To mark the release of a DVD retrospective and the publication of the book Documenting Icons, Tony McKibbin analyses the career of Britain's most iconic documentary filmmaker, Nick Broomfield.

'With a film, once you start shooting you are committed. If the going gets tough, you have to carry on and somehow integrate all the problems you are having into the making of the film. I regard these films as a diary of the experience of making the film.' So believes Nick Broomfield, a documentarist who may claim the great Frederick Wiseman as one of his foremost influences, but whose style in films like Tracking Down Maggie (1994), Fetishes (1996) and Kurt & Courtney (1998) certainly now radically differs. Both would undeniably see themselves as documentarists who don't believe in notions of objectivity, but where Wiseman will edit his footage into a seamless whole, into a vision of blunt scrutiny apparent in films like High School (1968), Welfare (1975) and Public Housing (1997), Broomfield's films usually have a messy slackness as he grapples with his subject rather like a gatecrasher trying to push his way into a party.

This may be a heavy simile, but it's surely an apt one – Broomfield's work frequently possesses an audacious insolence that gives his films a particular kind of tension. This isn't the narrative tension we often find in contemporary documentaries that push for suspense in the story they're telling, for example Leon Gast's When We Were Kings (1996), and Kevin Macdonald's One Day in September (2000) and Touching the Void (2003), where the films' suspense lies in the accumulated and carefully arranged footage. These are in quite obvious ways genre films, Macdonald reputedly watched films like JFK (1991) for One Day in September, and mountain movies for Touching the Void. They thus more or less fit into generic suspense cinema: the boxing movie for Gast, the action film and the mountain movie for Macdonald. But with Broomfield we see that he generates a tension in the very process of filming. It makes sense when he says that now producers expect him to show up in his own work – a trope that almost makes a Broomfield film a Broomfield film – because the sort of tension he generates requires a documentary figure with whom we can identify. It wouldn't be enough for us to know that the camera is getting into difficult situations; we seem to need a physical presence to take us into these situations.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 104.