Fly on the lens

The release of Nick Broomfield's most controversial film on DVD offers viewers the opportunity to judge for themselves whether he really is the leading exponent in a genre that is leaning more and more towards entertainment writes Feargal Mc Kay

Starting with simple cinéma vérité / fly-on-the-wall documentaries, Broomfield's technique quickly evolved into what has become his signature – the film's subject vying for space with Broomfield's own on-screen presence. It's a style that has become increasingly familiar in recent years, with more documentary makers employing the same tactic and seeing their films getting cinema releases.

From Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 to Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, audiences are accustomed to that school of documentary making that another British documentary maker, Jon Ronson (The Crazy Rulers of the World, 2004) has dubbed "Les Nouvelles Égotistes" – directors who don't just hang back behind the camera but appear on screen as part of their own films.

Broomfield has consistently defended this approach to the documentary format over the more traditional approaches.

"If you're making a film," he claims, "it's more honest to make your presence felt than to hang back furtively on the other side of the room, because no one really benefits from that." What's important, he believes, is "the interaction between the film makers and those being filmed, and that the audience is aware of that interaction so they can make decisions of their own."

Egotism though isn't the only criticism levelled at Broomfield's films. They've also been attacked for their director's propensity to pay his interviewees for their on-screen cooperation. This, some argue, is dragging documentary making down to the level of the Tabloid's chequebook journalism. His first Aileen Wournos film saw Wournos' attorney, Steve Glazer, demanding $30,000 for an interview with his client. For his Heidi Fleiss film – Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995) – Fleiss herself pocketed $10,000 for her cooperation, while other interviewees were paid between $2,000 and $5,000 each for their participation.

In his interview with Jason Wood in Documenting Icons, Broomfield defends these payments by offering the excuse that there are no alternatives. "[It] was a good deal of the budget, but it was either pay these people or not get any footage. It was very much a part of the film and I felt so ridiculous, and then I was attacked in the media for paying my subjects, which didn't make sense because it was one of the main structuring devices of the film. The point was that everybody had their price. People took this very purist idea that in documentaries you don't pay anyone."

The issue of paying documentary subjects came to the fore last year in a French court case, when one of the subjects of Être et Avoir, a documentary about a rural French school, attempted to sue the film-makers for a share of the film's profits. French film unions claimed that the case could "spell the death of the documentary, undermining the crucial principle that subjects should not be paid to participate." The Association of French Film-makers added: "The nature and the economics of documentary are incompatible with any principle of remuneration."

When eventually a judge ruled in favour of the film-makers, their legal counsel said: "To pay someone who appears in a documentary would be to treat them as an actor, and that would be the death of documentary film-making."

But such arguments are nothing if not part of the long tradition of documentary making, a tradition which goes back to the birth of cinema itself. Robert Flaherty, an early exponent of the documentary format with films like Nanook of the North (1922) and Man of Aran (1934), was frequently criticised for scripting his stories and staging scenes for the camera. Nanook was further attacked for being funded by a fur company, turning it in the eyes of its critics into something akin to an ad for the fur-trade.

Documentaries, by their very nature, engender more trust than fictional formats, despite all the evidence that the boundaries between the two formats have always been blurred. As documentarians like Broomfield borrow more heavily from fiction in order to sex-up their subject, so they risk losing the trust of their audiences. But at least these films help set the media agenda, generating a wider and deeper discussion of certain issues, something which has been true of almost all of Broomfield's films.

?More Documenting Icons, the six-disc DVD box set is released by Metrodome, while the book of the same name is released by Faber and Faber