Documenting Animal Commodities: Activism or Advocacy

The Northwest Film Center  in Portland, Oregon, recently presented three films for Northwest Tracking Farm Edition: Industry and Animal Husbandry. Milk Men, directed by Subversive Storytelling's own Jan Haaken (2015) explores dairy farming through several family farms and one industrial farm in Washington state. Loose Horses, directed by Kathy Kasic (2015), focuses on an intermediary auction pen in Montana by which unwanted domestic horses might either find a new life or be sent to the slaughterhouse. Boone, directed by Christopher LaMarca (2016) follows three farmers on a small goat farm in Southern Oregon. Shown on three consecutive nights, the films constitute diverse instances of activist rather than advocacy documentary.

The genre of documentary is huge and various—it includes everything from television news segments through avant-garde work by Trinh Minh-ha; from Triumph of the Will through Fahrenheit 9/11. Considering some debates about documentary and recurrent issues in documentary studies can help audiences to approach not just the content of films but the ways that content is presented. There are questions of the status of realism—the status of documentary as nonfictional, but also questions of how the portrait of reality is shaped by the film—and interrelated questions of ethics and of style.

The Northwest Tracking Farm Edition series moves from Milk Men, which includes voiceover by the filmmaker and her on-camera interviews with her subjects; through Loose Horses, which does not include the director but does have interviews with participants in which they directly address the camera, answering questions we don't hear but can often guess at; and ends with Boone, arguably an example of what's known as "direct cinema," in which we seem to be a fly on the wall, following various actions rather than interviews with the subjects of the film. Thus the documentarians in the films in this series become less and less visible.

Direct cinema or observational cinema is also sometimes equated with cinéma vérité, although cinéma vérité, French for cinema truth, has also been distinguished from direct cinema as involving more confrontational, participatory, and self-reflexive techniques by the filmmaker. Developing in the 1960s with the greater availability of lightweight cameras and synchronous sound that made it more possible to follow subjects and capture events in process, both the French cinéma vérité and the American direct cinema traditions are invested in presenting truth or reality.

Now, you might think that that is what all documentary is supposed to be about: documentary films are generally understood as nonfictional, about real people, real situations, real places. But they also have traditions of using techniques associated with fictional narrative features, stylistic strategies developed to make films easier to watch, conventions that clarify spatial relations, or temporal continuity, for instance, and investments in narratives that may reinforce the status quo through their very familiarity.

Direct cinema sought to remove some of those artifices and to show a more authentic glimpse of the world as it is. John Grierson,  an early British documentarian and theorist of documentary, suggested that documentary is "the creative interpretation of actuality," and direct cinema was in some ways a reaction against what were perceived as the biases of the "creative" side of that formula—against filming events that had been staged, for instance, as Grierson's films sometimes did.

But that view was also critiqued, because the filmmaker is always making choices—what to shoot, how to shoot it, and how to edit it together. So in contrast, films that foreground their active intervention in the process of representation were argued to be more truthful, precisely because they make clear their investments.

On the other hand, having a filmmaker participating in the film doesn't necessarily make things more true, and indeed many people have critiqued Michael Moore's work in that light. But if one of the critiques of Moore is sometimes that he's "biased," we can also critique that idea, in turn, since just as there isn't a sharp line between fictional and nonfictional films, there isn't any way that a film can be entirely "objective." The truth it presents is a different sort of truth.

And Moore's work might illustrate another sort of documentary that has become increasingly popular in the last 20 years or so: the advocacy documentary, in which the filmmaker presents a clear position and asks the audience to take some sort of action—as, for instance, An Inconvenient Truth ends with the url for a website giving suggestions on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Among animal documentaries, a lot of these have been advocating for animal rights in various ways—like the exposes that are referenced in Milk Men, or The Cove, which calls for an end to dolphin hunting, or Food, Inc., which calls for an end to factory farming.

But the Northwest Farm series films are not advocacy documentaries in that sense. Milk Men is quite explicit in positioning itself in opposition both to early Dairy Board propaganda and to anti-industrial farming exposes. Loose Horses is less explicit in its presentation of the debate it engages—there's no authorial voice-over—but features the people it interviews arguing both that people who sell their old horses at auction are being lazy and selfish because they don't simply shoot and bury old horses but instead put them through a traumatic experience; and, in a counterpoint to that, arguing that not everyone has land on which to bury a horse, and some people need the money they can get from auctioning their old horses. In Boone, the very intimacy of the presentation foregrounds both the primal satisfactions of farming and the grimly arduous labor involved.

None of these films ends with a clear "ask," then, but they all engage or respond to a number of troubling issues—about the difficulties of farming, about the economic pressures on farmers, about overproduction in the global economy, about the situation of animals who are also commodities, about the status of regulations such as those about the siting of slaughterhouses or the sale of raw milk to consumers.

And like all documentaries they raise questions about the relation between the filmmaker and the subjects of the film. So in addition to the degree of explicit intervention by the filmmaker and the open directing of our understanding or response through narration or choices of interviews, there's also the question of the ethics of how the filmmakers interact with their subjects. Documentarians tend to have some substantial access to resources, and their subjects, or characters, are often less privileged—as in Hoop Dreams, or Born into Brothels, to take some relatively recent examples, but also in documentaries Grierson produced in the 1930s about working-class Britons, or in ethnographic films going back to Robert Flaherty's 1922 Nanook of the North, about Eskimos.

The people in the NW Farm series films are not ethnic or cultural Others to the filmmakers—not indigenous Inuit or Bengali children. But they are rural rather than urban, and given the economic stresses of farming that we see in all these films, they are often economically pressured. And certainly insofar as the filmmaker is the one telling the story, there are always questions about the filmmaker's responsibility to those whom they represent and on whose participation the film depends.

There are also questions about the ways that stories are told—what's included and excluded (aside from the filmmakers themselves), and how that presentation is accomplished. For instance, we can think about setting: Milk Men uses aerial shots to connect the various farms we visit and to give an overview of the size of the different farms, whereas Boone and Loose Horses each focus on a single location, with more or less information about what lies beyond the immediate setting—where people and animals we see have come from and go to.

Or, we could think about the use of close-ups. In all three films, for instance, close-ups of the animals, particularly of their faces and eyes, may prompt us to understand them as sentient beings with subjectivities. But the films also use close-ups of equipment. An udder-eye-view of the automatic milking machines in Milk Men invites amazement at the technology, and also suggests the intimacy the cows may come to feel with the machine that gives them some control over milking. In Loose Horses, close-ups of fences and chute walls convey a sense of the constraints on the horses and the narrow possibilities for their futures. Close shots of broken machinery in Boone emphasize the difficulties and frustrations of farm labor, while a view from the underside of a tiller suggests the fragility of life so easily cut down.

And finally, we might consider the question of sound. Direct cinema initially emphasized synchronous sound, but all of the films in the Northwest Farm series complicate the relation of sound and image, at points using off-screen voices and sounds in combination with images that influence our response. Moreover, both Boone and Loose Horses give us an immersive soundscape, pushing forward the sounds of their settings. Kasic describes her film's style as "sensory-vérité," evoking the work promoted by Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, but resisting that school's embrace of entirely open-ended, digressive, even confusing mess. Instead, like the other films in the NW Farm series, Kasic's reaches the audience sensually, emotionally, and cognitively, to promote not a quick change of lightbulb or letter to the editor, but an ongoing and nuanced engagement with the complexities of human relations to sentient animals potentially both loved and commodified.