Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Dr Nick Broomfield
Oration given on 19 July 2006
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that
the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon NICK BROOMFIELD
Nick Broomfield is one of Britain’s most important documentary film
makers. The films he has made over the last 30 years have spanned several
continents, and dealt with an incredible range of issues. In Behind the rent
strike he documented rent strikes and abysmal living conditions in
Liverpool. In films like Kurt and Courtney, and Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood
Madam, he revealed the pitfalls of Hollywood fame and notoriety. In The
Leader, His Driver and His Driver’s Wife and its recent follow-up His Big
White Self he examined ongoing racism and neo-Nazism in the Afrikaner
Resistance Movement of South Africa. Even a cursory glance at these films
makes it clear that Nick Broomfield has rarely played it safe. And, as
reflects the work of an investigative reporter who is always taking risks,
critics have rarely been able to formulate a unified opinion of his work. In
the press Nick Broomfield has variously been described as a maverick
director, as daring, enticing, controversial, hilarious, scintillating,
notoriously abrasive, audacious, dedicated, and as politically astute.
Probably somewhere amidst this sea of praise and blame is a kernel of truth:
a documentary filmmaker whose work does not always make for comfortable
viewing, capturing as it does the strangeness, and the unpredictability, the
violence and subtle frustrations of everyday life. Nick Broomfield is a
director whose dedication to using film as a medium for truth-telling has
led him, no doubt, down many blind alleys, but also towards extraordinary
revelations about the world we live in.
His films tend to be the work of an investigator and provocateur, who
places himself at the forefront of the action, and the result is a signature
style that has made him a celebrity in his own right. Like only a handful of
documentary filmmakers today, he is instantly recognisable: a familiar
presence on screen, usually holding the sound boom while in pursuit of a
sceptical or outright resistant interviewee. This practice came about as the
result of a now-widely cited moment in 1988 while making Driving Me Crazy,
when he decided that putting his own presence up front in the film could
help make sense of the disordered events taking place before the camera.
Traditionally, all but the most radical documentary filmmakers tended to
hide their presence editing themselves out of the action so as to preserve
the illusion of narrative coherence and realism. Nick Broomfield wanted his
films instead to reflect - rather than erase the often messy filmmaking
process - so he began to leave in the documentary footage of the confused
meetings, disagreements, failed interviews and dead-ends that inevitably
form the task of filmmaking. This change of direction led to a new freedom
away from the confines of what has come to be known as observational cinema,
and it would result in the innovative and investigative modes with which he
is now closely associated.
Nick Broomfield is here today not only because of his many achievements
in film, but because he has a substantial connection to the University of
Essex. He studied Politics here, and around the same time he made a short
film called Who Cares?, about a threatened working class community in
Liverpool. Although produced on almost no budget and quite different in
style from his later works, even this early piece reflects his strong
personal investment in the people he films. After Essex, he took up
filmmaking as a vocation, seeking a more hands-on route to communicate
public and social issues. He was one of the first cohort of students at The
National Film School, as it was known then, an institution that has become
amongst the most prestigious in the world, producing documentary filmmakers
like Kim Longinotto and Molly Dineen, as well as directors like Mike
Radford, Lynn Ramsay, Nick Park, Terence Davies and many other well-known
figures in the film industry.
Colin Young was the Film School’s founder and he, then, was the chair of
the Department of Theater Arts at the University of California Los Angeles;
and Young had an enormous influence and inspired great affection among young
filmmakers over the years - Nick Broomfield was no exception. Film School
was also where he encountered Joan Churchill, herself a highly regarded
director and cinematographer, and their meeting would lead to award-winning
collaborations on a number of films. While at National Film School, Nick
made Proud to Be British (1973), in which the inhabitants of Beaconsfield,
where the Film School is located, speak out on what they think Britishness
means and at the same time reveal the pervasiveness of class-consciousness,
racism and nationalism. Prefiguring many controversies to come, the
Buckinghamshire Advertiser disapprovingly reviewed the film as the product
of “a left-wing, pro-comprehensive school atheist.”
Behind the Rent Strike was made as his graduation film the following year
and established a career that would lead to numerous awards and honours: the
Sundance Festival First Prize, the Amnesty International Doen Award for
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, First Prizes at festivals like
Chicago, Mannheim, and Popoli; the Dupont Columbia Award for Outstanding
Journalism for the film Tatooed Tears, the Robert Flaherty Documentary
Award, the Hague Peace Prize, the Chris Award at the Columbus International
Film and Video Festival, and a British Academy Award for the film Soldier
Girls.
In Nick Broomfield’s work you can trace the influence of some of the most
daring and innovative practitioners in documentary film history. These
include the French director Jean Rouch, who developed a manifesto for a
self-aware and audience-centred mode of filmmaking that he called cinema
vérité, or film truth; also British documentarist John Grierson’s commitment
to using cinema as a method for showing social problems to wider audiences;
also D. A. Pennebaker’s irreverent and penetrating glimpses into the messy
world of celebrity culture. The All Movie Guide notes that his “overt
technique of courting controversy and his choice of offbeat material has
made Nick Broomfield an important voice in reshaping the style and content
of documentary today.”
But I think the uniqueness of his work goes even further. Like the
American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, Nick Broomfield has always had a knack
for revealing the hypocrisies that lurk beneath many social and governmental
institutions, but to this he has added a dash of black humour and a more
directly confrontational, interventionist stance. This is evident as early
as 1975 in the film Juvenile Liaison, which follows the harsh police
treatment of children accused of minor offences. The film ended up at the
centre of a censorship controversy when the BFI withdrew it from
distribution after pressure from the police, and refused to allow it to be
shown on television.
Many of his films, like Biggie and Tupac (2002) which investigates the
relationship between the murders of rap superstars Tupac Shakur and Biggie
Smalls (aka the Notorious BIG), take the shape of a journey or quest, and
use the camera as way of peeling back the layers of what’s visible to us, as
consumers of celebrity images, they reveal the truths hidden behind the
media glare. There are moving images that linger in the memory like 1982’s
Tattooed Tears, a disturbing look at incarcerated young people in Los
Angeles, which shows a dehumanizing penal system that crushes the hopes of
teenagers who often were involved in merely minor offences. There are also
intense scenes that mix comedy and danger, as when in Biggie and Tupac he
insists on visiting the rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight of Death Row in a
high security prison, leaving his cameraperson in such obvious terror that
he is nearly unable to film. At a recent screening of that film in Essex,
the scene left one person nearly shouting at the screen, “Don’t do it Nick,
he’s crazy!”
This is typical of the emotion that Nick Broomfield’s work can conjure
up. Though he’s been compared to other filmmakers, many of whom actually
followed in his footsteps, one comparison I’ve rarely heard is to the great
German documentary and fiction film director Werner Herzog. Both men’s films
show that real life occurs in the margins, in the details, and communicate a
commitment and passion that their directors have for filmmaking, amidst a
sense that chaos is always waiting in the wings. Herzog has said,
“Filmmaking is my duty, because [the films] might be the inner chronicle of
what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would
be cows in the field.” Herzog has also said, “I would travel down to Hell
and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.” These are words
that perhaps might have been spoken by Nick Broomfield himself.
Chancellor, I present to you NICK BROOMFIELD.
Orator: Dr Jeffrey Geiger