The work of documentary relationships

Abstract

Relationships between documentary-makers and their subjects are a core concern of the scholarship, typically analysed in relation to issues of power and exploitation. This article instead considers documentary relationships as a form of work, examining what it means when a job entails the production of intimate connections, which are also subject to commercial pressures and imperatives. Relationship-building is an intrinsic part of the filmmaker’s job, but takes place around its margins: often unpaid and unacknowledged by the media industries. A consequence of this lack of status and recognition is that an appropriate professional framework has yet to be developed, with worrying implications for training, regulation and duty of care. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted over a period of 4 years, this article conceptualises the work of documentary relationships as a practice of creative labour, by considering how they function interpersonally, procedurally and organisationally. Through a discussion of emotional labour, I will explore how the permeability between work life and intimacy impacts both filmmakers and contributors alike, considering the various ways their experiences take shape within the structural context of contemporary media production.

Introduction

For documentary-makers, building relationships with contributors is a fundamental part of their job. The ability to engender trust and intimacy is a prerequisite for creating a successful documentary; yet the skills of relationship-building are under-valued by production companies and broadcasters – often taking place without pay or recognition, at the margins of the more tangible tasks of shooting and editing.

The nature of the actual work involved in crafting documentary relationships has been similarly overlooked by the scholarship. While the dynamic between filmmakers and participants has been insightfully analysed in terms of their unequal power relations (Nash, 2010; Nichols, 1991); by drawing upon the social interactionism of Goffman (Ellis, 2011); or with recourse to the psychoanalytical concepts of Freud and Lacan (Piotrowska, 2013), there remain significant gaps in our knowledge about what it means when a job entails the production of this kind of intimacy, which feels ‘real’ to the people involved, but is also instrumentalised and frequently compromised by commercial constraints.

Research into creative labour practices has shown how organisational conditions of chronic precarity and insecurity are embodied in the lives of creative workers (Banks, 2007; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Ursell, 2000), but less is understood about how they are manifested in the interpersonal relationships between these workers and their subjects – the ordinary people, without whom their documentaries could not be made. In much of the existing research, the power of individual producers is undifferentiated from the power of the media organisations they work for, but the two are not synonymous. Creative workers are not simply agents of media power. They are not only part of, but also subject to, the systems they represent. Behind the lens stands not only an individual filmmaker, but a commercial, structural and economic context that merits greater scrutiny.

Scholars including Laura Grindstaff (2002) and Kym Melzer (2019) have explored affective work using Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour. In her seminal book, The Managed Heart (1983), Hochschild directs her attention to the commodification of emotions, which occurs when people’s feelings are displaced from the private domain and assimilated within labour processes. By foregrounding the ways our inner lives can be appropriated and utilised for the benefit of the corporate workplace, this framework enables us to understand how the political–economic organisation of the media is registered in the subjective experiences of creative workers (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011: 170) – and, I would argue, the ordinary people who participate in the media as well. For Hochschild (1983: 218), it is not so much our strategic management of emotions (which is a necessary part of everyday life), but its link to an underlying exploitative capitalist system that is troubling. The penetration of the corporate world into our heads and hearts, our private selves, amounts to a mass ‘surveillance of feelings’, and raises deep concerns about the reach of capitalist power into individual subjects.

Grindstaff notes that both media workers and contributors are required to perform different variations of emotional labour. While the filmmakers expend their energies behind the scenes, cajoling, encouraging and sympathising, their subjects are required to produce a convincing emotional performance, which the audience will read as authentic and heartfelt:

The payoff for the emotional labour expended by producers is supposed to be the emotional performances of guests (Grindstaff, 2002: 193).

For Hochschild, one of the core features of emotional labour is that the actual labour involved is hidden and, therefore, devalued. Its success is premised upon an appearance of effortlessness, which means it remains an assumed and largely unsupported part of the job. Several recently published reports have drawn attention to dysfunctional working conditions, occupational distress and mental health concerns in TV (Swords et al., 2022; Van Raalte et al., 2021; Wilkes et al., 2020). An investigation by the Dart Centre was highly critical of the industry’s failure to properly equip filmmakers for aspects of their work that involves ‘extensive engagement with vulnerable, often traumatised sources, and the significant ethical dilemmas it entails’ (Rees, 2019: 1). The report highlights the fact that no industry-wide training structures exist to help filmmakers engage with contributors, process the psychological impact or mitigate risks.

Factual TV, as an industry, has not examined these occupational health questions, and has done little to prepare programme-makers for the profound challenges to ethics, craft, and emotional capacities that may accompany frequent engagement with highly vulnerable contributors (Rees, 2019: 3).

In order to challenge the invisibility of relationship-work in documentary-making, first we must understand more about the ways it is performed, how it affects the people involved, and in turn, shapes the texts they produce. Using empirical data gathered from a series of in-depth interviews with documentary-makers and participants, this article will examine why the creative partnership between them can be profound and meaningful yet, at the same time, complicated by incompatible goals, expressions of agency, divided loyalties, commercial values and the political-economic organisation of the media. In previously published work, I have explored the profoundly interconnected nature of the relationship between media producers, contributors and the production environment (Coleman, 2023). Because their experiences intersect and overlap to such a substantial degree, to study either party in isolation would be to offer a partial understanding of the exchange. I have, therefore, chosen to analyse documentary relationship from a dual perspective, inviting both filmmakers and their subjects to share their views. The documentary scholarship has been rightly criticised for its focus upon a narrow canon of feature-documentaries made by (usually white male) auteur directors, and its consequent neglect of everyday depictions of social reality (Bruzzi, 2006: 4). In order to redress this imbalance, my approach has been to embrace the diversity of the documentary genre and include a wide variety of different texts, including highly acclaimed, award-winning films, but also more tabloid, constructed styles and factual-entertainment, including some productions that were explicitly criticised for their representation of contributors. While scholars have tended to focus exclusively upon interpersonal dynamics, my aim in this article is to reconceptualise documentary relationships as multi-dimensional. I will, therefore, explore how they are actualised on a number of different levels – interpersonal, procedural, and organisational – but first, I want to discuss some of the most significant ideas about documentary relationships in the existing scholarship, upon which this research seeks to build.

Documentary relationships

The relationship between filmmakers and their contributors is an important theme within the study of documentaries, with the relative powerlessness of the participant generally perceived to be problematic (Canet, 2022; Nichols, 1991; Winston, 1988). From the inmates of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, who Frederick Wiseman filmed being stripped naked and force-fed without obtaining their formal consent, to the Inuit son Robert Flaherty fathered then abandoned, to the Thai prostitute Dennis O’Rourke hired for sex then made a film about, scholars have found ample evidence that appears to substantiate the claim that these encounters are profoundly unequal, inherently exploitative and open to abuse (Anderson and Benson, 1991; Rony, 1996; Williams, 1999).

Brian Winston (1988) writes about the ‘victim tradition’ in documentaries, tracing it back through the paternalistic films of the Grierson era, which focussed on the plight of working-class miners, shipyard workers and slum-dwellers. The Griersonians may have intended their films to shine a light onto social issues, such as malnourishment, labour strikes and overcrowded schools, but Winston claims ‘they were nothing but poseurs, clutching their double-firsts from Cambridge’ (1988: 35). By training their lens on people who are marginalised within society, the filmmakers guaranteed they would have the upper hand in the relationship, and their contributors could be easily manipulated. For the contributors’ part, Calvin Pryluck (1976) claims their compliance is premised upon a combination of naivety, loneliness and insecurity on one hand; mixed with narcissistic self-aggrandisement on the other.

Yet as Kate Nash points out, the conceptualisation of power presented in such accounts is simplistically equated with the ability of filmmakers to dominate their subjects, to the exclusion of more nuanced analyses. She asks:

In focussing exclusively on the documentary-maker’s exploitation of the participant do we conceal the complex power relationships that make documentary possible? (Nash, 2010: 24).

Nash argues that the emphasis placed upon filmmakers’ power has obscured the importance of building an account of contributors’ agency, and the various ways it is constrained and enabled by the production context. As Willemien Sanders (2012) claims, participants have significant creative input, yet are regarded as extrinsic to the media, and are notably absent from production studies research. The scholarship has tended to concentrate upon the power of individual directors, but the argument I wish to present in this article is that most of these discussions have significantly underplayed the structural context, and consequently, we have a limited understanding of how documentary-maker–contributor relationships are influenced by the production process, and how conflicts of interest are embedded within the organisation of the cultural industries.

Although power critiques have been the dominant theme of the scholarship, they are not necessarily the only – or even the best – framework for interrogating the ‘difficult space’ between filmmaker and subject (Piotrowska, 2013: 2). Drawing upon psychoanalytical concepts, Agnieszka Piotrowska argues the documentary encounter is governed by unconscious mechanisms – the key one being transference. Within clinical psychoanalysis, transference is a term used to describe the attachment between analyst and analysand, which enables therapeutic work to take place, but may involve a transfer of misplaced or archaic emotions from past encounters, frequently presenting itself as intense feelings of desire or even love (Piotrowska, 2013: 45–46). Piotrowska believes that transference is not confined to the clinic room, but is a common and everyday feature of the workplace within a whole range of different professions and institutional settings. The intensity of the documentary encounter, involving intimate disclosures and self-exploration, make it a particularly fertile environment for such emotions to flourish:

Documentary filmmakers often appear the perfect canvases on which to draw one’s emotions. Just like psychoanalysts, they listen, they try to stay ‘professional’ regardless of their drives, they attempt to hold onto their boundaries in order not to reveal too much of themselves to those about whom they make films. These very attempts of course make them perfect candidates for experiencing transference (Piotrowska, 2013: 48).

The difficulty of transference within the context of documentary production is that it remains unnamed, and therefore hidden, creating confusion and sometimes hurt feelings when contributors are ultimately left feeling manipulated, used and exploited. The central focus of Piotrowska’s work is upon the dyadic relationship between filmer and filmed, rather than issues of structure, but her important work makes the vital acknowledgement that revelation and intimacy are not merely unintentional by-products of the documentary encounter, but an intrinsic part of the practice. Therefore, the management and organisation of the subjective and emotional dimensions of these encounters – not supplanting, but alongside issues of power and exploitation – needs to be situated within an understanding of media production.

In the documentary literature, there has been a historical lack of empirical data about the experiences of filmmakers and participants, but an important exception, and a key influence underpinning this research, is the Honest Truths by Patricia Aufderheide et al. (2009). Based on interviews with 45 documentary-makers in the United States, Aufderheide challenges the cliches of filmmakers as deceptive and ruthless, revealing the ethical dilemmas they face when adjudicating between creative and commercial imperatives, and the fair treatment of their subjects. Aufderheide’s research suggests that filmmakers have protective feelings towards their contributors, and in some circumstances, are willing to share creative control; yet at the same time, they recognise that manipulation and deception go hand-in-hand with their work. In contrast to Piotrowska, she describes the relationship in pragmatic terms, as ‘less than a friendship and more than a professional relationship’. Crucially, Aufderheide attributes appropriate significance and complexity to the connection between filmmakers and their industry, demonstrating how the link between the two can, in some ways, make filmmakers vulnerable as well as powerful, with individual workers ‘trying to behave conscientiously within a ruthlessly bottom-line business environment’.

The aim of this article, therefore, is to develop an understanding of documentary relationships not only as an interpersonal encounter, but also a routinised, structured, institutionalised practice, which is determined, at least in part, by the context in which it takes place. Building upon insights from the existing scholarship about power and the psychoanalytical mechanisms at play, I will analyse relationship-making as a labour process, focussing upon its management and organisation by the media industries, the status the practice holds within documentary production, and examining the impact for both parties.

Methodology

This research is based on in-depth interviews with 31 documentary filmmakers and contributors, which took place between 2018 and 2022, and is also informed by my own professional experience of working as a producer/director for UK broadcasters including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 for more than 15 years prior to beginning this research project. Twenty percent of the sample are documentary-makers and 80 percent are contributors. The qualitative approach I applied to the interviews was enabled through many hours of preparatory viewing, familiarising myself with the relevant documentary texts in order to make the discussions personal and specific rather than generic. In addition to viewing their documentaries, I spoke to potential interviewees over the phone, read their reviews and interviews in the press and on social media, took extensive notes and wrote memos to document my ideas as they took shape. The interviews generally lasted between 1 and 2 hours, and were conducted in people’s homes or places of work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the research migrated online, and the conversations took place over video calls.

My professional background in TV production gives me lived experience of navigating many of the complex issues I analyse, and helped me to overcome many of the access issues, which scholars have often encountered while undertaking media research (Born, 2004; Caldwell, 2008). However, being an ‘insider’ can also be associated with a loss of objectivity and neutrality. To minimise these risks, I decided not to analyse my own productions or interview my own contributors. I got in touch with most of my interviewees through websites or social media networks, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, although others came through press offices or personal contacts. The majority spoke to me about documentaries that were transmitted within the last 5–10 years. Because of the lack of existing empirical research, I used a grounded theory approach to data collection and analysis, which enabled me to work inductively, exploring different themes as they emerged (Gynnild, 2016).

My interviewees ranged in age from their 20s to their 90s, and were filmed in disparate circumstances: from giving birth to having a heart attack; from home-schooling a family of seven children, to transitioning gender; from living with obsessive compulsive disorder to campaigning for men’s rights. My sample selection was influenced by the intention to build meaningful diversity by encompassing a wide variety of different subject-positions and participatory experiences, seeking out documentaries, which placed different kinds of demands upon their contributors, following them through challenging life experiences, for example, or for extended periods of time. More than half of the interviewees are female, and I have sought to include people from a wide variety of backgrounds, including different ethnicities, religions, gender identities, sexual orientations and disabilities. In this article, I have anonymised most of the people I have quoted in order to avoid making individual criticisms, or identifying the people to whom they refer. The exceptions are in cases where a greater degree of specificity is necessary to fully appreciate their accounts. Several of my interviewees would be categorised by Ofcom’s regulations as ‘vulnerable’, having undergone traumatic experiences, bereavements or mental health struggles (Ofcom, 2020: 10). To minimise the risks of misrepresentation or re-traumatisation, I developed a collaborative approach and a rolling consent process. My interviewees have all been given the opportunity to review their contributions prior to publication, and amend or anonymise as they prefer. This research is part of a wider project about what the experiences of documentary contributors can tell us about the politics of media production.

Documentary relationships as creative labour

In this section, I will organise my research findings under three levels of analysis. My intention is not to provide an exhaustive approach, but rather to highlight some of the different dimensions of documentary relationships, which may be more or less salient in different circumstances. First of all, I want to talk about their interpersonal characteristics, and what is distinctive about them in comparison to the relationships that underpin other forms of media work. I will then move onto considering the processes and procedures which operationalise these relationships and what the experience of performing them entails for both documentary-makers and contributors. Finally, I will discuss how documentary relationships are organised by the media industries, considering issues such as pay, training, regulation and duty of care.

Interpersonal characteristics of documentary relationships

Perhaps the most striking distinctive feature of the relationships between documentary-makers and their subjects is the degree of intensity involved. Whereas a journalist might typically share a fleeting phone call with the people they write about, and talent- and talk-show the producers’ interactions largely revolve around studio days, the process of making a documentary tends to be more protracted (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Palmer, 2017). Several of my interviewees described enduring relationships, lasting longer than many marriages – 10, 20 or even 40 years and counting. One of my interviewees, for example, began filming a long-running documentary series as an unborn baby in utero. Now in her 20s, cameras have documented every stage and major event of her life. The production team, she told me, are ‘like family . . . we just trust each other totally’.

This intensity does not seem to be generated by longevity alone. Documentary-makers film in people’s homes and personal spaces. They witness the major events of people’s lives, asking searching questions, inviting their subjects to explore their inner selves. Even within briefer encounters, the act of filming itself engenders close emotional connections by creating a discursive space for self-examination and reflection, which is uncommon in everyday life. One director told me:

I have some of the best conversations ever if there’s a camera there . . . In normal life . . . the emotional intensity is socially unacceptable . . . I really like it when people actually focus and go right down the mine shaft with you. The camera makes them feel like they should do that, or can do that.

Documentary relationships are peculiarly imbalanced – not only in terms of power, but also the unidirectional flow of attention: the one-sided nature of the intimacy. The norms of the interview format, which organises so much of documentary filming, dictate that the subject will speak while the documentary-maker asks questions or listens. One director I interviewed described her role within this process as:

Facilitating, listening, and asking gentle kind questions that will help someone come to their own conclusion. No one ever does it back [laughs].

Interviews are prevalent in many media genres and formats, but this asymmetric dynamic is particularly pronounced in documentary filmmaking, where a clear audio recording is required, and subjects must speak without interruption, in a manner that is neither conversational nor reciprocal. Because the material is edited before transmission, interviews can last for many hours and are often repeated at several stages throughout the production. While the contributors’ emotional lives are laid bare, the documentary-maker has often disclosed very little about themselves. In this respect, scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives have compared the experience of participating in documentaries to a therapeutic encounter. Psychologist Emmanuel Berman (2005: 221) writes:

I think that there are some similarities between the two processes . . . like analytic or psychotherapy patients, [documentary contributors] come to a place where there will be a lot of attention to their story, hopefully in an empathic, sympathetic, interested, respectful way, and some wish for the other, the director or the therapist, to be the spokesperson, to be the one who will help crystallize one’s story, will help one understand and see things.

Several of the contributors I interviewed made the same comparison. One described the interview process as ‘a conversation with myself’. She told me:

I could verbalise and hear reflected back to me the kinds of things I was experiencing . . . just the recognition that emotions you’re having are valid and have a legitimate platform for expression – I’d say it seemed to legitimise it.

But however much the filming process might feel like a counselling session, it is, in many ways, the polar opposite. The definition of therapy offered by the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy is that it provides a ‘safe and confidential space . . . to talk to a trained professional about your issues and concerns’ (BACP, n.d.). One of Paddy Scannell’s (1991: 1) characteristics of ‘broadcast talk’ is what he calls its ‘double articulation’. Participants’ speech is simultaneously articulated to the documentary-maker who is present, and to the audience who are absent. Their words are spoken in one context, but heard in an entirely different one – and in this second articulation, they may not find a similarly sympathetic or respectful listening space. As one of my interviewees joked: ‘It’s like counselling in front of 5 million people’. But while counsellors are extensively trained and supervised, documentary-makers are performing a quasi-therapeutic role without necessarily having either the time or skills to do so responsibly (Rees, 2019).

Because documentary relationships are inherently instrumental and strongly tend towards being manipulative, there is a lingering sense that they are manufactured and false. Arlie Hochschild (1983: 35), however, makes the distinction between ‘surface acting’ and ‘deep acting’. In surface acting, the gesture or expression is superficial or uncommitted, and is easily detected as false. In daily life, when our instinctive emotional response does not fit the situation, we instead employ deep acting, exhorting the requisite feeling or retraining our imaginations to match the appropriate response. Because the kind of close attachments involved in documentary relationships cannot be easily faked, they have to be internalised and truly felt; pretence is simply not convincing. For the relationship to be successful, it has to be genuine. An executive producer I interviewed agreed: ‘It is a real relationship even if it starts off formal or contrived’. Scholars have tended to characterise the filmmaker–subject dynamic as manipulative and exploitative, but if we consider that relationships filmmakers build with contributors might be genuine as well as instrumental, the dilemmas they face become more ethically complex.

Such tensions mean that the boundaries of documentary relationships are inherently slippery and difficult to manage. Many of the documentary-makers I interviewed told me they found it difficult to know what limits can reasonably be placed upon their obligations to their contributors. They described fielding phone calls at 3 am, performing a role that can feel more like being a social worker or a counsellor than a producer or director. When work life and personal life have such permeable boundaries, it can be hard to distinguish where the worker ends and the private self begins. One director told me:

The problem is you start allowing people to get away with treating you badly in your life. You’re so used to like, ‘You do your worse, I will remain calm, accept everything you chuck at me’. It’s your job. And then you realise you’re doing it in your life as well. That’s not very healthy.

As these comments suggest, the utilisation of intimacy, which has such obvious benefits for broadcasters and production companies, can have negative consequences for the people who must perform it, which are not confined to their professional identities. However, it is also clear from my research that documentary relationships can be a source of pleasure for filmmakers and contributors alike, in many cases outlasting the productions which initiated them, and continuing for months or even years afterwards. One director emphatically told me:

I’ve gained more than it’s cost me. I’ve gained understanding, knowledge of people, and love from people – relationships with people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, who are almost family.

But despite the apparent mutuality and voluntarism with which these relationships are conducted, it’s important to recognise that they are not incidental to the project of making the text. Several documentary-makers told me that relationship-building is the most fundamental skill of their job, and can only be achieved through a huge investment of off-camera time:

Getting stories, getting people to talk . . . that’s about making a relationship and spending time with people. If you cut those corners, you’ll never make a good film.

Intimacy is a mechanism which is utilised to collapse the distance between the intimate life of the subject and the mass anonymity of the audience, and as such, is deliberately cultivated and managed as an integral part of the process of documentary production. Therefore, in order to build an understanding of documentary relationships, they need to be theorised as a practice of creative labour, performed within the context of the media industries.

The practices and procedures of relationship work

Having described some of the key characteristics of documentary relationships, in this next section, I want to consider how they are put into effect as a component of the creative process – what are the procedures that make and maintain these relationships, and in what ways do they impact upon the people involved?

To perform the kind of emotional labour involved in documentary-making ‘requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild, 1983: 7). Documentary-makers must manage their emotional responses to situations and limit their self-expression: ‘either pretending to care . . . or trying not to care too much’ (Grindstaff, 2002: 132). One director I interviewed described her interactions with contributors as providing ‘an emotional service to that person’. When I asked her to clarify what being an emotional service meant, she told me: ‘Your emotions are not important, is how I think of it’.

The management of inconvenient emotions is harder to accomplish when filmmakers’ feelings towards their contributors are ambiguous, or even negative. Many shared stories about people they found difficult to work with. One producer/director described a film she made about women who sold kiss and tell stories to the tabloid press:

Everyone in that film was well dodgy. They were! They were lying, manipulative; they would sell their granny. They were making money out of selling stories. They were morally corrupt . . . I didn’t trust any of them.

Another director lobbied for years to make a film about gay parenting, after being repeatedly told by commissioners that ‘gay doesn’t rate’. When she finally convinced a broadcaster to finance the film, the contributors who were cast were people whose views she found ‘appalling and offensive’:

I’ve always found it hard to make a film about someone I didn’t like, or even love . . . I’m making this film that’s going to represent queer parenting with some of the worst people you’re likely to meet in the gay community. What the hell am I doing?

The director described the resulting internal conflict she experienced between what she views as her ‘responsibility to let people be the real extent of themselves’ and ‘giving them a free reign on misogyny’. A tense shoot culminated in a huge row which jeopardised the whole production:

There was too much time together, too much proximity, and we got quite fed up with each other. . . I thought I’m not doing this; it’s a nightmare. We probably had silence for a month, then I wrote to him and said this is what I think happened. I just backed down because it’s my job . . . I wanted to finish the film.

In circumstances such as this, filmmakers are required to self-edit, suppressing aspects of their own identities in order to get the job done. Ultimately, Hochschild (1983: 56) claims, performing this kind of affective work can result in the estrangement of the self from one’s own authentic feelings. Our emotions are a form of ‘pre-action’, which help us to orientate ourselves within the world. Without emotional authenticity, our autonomy and capacity to act is fundamentally undermined.

One of the main purposes of the emotional labour of filmmakers is to elicit emotional performances from their participants, who are often required to give access to their inner lives, that is, making intimate disclosures, sharing revelations and self-discoveries in ways that can make them feel exposed and vulnerable. As one interviewee described it:

I’m putting my whole life out there; literally, my whole life is out there.

Such performances can be moving and powerful for the audience, but they also carry a risk for the participant’s wellbeing. Contributors have tended to be portrayed as the passive partners within documentary relationships, but my research suggests that when such tensions arise, their agency finds expression in acts of resistance and ruptures, which documentary-makers must then manage and appease.

One contributor I interviewed was filmed for more than 2 years as she underwent a gender transition. She described how her attitude to the relationship she built with the producers started from a place of straightforward trust and acquiescence:

In the early stages, it was like . . . whatever you want to do, whatever you ask: we answer.

As the shoot progressed, her compliance became gradually replaced with a more complex appreciation of the documentary relationship and her position within the production:

I learned over the course of the two or three years: it was their job, they weren’t my friends – well, they were my friends, but they were my friends doing a job. And I had to remember that they were manipulating me.

Part of this shift in attitude was motivated by a growing awareness of the power she had to set boundaries and exert control over how she was represented:

They needed me more. I started to realise that – I wouldn’t say play them, but I kind of knew the rules of the game . . . When they were talking to me and buttering me up and being nice and persuasive, I could tell they were doing it. I would go, ‘Do I want to do this or don’t I? . . . No. [I’m] not going to do that’. Even sometimes in the middle of filming . . . I would say, ‘I’m not answering that question. No’. . . . [I] got braver at not being sucked into it . . . [I] got wise to it. The crew are still our friends. They weren’t superficial and shallow. They were genuinely lovely, nice people who [I] loved working with, but [I] realised it was all a job at the end of the day.

In this example, a firmer grasp of the dynamics gave the contributor a sense of empowerment and allowed her to start calling the shots. In other cases, ruptures in the relationship are manifested not so much by out-and-out refusals but through minor acts of resistance. Another contributor told me how she and her colleagues began to use the knowledge of production they had gleaned through the course of the production to assert themselves:

We’d put things in the conversation we knew they couldn’t put on TV to try to stop them using that footage . . . a lot of the time we would go other places for meetings and take the mics off, because there are some things you don’t want people listening to.

In contrast to the perception of contributors as powerless partners in the documentary relationship, my data found ample evidence of them learning how to effectively express their agency and leverage control. Power has often been characterised as a force of domination, weighted heavily in the favour of filmmakers, but my research suggests a more complex and fluctuating balance, which tips in different directions at different stages of the production process. As contributors learn how to express their agency, documentary-makers can find themselves in a tight corner, caught between increasingly assertive or uncooperative contributors, the perceived needs of the audience, and the demands of funders and broadcasters. My data suggest their ability to prioritise their contributors above other considerations, and the scope of their possible responses to minor rebellions is very much dictated by the commercial context. One director told me:

The more gear you have, the more the daily cost of the shoot, the more uncompromising you can be about those things. If someone rings up and says ‘I’m a bit ill, I’ve got a headache’, and you’re thinking shit, I’ve spent £5,000 in air fares to get here to do this – that’s one response, or the other is: ‘Well, I’m just here so I can wait a few days’ . . . My experience is that the bigger the film has become, the more my relationship with the contributor has become less personal . . . I think the more money there is in a production, the more the thing becomes contractual.

Documentary-makers’ loyalties are divided between their contributors, their employers, their audiences, and a fidelity to the truth. This alignment can shift in sudden and unexpected ways. Executive Producer Peter A. Gordon told me about a documentary he made in the 1990s with West Midlands Police for the ITV current affairs series, First Tuesday. Gordon was granted access to film in a police station, and was monitoring the output of a remote camera when he heard a detective threatening a man in custody:

He was being picked up by the mic in the custody area. You couldn’t see it, but you could hear him in the cell saying, ‘Well, we can do this the hard way or the easy way, mate’.

Having taken legal advice, the production company decided there was a clear public interest in broadcasting the footage, but they had contractually agreed to show the film to the police force prior to transmission. Gordon described an excruciating viewing, sitting right next to the people he had implicated: ‘We turned the lights on. They were just white. They were incredulous’. The police force tried to get an injunction to stop the broadcast going ahead but were unsuccessful. When a developing narrative is being filmed, unforeseen events can cause the agendas of the filmmakers and subjects to diverge unpredictably. Although this situation was awkward on an interpersonal level, Gordon could not withhold the footage without becoming complicit in the wrong-doing he had uncovered:

It wasn’t easy but I didn’t lay awake at night thinking, ‘Oh my god what a terrible person I am’, and ‘I’ve betrayed these people’, because they’d broken the law and they’re policemen.

Gordon’s story is an extreme example of a dynamic, which more often plays out in less dramatic fashion, but it demonstrates how unanticipated developments can make the mutuality of both parties slip out of sync, bringing their agendas into conflict. The work of documentary relationships requires filmmakers not only to build close bonds with their subjects, but also in some cases, to sever those connections and break that trust.

Having described the kind of affective work involved for individual people in forging and maintaining documentary relationships, I now wish to bring the organisational context back into focus, and consider how this challenging aspect of the job is supported or complicated by media employers and institutions.

The industrial organisation of relationship-work

While some support for participants from external psychologists has been formalised and funded by the UK television industry after a highly publicised policy review (Ofcom, 2020), the emotional labour of filmmakers continues to go largely unacknowledged and unrewarded. As the filmmaker and scholar Daisy Asquith (2019: 15) claims, ‘Any meaningful responsibility assumed by documentary filmmakers is overwhelmingly a personal undertaking’. A striking example from my research is the producer Claire Lewis, who has made the highly acclaimed Seven Up series since the early 1980s. It’s Lewis’ job to stay in regular touch with the cast, to maintain productive relationships and to keep them on board. The series could not be made without this labour, but as a freelancer, Lewis told me that she only gets paid for it once every 7 years during the few months when the series is in active production:

I’m there – day or night. That’s what it involves . . . and I’ve never been paid for that, never.

Along with a lack of pay and recognition comes a lack of structure and support. Recent research suggests there is a high possibility of filmmakers’ encountering trauma throughout the whole scope of factual production, including seemingly ‘lighter’ programmes with apparently innocuous subject-matter. For filmmakers who specialise in more challenging documentaries, ‘the terrain of suffering may be their primary area of work’ (Rees, 2019: 2). Of course, documentary-makers are far from unique in that their job brings them into close contact with other peoples’ trauma, but unlike therapists, teachers, nurses and other caring professions, there is a lack of appropriate training and professional guidance as to how they should conduct themselves. The media industries have scarcely recognised that performing such labour might have an effect on their workforce.

Vicarious trauma is a known risk for journalists who witness acts of violence and suffering, but less attention has been paid to the effects upon workers in the broadcasting industry (Melzer, 2019; Newman et al., 2003). During the making of her doctoral documentary project, Kym Melzer (2019: 44) describes ‘sobbing uncontrollably’ in her car after interviewing veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and their carers; the effort to suppress her emotions in order to maintain a ‘veneer of professionalism’ leaving her feeling ‘exhausted and dejected’, and overwhelmed by ‘intense feelings of guilt, sadness, powerlessness and helplessness’.

Director Sue Bourne told me that during the making of A Time to Live, a documentary which followed the stories of 12 people with terminal illnesses, she had to pressurise the broadcaster to recognise that their duty of care should extend to the production team:

I said, ‘Well actually, you’ve got a duty of care to us’ . . . We were on the road together . . . going in and out of dying peoples’ houses for four months. Our best contributor died the weekend before we got there . . . We had to put our emotions in a box and get through it.

It was clear from my research that becoming so closely entangled with human suffering, trauma and distress is a great responsibility which can take a heavy toll. Documentary-makers feel if they do not provide unpaid emotional support, the people they work with will suffer. One director told me, ‘I am the duty of care!’ I asked if she found it emotionally stressful or draining:

Well, I got cancer. Of course it is. No seriously, it is – it’s exhausting.

Over the course of a career, the burden becomes hard to sustain. My sample included some of Britain’s top documentary makers, yet there was a palpable sense of disillusionment in many of my interviews. ‘I’m just tired of fighting for everything’, one told me. ‘I can’t go on getting treated like this. You get no support at all’.

There is a human cost for creative workers who perform this distinctive type of emotional labour, but the people who are most let down by the neglect of affective labour are the participants themselves. The disparity between what they need and what the industry provides them is often most apparent around the time of transmission. For contributors, this can be a life-changing event, when they are exposed to very public representations of themselves, and along with it, the reactions of family, friends, the press and judgemental strangers on social media. By contrast, documentary-makers are rarely kept on the payroll to oversee transmission. As such, any ongoing support they offer to their former contributors will be a matter for their individual consciences. When documentary-makers withdraw from the relationship as the project comes to its conclusion, their participants must come to terms with a variety of different losses – not only the loss of control over how their material will be edited and received, but also the loss of a confidante, whose attention is closely focussed upon them. One of my interviewees described her ambivalence as a filming process she had found intrusive and challenging came to an end:

It was a relief, but it was also very final. In a way, it was hard to adjust . . . I just felt deflated. Weird . . . You get used to people being around and then they’re not there.

The confusing mixture of personal and professional means the end of filming can feel like being ‘abandoned’; the abrupt cessation of the relationship casting new light on the nature of the intimacy that was shared:

I felt used . . . You spend a lot of time with these people. I might think we could be friends, we’ve got friendly, maybe she genuinely cares, then suddenly – film’s out. Bye! . . . Part of you is like, was I only ever just a documentary to you?

Piotrowska claims the presence of transference-love is one of the reasons why so many people feel aggrieved at its loss, but there is also a sense of guilt and shame about its transience. The instrumental nature of the relationship becomes uncomfortably exposed by the way it is shrugged aside. What was happening was something ‘slightly inappropriate and yet necessary, in order to make an ‘intimate’ film’ (Piotrowska, 2013: 75). Another interviewee told me:

The producer just disappeared . . . In hindsight, it feels like they were being quite fake . . . they were really chatty . . . then it just stopped. I guess that’s the nature of their work, but it makes you feel like you’ve been played.

The absence of after-thought about what happens to participants once filming has wrapped is a failure of duty of care, which in itself has the potential to cause distress. Daisy Asquith (2019: 15) claims:

It is possible that the damage done to those filmed is done when filming stops, when the attention is withdrawn and life returns to banal ordinariness.

Without proper training, regulation and support systems in place, contributors are being asked to put their emotional wellbeing in the hands of people who may not have the time or skills to care for them responsibly.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that the interrelationship between documentary-makers and their subjects should be analysed as a practice of creative labour, which can be understood as operating on a number of levels – including the interpersonal, the procedural and the organisational. By paying closer attention to the context through which these relationships are enacted, my research adds to a growing debate that positions the ‘care’ contributors receive as a core concern for the cultural industries (Wood, 2021).

Within the media, the duty of care conversation has tended to be restricted to on-screen participants, while the impact that performing such tasks has upon their workforce remains largely unacknowledged. My research uncovered examples of documentary-makers working in truly harrowing situations, filming with people who are terminally ill, living with devastating grief, or coping with life-limiting mental disorders. The potential to unintentionally compound their distress, or to suffer vicarious trauma themselves, is high. These factors, in combination with a dysfunctional working environment, can lead to burn-out and disillusionment. There is a distinctive form of emotional labour at play in documentary production, which not only requires documentary-makers to behave empathetically, building trust and maintaining goodwill, but also, in some cases, to detach and make difficult decisions, which might be in the best interests of the documentary, but not necessarily their contributors. Performing this type of emotional labour is a significant component of the practice of creative labour, with an impact that is comparable to the occupational risks that have been studied more extensively by scholars to date.

In the existing academic literature, lapses in duty of care are usually ascribed to individuals, but this research suggests instead that embedded ethical flaws arise from systemic features of the political–economic organisation of the media. By thinking about relationship-work as a component of creative labour, we can begin to understand the benefits and risks it brings to the workplace, and consider how the wellbeing of both filmmakers and their subjects could be better protected.