Notes Over the Image: In Defence of the Filmmaker's Commentary

There was a period, roughly bounded by the arrival of the DVD and the moment streaming quietly took over the living room, when a film was not considered complete until someone had talked over it. A director, an editor, a sound recordist, occasionally an actor who had been persuaded into a booth in Soho for an afternoon: all of them describing, frame by frame, what the audience was looking at and why it had been made that way.

That track has now largely gone. Not entirely, and not everywhere, but from the place where most people watch films it has been removed with almost no public discussion. This is a small loss in the grand scheme of things, and it is worth mourning anyway — because the commentary was the least promotional, most sustained explanation of craft that the industry ever handed to ordinary viewers.

A format that rewarded attention

The commentary track was never a passive pleasure. It required a decision, made before the film began, to listen to it differently — to treat a finished work as something with a workshop behind it. In return it offered the kind of detail that no press junket would ever yield: why a scene was shot on a longer lens, why a particular cut was made two weeks before the premiere, why the sound of a kettle in the background had been replaced entirely in post.

The best examples were not triumphant. They were confessional. A director admitting that a set had been built too small, that a performance had been rescued in the edit, that a joke which had tested well in the room had died in front of an audience. Anyone who has listened to a good commentary knows the peculiar education it provides: it teaches you to watch structure, to notice where a scene begins and ends, to hear the mix rather than merely the dialogue.

The British school

British filmmakers took to the format with particular seriousness. Edgar Wright's commentaries, recorded with a collaborator's generosity and an archivist's memory, functioned as seminars in comic construction — timing on the page, timing in the cut, the difference between a joke that lands on a look and one that lands on a word. The tracks accompanying Spaced did something similar for television, at a point when nobody had thought to treat a sitcom's DVD release as an educational object.

Aardman's commentary tradition, in which animators and designers explain how a shot that lasts four seconds took three weeks, is arguably the most honest account of production in the whole of British popular cinema. And there is a particular British habit, born of a television culture in which the crew are colleagues rather than hires, of inviting the below-the-line contributors into the booth: the editor, the production designer, the location manager. Listen to enough of these and you learn more about how a British production actually runs than you will from any making-of documentary, all of which are, by their nature, part of the marketing.

Why the streamers let it slide

The reasons for the format's decline are unglamorous. An alternate audio track costs relatively little to produce but returns nothing measurable; it cannot be A/B tested into a recommendation algorithm. It competes for space with dubbing and audio description, both of which carry genuine regulatory weight. Many streaming players handle secondary audio badly in any case — the technical plumbing for a third or fourth track is barely supported, and subtitles, which would seem the simpler problem, are still frequently clumsy across the major services.

There is also the question of rights. A commentary may include remarks about people who would rather not be discussed, music that requires clearance, or assessments of a studio's notes that the studio would prefer remained unrecorded. In an era when a finished film is treated as a piece of inventory rather than a cultural object, none of this recommends the track to a risk-averse executive.

And so extras have migrated to where they began: the launch window. A short promotional feature, a roundtable filmed on a red carpet, a clip released on social media the week before transmission. All of it is designed to be consumed once, quickly, and to feed the opening weekend.

The collector's shelf, and what it tells us

The disappearance is not total, and the exception is instructive. The independent labels that serve the physical media market — the BFI among them, alongside the specialist imprints whose catalogues now do much of the work of film education in this country — commission new commentaries as a matter of routine. They do so because their customers expect it, and because there remains a demonstrable audience for people talking seriously about films.

That audience is not large. But it is the same audience that buys tickets for repertory screenings, subscribes to the BFI's archive collections and reads long-form criticism. It is, in other words, precisely the audience the mainstream streamers claim to be courting when they commission a prestige documentary series about cinema. The interest exists. It has simply been priced out of the interface.

A reasonable demand

There is a modest remedy available, and it requires no new technology. The services should restore alternate audio tracks where they exist, and label them clearly. Producers should treat the commentary as part of a film's delivery rather than an optional extra, in the way that subtitling and audio description are already treated.

More pointedly, publicly funded British cinema — the work supported by the BFI, by Film4, by BBC Film — is paid for by the public. It would be no great imposition to require, as a condition of that support, that a recorded conversation about the making of the film be made available with it. The audience has already bought the ticket. It should be allowed to hear the notes.