(L-R) Lauren Greenfield and Jaqueline Siegel at 'Queen of Versailles' premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2012. Credit: Danny Moloshok / Associated Press

By Nicholas Davies, Senior English Editor, Doha Film Institute

The thrill of experiencing a well-told narrative is a foundation of human culture and history. Of course, there are thousands of examples of this in cinema, from perennially popular classics to lavish musicals, sci-fi space oddities to long-forgotten B-grade zombie flicks. Collectively, we human beings are conditioned to respond expectantly to the familiar narrative arc of boy-meets-girl or woman-versus-alien, and breathe a great sigh of pleasure when all the ends are tied up (girl dumps boy to pursue career; woman outsmarts alien … or so she thinks) just before the end credits roll.

But documentary films don’t work in quite the same way; they bring about a different kind of satisfaction.

Documentary filmmaking has been considered in depth for as long as cinema has been a subject for academics. The general notion that docs present ‘facts’ and ‘truth’, when in fact the elements that go into making up a documentary are no less manipulated by the filmmakers in order to tell a carefully constructed story, is Lesson 1 in doc class. There isn’t space here to go into discussions of documentary filmmaking from the point of view of cultural anthropology – the idea that the act of turning on a camera in front of a subject immediately changes the subject so that what the camera captures is to some extent unnatural. (At the risk of being overly brief, think of reality TV – the cameras are running; the subjects know the cameras are running … no matter how natural their behaviour may appear, it is to some extent a performance.)

Put all of that valuable thinking in the background and for a moment let’s consider a more simple opposition of fiction and documentary filmmaking. In a fiction film, the filmmakers have more or less complete control over the story being told. (There are graduations of this, of course – from Alfred Hitchcock’s films apparently turning out precisely as the screenplay and storyboard planned, to far looser productions where improvisation during filming takes the kernel of an idea in unexpected directions.) In some docs, on the other hand, while the filmmakers have control over the final output (their biases and motivations intact), they do not have control over the content they gather. (Yes, archival documentaries probably blow this idea out of the water … bear with me for the sake of this discussion.)

When is this somewhat narrow idea true?

Remember lazy Saturday afternoons in front of the TV watching ‘National Geographic’ docs about the habits of wildlife in the veldt? Perhaps you were interested in the biological details of the lion, zebra, wildebeest or hyaena; perhaps not. Either way, surely the most exciting bits of those shows were the unpredictable moments: unfortunately – and I admit morbidly – the moments that have stuck with me often involved a pack of vicious predators chasing after and killing some weak and probably rather adorable smaller animal. This kind of satisfaction in the surprises inherent in the nature doc is by no means a thing of the past; it has not been completely eclipsed in recent years by the more immediate (also somewhat morbid) pleasure we can take in the sufferings and excesses of reality TV. Consider the immense popularity of the recent ‘Planet Earth’ series (2006) – ‘National Geographic’ updated with better technology and evermore impossible-to-imagine locales.

Taking this idea – that the unpredictable in a doc brings about a particular jolt of cinematic pleasure – into consideration, it’s perhaps no surprise that some of the best-loved and most discussed docs are those in which the filmmaker follows human subjects over an extended period of time. After all, we never quite know what’s going to happen in real life … pitfalls and unexpected joy are often just around the corner.

Examples abound. There’s Michael Apted’s ‘Up Series’, which in 2012 checked in with a group of Brits who were first seen on screen nearly 50 years ago when they were seven years old. Every seven years, we get to see how and what they’re doing – who got rich, who went crazy, who’s happy, who isn’t – even who’s dead and buried. It’s like visiting with old friends.

Albert and David Maysles followed the Rolling Stones on tour in 1969; the resulting film, ‘Gimme Shelter’ (1970), is best known not for its concert footage, but rather for capturing the killing of an overzealous gun-toting fan by Hells Angels, who were providing security. The Maysles are also celebrated for their ‘Grey Gardens’, which captures the rather loopy duo of the late Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie – the aunt and cousin of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – living in a decrepit mansion in upscale, upstate New York.

More recently, Lucy Walker’s brilliant ‘Devil’s Playground’ (2002) looked at ‘rumspringa’ – a period when Amish teens are allowed to experience the world outside the confines of their religious community. The result? Drugs, sex and rock’n’roll – an unexpected recklessness that is both shocking and distressing. And very much still at the forefront of cinematic minds is last year’s ‘Queen of Versailles’, a film by Lauren Greenfield that begins as an examination of the excesses of the American Dream becomes a study of a family in crisis. Labelled ‘schadenfreude’ by some and a more compassionate consideration of the foibles of capitalism by others, the film grips us by capturing the fallout of the evaporation of millions and millions of dollars.

Broadly, these moments in this form of documentary allow us to see a world that is unfamiliar, and yet one that we belong to. They let us explore What if? moments – What if I had more money than I knew what to do with? What if the rules that govern my daily life were altogether lifted? What if I went a little bit crazy? In the hands of talented filmmakers, undergoing this exploration tells us something we don’t know about our world – and, more significantly, something about ourselves. Yes – back to Doc 101 – these filmmakers are turning those talents to selecting the elements that create the best story. But it’s those unexpected moments they come across that can show us all who we really are.