Sunday, August 05, 2007

More on Paul Watson

In response to this post, Kuala Lumpur Chris draws my attention to this article defending Paul Watson, the documentary maker whose film Malcolm and Barbara was promoted by ITV as showing an Alzheimer's sufferer dying. This turned out to be a lie - exposed by the dead man's brother on a Times blog - the man died a few days later. In response, I draw your attention to this considerably more persuasive article and, of course, to my own view of Watson and others from a decade ago. The John Mair article defending Watson is broadly similar to Watson's defence of himself - '...if you're a film-maker, you're meant to be subversive.' Mair's version of this idea is that being controversial is a director's badge of authenticity. Since anybody can be controversial - serial killers, psychopaths, Hitler - this requires a further defence of Watson's character and work to establish that there is something good about the controversies he arouses. The character assertions are merely that - assertions. One is simply risible. He says Watson is 'selfless when it comes to the next generation. Year after year he chairs the Royal Television Society student awards.' I've done things like that out of vanity, now I don't bother. All Mair says about Watson's work is that it is good, not why or how it is good. This is a particularly serious omission since, as I said ten years ago, much of his work has humiliated and traumatised his victims. At the heart of the matter, as Minette Marrin makes clear, lie Watson's delusions. All these spring from his apparent belief that film is intrinsically true. Furthermore, and with staggering conceit, Watson asserts that his editing process is all about playing God - 'and if you don't play God truthfully, there's no point'. This is absurd, grotesque. God may be able to know when he is being truthful, presumably he has no choice, but the only judge of Watson's truth is Watson.  This means, of course, that he feels free to manipulate reality to fit in with his idea of the truth. As I pointed out in my original article, he filmed two versions of The Dinner Party. He decided the first wasn't good enough and then, for the second, provoked his victims into ever more extreme opinions in order to establish his point that these were a bunch of near-fascist nutters. That one fact destroys any claim Watson might have on the truth. And, in the midst of this, nobody explains why we need to see a man dying. Taboos are expressions of value and, for the most part, entirely reasonable, especially when all that is on offer to replace them is sub-literate egotism. Watson is deeply isolated from the world he claims to report. He is lost in the peculiar vanity, sustained by fans like Mair, that afflicts certain people in television. The power of documentary, as Marrin says, tends to corrupt. The camera is the most insidious liar of all.

8 comments:

  1. I must mention that I have not seen it. But if drama was what he was after, then it is much more powerful to leave it to the mind of the watcher.

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  2. Enitrely agree with all you say about the vile Watson, but this death taboo thing - I'm not so sure. Is it really a taboo - or is it rather a particular form of squeamishness, and one of recent growth (cf breastfeeding)? If the Victorians had telly, they'd have had a whole channel devoted to deathbed scenes, which were regarded as deeply edifying - though, happily, they wouldn't have had a Paul Watson filming them. The 'honest' filming of a death -and it has been done before on TV - is not in itself wrong, and might even be salutary and - yes, edifying.

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  3. Bryan, I am now back in Germany - and soon to be on your shores too - so for a while at least I cannot be linked to Kuala Lumpur. I have no personal investment in Paul Watson, who I worked with briefly years ago when I was employed in what were then called 'cutting rooms'. He was certainly an arrogant, not especially pleasant but passionately committed film maker. He cared about his programmes: and believed in good faith they uncovered truths. We need film makers like Paul Watson: and it is as absurd to say the camera is a liar as it is to say the typewriter or keyboard is... There is a naive idea underlying the current obsession with misrepresentation in documentary that 'truth' is somehow simply present in the same way as a bunch of grapes in Safeways, and is merely acquired. As Keats so rightly put it truth is beauty - and that implies it is an artefact that is worked towards. This also implies that one person's truth is another's lie - and vice versa. Truth - if we think of it beyond a few faked telephone calls in a game show - is hard to define, hard to represent - and will always be contested. As an example, Mark Lambert's purported misrepresentation of the truth in the now notorious Queengate scandal MAY be closer to a truth about Her Maj than the supposed 'right way round' edit. Can we try to get beyond the naivety that riddles the current debate - which may set truthful documentary making back by decades.

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  4. Surely, a documentary is meant to document what is. In other words, the truth. A documentary maker may fail to present a clear picture of reality because he or she is a poor documentary maker. However, if they fail to do so by telling lies or cheating, then quite simply they are not in the business of documentaries but something else entirely. It's very straightforward isn't it?

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  5. I am a plain and simple man; evidence of that is provided by the fact I had to stop just then to make sure the spelling of plain was correct, and my intellectual abilities would, perhaps, be more suited to the blog of Aniston than that of Appleyard. But, like Neil, I thought the word 'documentary' was a factual record or truth. Why then is it a naive idea that truth is "simply present" in a documentary. The idea that it is an artefact to be worked towards seems preposterous (Perhaps all this is Keats' fault?). I look forward to hearing David Dimbleby admitting "We're not telling the whole truth in this programme but our aim is to work towards, say, 90% by the end of the series".

    Is it me? Am I, a simple viewer, naive? Have I missed ChrisH's point altogether? Am I one of those who may set back truthful documentary making by decades, rather than those (hopefully few) dishonest film makers?

    By the way, there were a few sentences in ChrisH's posting which gave me an uneasy feeling that the Madeley impersonator was at it again.

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  6. Some of these arguments as as old as the hills. Read the classics, and you'll soon find folks tut-tutting at the credulity of the plebs and their propensity to believe whatever omens the augurs in the forum have just dished up. Yet somehow, those at the top of the pile who know the illusion for what it is, and who are far too intelligent not to know, always turn out to have a vested interest in keeping the show on the road. Perhaps the assertion that subjective truth trumps all other categories is the last refuge of the scoundrel down the ages.

    I would never watch a program like this. Some things are best left unsaid or at least unseen, and any attempt to turn them public is sure to destroy the dignity of everyone involved.

    I'm not a lawyer, but it would be good if the law automatically assumed that privacy was irrevocable in cases where someone has become so ill they are no longer able to answer for themselves. That way, no other documentary-maker would be able to do anything like this again.

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  7. My wife, in an attempt to offer constructive criticism, believes that my earlier comments were based on a far too literal interpretation of a complex issue. She maintains that I clearly have no idea of the documentary film maker's essential licence to use symbolism, and language which cannot always be expected to find precision in a purely literal sense, and to use, whenever necessary, the cherished concept of 'that that is left unsaid can be worth a thousand words', and the more profound concept that 'a nod's as good as a wink to a blind man'. She adds that Keats was a very good poet and especially telling in that ode to a grecian urn.
    I am now on my way to Aniston's blog.

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  8. I'm all for imaginative truth, Chris, it's called art. But I didn't bring truth into this. Watson did and nothing will persuade me that he is anything other than a jerk.

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