Filmmakers’ “Theories” – Nick Broomfield

Nick Broomfield is an English documentary film director. He is best known work is probably Kurt and Courtney (1998) and his overall style and documentarian approach that has been adapted by many other documentary filmmakers over the years.

Similar to Moore, Broomfield tends to blend elements of participatory and performance documentaries to maintain a casual and realistic filmmaking approach that appears like a “diary into the future” (Broomfield) whilst incorporating interviews that aim to explore the rawest version of peoples real lives. In his modern work he has adopted an approach he calls “direct cinema” that feature non-actors to play themselves in realistic scenarios following a script.

He also shares traits with Watkins in the fact that he likes to work with a minimal crew. Broomfield often records the sound for his documentaries himself and is accompanied by one or two camera operators.

Some of Broomfield’s documentaries have the reflexive trait of commenting on their own status as documentaries. For example in his documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), which follows the prequel Aileen: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992), Broomfield is hugely involved in the events following Aileen’s trial due to his prequel documentary and the popularity it got; some of the footage from the prequel is even used in court as evidence and that process is shown Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer to explicitly comment on the impact of his documentary and the nature of documentary truth.

“The Broomfield Technique works by zooming in on the inessentials as the means of getting to the heart of the matter. He leaves in what conventional documentary-makers would edit out and keeps rolling in front of stories on which most people would consider it extravagant madness to waste valuable reels.”
– John Carlin, The Daily Telegraph

He is described as an investigative documentarian which is evident in his Aileen documentaries as he follows her trials and gathers evidence from her family and friends regarding her life before her killings as well as interviewing her in an attempt to reveal some truths.