Licensing your work is easy. As a maker, you decide first whether you will allow for commercial or noncommercial use. Next, you will decide if you allow derivative work, which means uses where someone incorporates your work into their new one.

■ Figure 20.9 The license-generating feature of creativecommons.org walks the maker through a series of simple choices to generate an appropriate license for your work.

If the alternative licensing movement has a guru, it is Larry Lessig, who as a founder of Creative Commons is a strong believer in a culture where creativity and innovation flourish in an environment where there is a healthy interchange of ideas and creative potential.⁹ One of the outcomes of this movement is an acknowledgment of a need for a “commons,” a space where media of all sorts can be seen and shared freely. Sites like Flickr Commons (www.flickr.com/commons) contain user-uploaded images with Creative Commons licenses, as well as images in the public domain (Figure 20.10). The ease of use and large size of the collection makes this a good first stop if you are looking for pictures of something you can’t shoot yourself.

Other sites like www.europeana.eu and Wikimedia Commons (www.commons.wikimedia.org) offer searchable databases of large numbers of images as well, along with clear indications of how you can use them. While these won’t solve every need, they offer a good starting place for any documentary maker who needs to offer viewers representations of other times and places.

■ Figure 20.10 Flickr Commons has over time become a repository for a wide variety of photos from around the world. Here we see historical images from Australian and Irish collections.

A good general guide to the complexities of this area can be found in Sheila Curran Bernard and Kenn Rabin’s Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Finding, Using, and Licensing Third Party Visuals and Music.⁸

As with all legal situations, we suggest consulting an attorney who specializes in rights clearances for media.

■ The Ethics of Using Archival Material

The ethics of using archival material is a complex question, and some of the issues are dealt with separately in Chapter 5. When you use an image from the past, you are creating an entirely new context for someone with whom you can’t consult. As such, you bear some responsibility for their historical legacy. One film that deals with this issue directly is Elizabeth Barret’s Stranger with a Camera (2000). Images of poor coal miners in the Appalachians were used by everyone from CBS to the BBC to President Johnson to illustrate poverty. The film discusses the complexity of using real people as evidence for political arguments. As Barret says, “The media companies mined the images the way the coal companies mined the coal.” Does this mean we should never use archival imagery? Obviously not, but each filmmaker has to make a moral choice based on being fair to the subjects, and to the truth as they see it.

Another issue is accuracy. When you are talking about New York in the 1920s and you show archival material, it should really be New York, and not Philadelphia, and it should really be the 1920s, and not the ‘30s or ‘40s.

Another issue is whether or not you are obligated to identify archival material for viewers. As in other aspects of filmmaking ethics, people have a variety of approaches. In television news, it is standard procedure to identify the source of archival material. The WGBH public affairs program Frontline, on the other hand, suggests that it is not necessary to identify “non-original” material on screen unless doing so helps a viewer better understand the communication.¹⁰

Some documentary filmmakers take a completely different approach to using archival material. When Alan Berliner cut to a shot of a 1950s boxing ring in Nobody’s Business, the ring is metaphorical, representing father–son conflict, and has no reference to a real match. On the other hand, when he cuts to a photo of a guy clowning in front of a microphone from the same era, it turns out to be a real photo of his father and we understand it as such. But anyone watching Berliner’s film has a clear idea from the outset that they will be getting this more open, less literal, approach to archival materials.

■ Technical Issues

Another issue with using archival material has to do with the technical side. The gold standard for image quality is to have access to the original image, but this isn’t always possible. If you can access an original photograph, you can scan it at a high resolution. How high is enough? The standard image resolution for anything on screen is 72 dpi or 72 pixels per inch. If you scan at double that, say 150 dpi, you will be able to digitally “zoom in” on the image digitally up to 50 percent of its original size without degradation. Another way to think of this is that a standard HD image is 1920 pixels across. If you want your image to fill the screen, then you need to scan it so that it has similar pixel width. For example, let’s say you have a small passport photo of someone that you’d like in the film. The photograph may only be 2 inches high. You need to think how big you’d like this to appear on screen. If you want it to fill the frame, which is 1080 pixels high, you will need to scan the image at 500 dpi (2 inches x 500 pixels = 1000 pixels, or approximately the height of the screen).

You should be particularly wary of images or footage downloaded from the Internet. It is very easy to find material there that will not stand up in the context of a film. The overly pixilated look of low-resolution digital imagery will give your documentary an amateurish appearance you should strive to avoid. This, along with the difficulty of sourcing images online, means you should try to stick to known archival sources, or do as Ann Bennett and Thomas Allan Harris did and find your own!

Another issue that arises with archival materials is that of aspect ratio (Chapter 7). The difference between standard 4:3 aspect ratio, which is typical of archival film and SD NTSC video, and modern 16 x 9 screens presents another problem because the 4:3 image isn’t wide enough to fill the sides of the 16 x 9 frame. One solution is to blow up the 4:3 image, cutting off the top and bottom, but sacrificing information and image resolution. Another is to letterbox your image, filling the empty edges of the frame with black (Figure 20.11). Doing this signals to viewers that they are seeing historical footage, and maintains image resolution that can be lost in a “blow up.”

■ Figure 20.11 Using letterboxing to integrate 4:3 archival material into a 16 x 9 frame.

■ Documents

Archival material isn’t just still and moving images and audio. It can consist of a variety of types of documents and ephemera. Ephemera is material that was originally thought of as something disposable, whether a greeting card, an advertisement, or a fruit box label.

When Ken Burns, whose documentary storytelling is based extensively on the use of archival materials, made his PBS historical documentary The Civil War (1990), one of the things that gave it a unique flavor was his use of original documents of all kinds (Figure 20.12). A good example is a letter home from a Union soldier, Sullivan Ballou:

■ Figure 20.12 Ken Burns used letters, photos, and illustrations from popular magazines like this Thomas Nast illustration from Harper’s Magazine to give a rich sense of how the Civil War impacted daily life.

At the time of the Civil War, photography was in its infancy, and sound recording nonexistent. But Burns made a virtue of necessity by emphasizing the voices of the otherwise voiceless: ordinary citizens who fought and died.

Other types of documents such as maps, deeds, licenses, and reports can also play a role in your documentary. In Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1989), a broad variety of documents appear in microscopic focus. While no single one of them is remarkable, the overall deluge of minutia gives the film an unmistakable visual style and serves the director’s goals of raising questions about the veracity of evidence itself (Figure 20.13).

■ Figure 20.13 In The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris mixes court documents with extreme close-ups of newspaper clippings, and even an ordinary road map, to give the search for the facts about the murder of a Dallas police officer a haunting flavor that challenges the audience’s assumptions about the nature of evidence.

■ Conclusion

This chapter can only offer a short overview of the vital subject of archival materials for documentary filmmaking. Just remember that thoughtful research and deft storytelling can enrich your own sense of your subject, and add a lot to the viewer’s experience of your film without necessarily being a major drag on your budget. Also keep in mind that, while the number of online sources grows daily, going out and doing your own image research always pays off in unexpected ways.