A year before his tragic death in 2014, Malik Bendjelloul won the Academy Award for his first (and last) documentary film Searching for Sugar Man. Still, the masterpiece is not without its critics, who question the cherry-picking narrative of the Swedish director.
Searching for Sugar Man revolves around the search for Rodriguez, a mysterious singer-songwriter from the United States, who released two albums Cold Fact and Coming from Reality in the early 1970s. Although both records were commercial flops in his homeland, many of his songs, including “Sugar Man”, became great hits in South Africa, gaining Rodriguez the same popularity as The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel. Yet little was known about Rodriguez. Rumours had it that he had killed himself on stage in front of a live audience. However, in 1997, two South African fans—one of them Stephen Segerman, a record store owner—made an unexpected discovery when they set out to find out what really happened to their musical hero.
They found that Rodriguez, whose full name is Sixto Rodriguez, was still alive and living in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He was entirely oblivious to his legendary status in South Africa. Nonetheless, with the help of his fans, he went on a concert tour there in 1998, finally earning his long overdue and well-deserved recognition.
Critics argue that Rodriguez, unlike the man depicted in Searching for Sugar Man, never was a nobody. He actually toured Australia in 1979 and 1981. By excluding key facts like Rodriguez’s Australian tours, Bendjelloul is accused of committing the sin of omission to tell a more impactful and emotional story. Similar criticisms ensue, questioning the honesty of Bendjelloul’s work and insisting that this film be thought of as nothing more than an exercise in myth-making. One reviewer asks, “Is it okay to bend the truth in order to make the story better than it really is?”
This question hints at an assumption about documentaries that they ought to give audience access to the truth of things. Yet, documentaries might be something more complex than merely presenting facts and documenting the reality.
In his book Directing the Documentary, Michael Rabiger raises two questions in the ongoing debate about the basis of documentaries: What is documentary truth? How objective is the camera? He points out that people assume documentaries are objective because the camera is a mechanical recording device. However, documentaries do not bring us unmediated reality. Similar to fiction films, they are authored constructs of selected shots and viewpoints pieced together by filmmakers, who have to make subjective decisions in the filmmaking process. Sometimes, dramatic ingredients similar to those in fictional stories may also be found in documentaries. Following this line of thought, documentaries, as a film genre, are highly selective in nature.
With Michael Rabiger’s observations in mind, we might be able to look at the controversies surrounding Searching for Sugar Man in a different way. Before travelling to South Africa in 2006, Malik Bendjelloul had no idea who Rodriguez was. During his journey, he met Stephen Segerman, who recounted to his new acquaintance the story of how his digging into the past of a supposedly deceased musician turned into the rediscovery of a living legend. Realising the potential of this real-life fairy tale, Bendjelloul went on to make the film. While it might be factual that Rodriguez has had some sort of reputation in Australia since the late 1970s, the reality is that Bendjelloul’s work retells the story of Rodriguez mainly through the perspective of Segerman rather than that of an omnipotent narrator.
Werner Herzog, a renowned German filmmaker, emphasises the subtle difference between “fact” and “truth” in documentary cinema. He reckons that facts cannot be overlooked, but they neither constitute truth nor give us insight into it. Using books as a metaphor, he says, “The book of books is not the New York phone directory with four million entries correct.” Instead of solely focusing on “factual truth”, Herzog attempts to go beyond the mere facts of things in order to dig deeper into a documentary story for the sake of revealing a deeper stratum of truth—the “ecstatic truth”—which can inspire and enrich the audience.
By Werner Herzog’s standards, Searching for Sugar Man manages to reach beyond the surface of facts to the deeper emotional undercurrents, yet without muddling reality. It explores a universal theme that resonates with us all: coping with failure and success. After being dropped by his record label, Rodriguez simply carries on with his life, obtaining a degree in philosophy near the age of 40 and continuing to make a living as a construction worker. When he performed to sell-out crowds in South Africa in 1998, one would naturally expect him to be bewildered at his newfound success. On the contrary, he took to the stage with an air of absolute serenity and modesty. In Searching for Sugar Man, viewers can draw inspiration from a committed artist who preserves grace and dignity in the face of both adversity and prosperity.
Instead of asking whether it is proper for a documentary film to bend the truth, a better question, in Michael Rabiger’s words, might be: “Must one show literal truth or can it be the spirit of the truth?”
