Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

18. “A Bastard Union of Several Forms”: Style and Narrative in An American Family

Chapter 18 “A Bastard Union of Several Forms” Style and Narrative in An American Family Jeffrey K. Ruoff Our story begins in the Loud home at 35 Wooddale Lane. . . . Craig Gilbert, An American Family An American Family (1973) bridges the stylistic conventions of independent documentary film and broadcast television, marrying the innovations of American cinema verité to the narrative traditions of TV. The twelveepisode series chronicles seven months in the lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, including the divorce proceedings of the parents. Producer Craig Gilbert deliberately chose an upper-middle-class family whose lifestyle approximated that of families seen on situation comedies such as Make Room for Daddy (1953–65). Under his supervision, Susan and Alan Raymond filmed the everyday lives of Pat and William Loud and their children, Lance, Kevin, Grant, Delilah, and Michele. The completed documentary captured the imagination of the American public when it was first aired by the Public Broadcasting Service in the winter of 1973. Ten million viewers followed the Louds’ unfolding marital problems in a controversial weekly show that some critics called a real-life soap opera.1 Like all cultural artifacts, films and television programs cannot be fully understood outside their historical contexts of production and reception. An American Family would never have been made by the commercial networks 306 J E F F R E Y K . R U O F F (ABC, NBC, or CBS), which, by the early 1970s, had scaled back documentary productions in the race for audience ratings (Brown 198). Even for educational and public TV, the form and content of the series were radical innovations, for Gilbert’s use of dramatic storytelling techniques in a nonfictional account of family life blurred conventions of different media forms. As Robert Allen notes, fictional television programs usually employ a “narrative mode” of viewer address, adopted from classical Hollywood cinema, while nonfiction shows generally rely upon a “rhetorical mode” of viewer address adapted from radio (“Criticism” 90–91). A distinctly hybrid work, An American Family confounds this typology; it represents, in the words of Yale drama professor Richard Gilman, a “bastard union of several forms” (quoted in Carlin 25). Though widely known as an example of observational cinema, the series mixes the narrative traditions of the film and television industries. Furthermore, it struggles against its own interpretive tendencies, striving to show “life as it is” while simultaneously criticizing American society in the early 1970s. As such, like the Loud family it depicts, An American Family is a text at war with itself. The documentary consists of twelve hour-long episodes. The first show introduces the family members and the central story line, while the next eleven programs follow their activities in the summer and fall of 1971. Individual shows emphasize certain events and characters over others as, for example, hour seven explores Grant’s attitude toward his summer job. With one crucial exception, the series proceeds in a loose chronological order. Though it often falls short, An American Family, like many works of observational cinema, strives for the clarity and comprehensibility of Hollywood cinema and American commercial television.2 Observational documentaries typically depict actual events in dramatic form, using continuity techniques conventionally associated with mainstream fiction film. Whereas most nonfiction programming, particularly TV news, speaks directly to the audience, Gilbert’s series addresses the viewer only indirectly through the telling of a story. As a style, observational cinema tends more toward the “open” textual pole of Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini than the “closed” pole of Alfred Hitchcock and Alain Resnais (Allen, Soap Operas 81–84). Vis-à-vis traditional documentaries, observational films are polysemic because they lack the devices of voice-over, interviews, and nondiegetic music through which point of view may be unequivocally expressed. A comparatively open text, An American Family ends on a decisively ambiguous note. Discussing her anticipated alimony arrangement, Pat Loud mentions that she may never marry again. As she concludes that “these things happen,” the final episode freezes on her smiling face in medium close-up. Thus, in an An American Family 307 ending reminiscent of François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), producer Gilbert opts for an open-ended conclusion. Throughout the series, narrative omniscience remains the order of the day. In episode three, the coverage of the annual recital of the Rudenko School of Dance presents sequential and simultaneous actions occurring backstage...