Australian Story: Broadcast or Documentary?

I’ve been exploring a little in the documentary space, and watching some things that I normally wouldn’t class as documentary in order to try and understand more nuances to the genre. To that end, I watched an episode of the show Australian Story, and would like to talk about it a little here.

The specific episode that I watched was called “The Bridge” and centred around Donna Thistlethwaite. More specifically, it centred around a single event in her life which occurred on Sunday the 12th of August, 2012. That day, she climbed over the railing of Brisbane’s Story Bridge and jumped into the river below in an attempt to commit suicide.

While the show begins with the reporter type voice of Caroline Jones introducing the person and situation which is about to be viewed, it then shifts into appearing to be a more documentary style production that television interview, and so excludes the this influence of the interviewer from that point forwards. The audience never hears the interviewer ask a question, or appear in front of the camera at any point. Instead, the modality appears to be very comfortably within the realm of expository documentary.

So this begs the question, what really is the difference between broadcast TV and documentaries? Why is this episode of a television series not thought of a a documentary, but films of a similar length covering similar subject matter could be thought of in this way? Well the simple form of the answer seems to be that broadcast TV is shot to be seen by as many people as possible, while documentaries are shot to pass on a message with nuance (“What is the difference between documentary and broadcast?”, n.d.). This increase in audience is usually thought of as a loss in subtlety and layered meaning, or as put by former journalist and now documentarian Tim Hetherington “You can present something on network news that has clarity but doesn’t necessarily have nuance” (Kasson, 2010). The other primary difference is that while documentaries are able to use distinct and unique styles in their presentation, editing and interviews, shows like Australian Story are designed to have a recognisable style and look which is consistent from episode to episode (Chapman & Kinsey, 2009). This style dictates how interviews will look, the style of the general editing as well as the type of overlay used along with how it is used.

As this particular episode of Australian Story was about a woman who had survived her suicidal jump off the Story Bridge, the majority of the overlay was showcasing Donna, alone when describing the lead up to and the suicide attempt, but with her family when describing how she has bounced back. However, the bridge itself had a large visual presence in the story, as did the river and examples of the ferry that pulled her out of the water. While very literal, this overlay enhanced the story by giving additional context to the story being verbally told.

The verbal story being told was the heart of the show, however, and the emotional core and genuine feelings of Donna was the compelling part of this show. The highlighting and focus on the issue of an actual suicide attempt by someone who you would not associate with being suicidal creates an interest in the audience to understand this person and how they have grown since the attempt. In this way, the show is very effective as I was engaged throughout the whole 28 minute running time.

Bibliography

Chapman, J., & Kinsey, M. (2009). Broadcast Journalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

Kasson, E. (2010). The Message Is the Medium: The Difference between Documentarians and Journalists. International Documentary Association. Retrieved from http://www.documentary.org/magazine/message-medium-difference-between-documentarians-and-journalists

Taylor, K. [Producer]. (2017). Australian Story: The Bridge. Australia: Australian Broadcasting Company.

What is the difference between documentary and broadcast?. WikiDiff. Retrieved from http://wikidiff.com/documentary/broadcast

 

Recreation as Truth: Errol Morris

Continuing down the rabbit hole that is documentary, I’ve been watching some of the works of Errol Morris. I’ve found his style of crafting a documentary to be highly engaging, something consistent across all of his work that I’ve seen. While this is admittedly a limited amount of films (because as yet I’ve only seen Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008) and The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988)), there were consistencies across the two films that speak more to Errol Morris as a filmmaker rather than the films themselves specifically.

Errol Morris has had a consistent directorial style throughout his different feature documentaries, which can be most succinctly expressed as ‘director as detective’. Throughout his documentaries, Morris guides the audience through the investigation of a crime, using evidence and testimony as the key driving forces to push the film forwards. To achieve this style, Morris first triangulates the crime. The amount of research and investigation that must go into these films before any cameras are even touched must be astronomical, for to guide the audience through the confusing mix of crime, investigation, evidence and truth the filmmaker has to fully understand everything about these details in their entirety.

In the actual content of his documentaries, Errol Morris has a relatively clear formula which works very effectively to keep the audience engaged. First, The circumstances of the crime is outlined, informing the audience of the people involved and their relationships to the case. This then moves into taking the audience along the journey of the investigation that was carried out, moving gradually but consistently towards the truth.

To Errol Morris, truth is all in the interpretation. He himself says: “As I like to point out, truth isn’t handed to you on a platter. It’s not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It’s a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means” (Morris, 2004). Rather than dictate the truth over the top of the people involved in the incident he is investigating, Morris allows his subjects to speak about their experiences, and consequently their interpretation of the truth. He does the same with images and video evidence, allowing the subjects he is interviewing to apply their perspective to the images presented to them, rather than forcing judgement upon them.

A way that Errol Morris makes this process seem personal to the audience is by trying to create a first person viewing experience, having subjects appear to make eye contact with the audience through the camera (Poppy, 2004). This is achieved through the use of the ‘Interrotron’, a piece of equipment that essentially places a teleprompter between the interview subject and the camera upon which a live video stream of Morris is shone (Dewhurst, 2012). This can be seen by the interview subject but not by the camera, and so when the interviewee makes eye contact with the subject, they also look directly into the camera. This makes all the interviews feel incredibly personal, as though the interviewee is having a personal conversation with each audience member without all the distractions of the camera, lighting, and time and distance differences.

Errol Morris is an incredibly interesting documentarian, not only because of his investigative style, but also because he acknowledges that he does not want his work to be seen as true just because it has a distinctly ‘documentary feel’ to it, the feeling usually associated with cinema verite (Poppy, 2004). Instead, he shifts as far away from this style as possible, and I for one believe his films are far stronger for it.

References:

Ahlberg, J. (Producer), & Morris, E. (Director). (2008). Standard Operating Procedure [Documentary]. United States: Participant Media.

Dewhurst, B., (2012). Interrotron: an Interviewing Tool Essential to the Documentaries of Oscar Winner Errol Morris. http://nofilmschool.com/2012/09/interrotron-errol-morris-documentary

Lipson, M. (Producer), & Morris, E. (Director). (1998). The Thin Blue Line [Documentary]. United States: Miramax Films.

Poppy, N., (2004), Errol Morris [Filmmaker], https://www.believermag.com/issues/200404/?read=interview_morris

Story found in the Edit: Documentary Post Production

So over the past several weeks, I’ve been involved with the creation of the short documentary and it is nearing completion. It’s been a long process with many ups and downs, but Got Sole is nearly ready for release. Got Sole is a short documentary about the community surrounding sneakers and some of the people who have taken this passion and turned it into a career.

The biggest problem that we struggled with throughout the edit was that we did not enter into the documentary process with a really clear idea of what exact story we wanted to tell. This meant that the whole way through the process, from the script writing to the interviews to the cutting room, we were constantly searching the interview subjects and their answers for a cohesive story which tied all the interviewees together. Finding the story in the edit is never advisable because of the exact danger that we ran headfirst into: we didn’t really find it. Rather than a single cohesive story, we came up several different unrelated vignettes. While each of the vignettes was enjoyable to watch, the 3 separate stories didn’t really flow together very well and made the documentary overall feel less satisfying to watch. However, we are still active in this process and have since found a more complete story which ties the interviewees together a lot more than any edit we have had previously.

While we were struggling with story in our interviews, the overlay that we captured was not a serious problem. Our film was never lacking for style or visuals, as you would expect from a documentary focusing on a topic which is literally designed to look as good as it can. As such, the overlay that we captured fit very easily into the documentary and proved to be usable in quite a few different ways. Furthermore, the overlay sequences got across a sense of what the interview subjects actually did, freeing us up from hugely expositional segments and making the explanations that were given a lot less dry.

The issue that we had with our sound design throughout this process was that we wanted each different person being interviewed to have a distinct feel and tone, created primarily through music. However, we experimented with a great many music tracks and found that many would not work together, changing the tone of key too much, disrupting the flow of the documentary. Finding all this music, which was royalty free, consistent but also distinct, proved to be quite a mammoth task. This also had to be done early on in the edit, as the overlay was then editing according to the beat and music cues.

Music cues are edits where the timing of the cut is dictated by the beat and flow of the music: i.e. the music gives the cues of when to cut. Our short documentary is full of them, as the music is an incredibly key component of the overall film. These are most clearly seen in the montages used as introductions to different sessions, which are cut to the beat of the music as a stylistic choice. This is a very strong choice, I think, because it totally draws the attention of the audience and hooks them into the story world. It gets people invested enough to watch the rest of the short documentary, even if they don’t really care about shoes going in.

Despite all of these problems, we ultimately ended up with a project that came together with a slick visual flair and style, aspects that we were and are very happy with. While the issues did certainly mean that our project has not yet reached its full potential, this is something that we are continuing to work at and improve. Overall, the visual flair and slick presentation coupled with strong music keep the film interesting to watch. However, the fractured story cobbled together in the edit held us back from what we really were trying to do and lets the film down. Who would have guessed that “fix it in post” didn’t turn out our strongest result?

Sour Grapes Feature Documentary Review

So I’ve watched a feature length documentary called Sour Grapes, and thought I would share my thoughts on a feature documentary. I’ve been looking at short documentaries pretty exclusively over the past few weeks, and then considered that I should watch a longer form and see my thoughts on that. While Sour Grapes had some great points to it, overall I found it lacking a little, and not really fully taken in by it. Let me explain why.

Directed by Jerry Rothwell and Reuben Atlas, Sour Grapes is an 85-minute long documentary released in 2016 centred around the world of fine wine, particularly high echelon fine wine auctions. While I’m not really a wine drinker myself, I was drawn to watch Sour Grapes because it touted itself as a detective story, unravelling a counterfeiting fraud on a scale never before seen by the wine world. Rudy Kurniawan entered the fine wine collectors club in the late 1990s, becoming prominent throughout the early 2000s through his famous palette and prodigious spending habits. Once becoming noticed, Rudy flew up the social ladder of the auction scene not only because he was buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wine, but also actively taking part in the culture around these auctions, wining and dining his way into the hearts of many collectors.

This is where the mystery and inconsistencies start showing up, both in the story in the documentary and the documentary itself. Rudy Kurniawan doesn’t exist: the name was appropriated and the what limited amounts he talks about his background provably false. However, this put on personality is never replaced by anything. The documentary begins to peel back some of the layers to Rudy’s personality and get at the real person behind the fraud, but as Rudy did not respond to requests to be interviewed for the film there is nothing to replace the persona with. This is the greatest and core weakness in the documentary, and the reason that it feels like it’s 85 minute run time is very padded. It’s essentially a character based story without a central character to function as the spine of the documentary. Instead, it relies on archival footage from a 2002 pilot for a wine show featuring Rudy that never got greenlit (Meager, 2016), which starts off very informative but gets repetitive as the documentary goes on, and the fragmented separate detective processes undertaken by several distinct parties. While the documentary does do an excellent job of making the investigation feel like an exciting journey of discovery, each person being interviewed feel like an island, without any real interaction between characters.

The other major issue I encountered during my viewing of the documentary was that while the detective story completely drew me in, especially the very slick graphics of purchase orders, emails and other digital documents, this portion of the documentary only started about 37 minutes in. The time prior to this was spent educating the viewer about wine, the wine action scene and Rudy as a character. Don’t get me wrong, these are all necessary pieces of the story, but they certainly do not need to take up over a full third of the film’s run time. This is particularly evidenced by the archival footage which is the only real visual and auditory references we have for Rudy. Even just watching this documentary, it seems pretty clear why the pilot was never picked up. While the second and third acts really pick up, the first act seems weak and bloated, with a lot of the information being passed on to the audience feeling unnecessary.

It is interesting in that this is a crime story where we do not really feel anything for the victims of the crime. While an element of this is certainly that the crime was financial in nature rather than violent, this does not mean that the victims deserve any less sympathy and indeed other documentaries focusing on financial fraud have played up the victims to pull at the heartstrings of the audience and help get their message across. No, the victims in this documentary are not painted as victims simply because this crime has not really affected them particularly adversely. They are all very wealthy to the point of having what Maureen Downey even calls in the film “fuck you money”, and it just seems pretty hard to feel sympathy for someone getting defrauded out of $4 million worth of wine when they don’t even notice the $4 million and instead are only annoyed because they think their former friend lied to their face. They don’t even seem particularly annoyed, remarkable grudge free for a film for a film called Sour Grapes.

Overall, I was totally taken in by the second and third acts of this documentary, where it really shows its strengths in crafting an interesting tale of mystery and fraud, and just how much is still unknown and unsolved about the case. After watching the documentary and reading the line of text stating Rudy did not respond to requests for interviews for this film, the only thing I felt was that this Sour Grapes was missing its main character. As I’ve been told many times now, without access, you don’t have a documentary. A pity then that the man known as Rudy Kurniawan does not grant access.

 

Meager, D. (2016). This Documentary Reveals How One Wine Scammer Conned the Entire Industry Out of Millions. Munchies. Retrieved from https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/jpkgw8/this-documentary-reveals-how-one-wine-scammer-conned-the-entire-industry-out-of-millions

Rothwell, J., & Atlas, R. (2016). Sour Grapes. Faites Un Voeu.

Interview Workshop & Awkward Questions

So recently I took part in a workshop all about interviews. Since I’m in the process of creating a short documentary film and through the course of that will be involved with quite a lot of interviews, I feel it is important to know what an interview feels like. This doesn’t just apply to how it feels to interview someone, but also how it feels to be interviewed, particularly when there are topics involved that either one or both of the parties may not be totally comfortable with talking about or sharing. Compassion is needed, I think, to conduct a quality interview, if not about the subject matter then at least about the idea of sharing your views and experiences.

In the workshop, we paired up with someone that we didn’t have a strong prior relationship to, and then one person interviewed the other about a topic question which the expert running the workshop had predetermined. After we had discussed the topic for an amount of time, the roles would reverse and the interviewer would become the interviewee and vice versa. I started off being the interviewer, It was a question specifically designed to make some of the people present uncomfortable, and necessitate the breaking of that barrier to start the conversation.

The question was, “Tell me about the first time you had sex.”

So just imagine for a second that you had to ask someone that you didn’t now very well this question, and actually have a sustained conversation about the topic, regardless of their initial reaction and answer. Would you jump straight into the deep end, or would you warm up to it with more innocuous questions first? Both ways have their merits, but it’s really up to you as the interview as to how you deal with the question, and how to put your interview subject at ease.

As for me, I made sure I told my interviewee that while the topic could be a bit sensitive, there was no pressure and his answer could be as broad or as detailed as he liked. First trying to set up a casual, lighthearted conversational tone, I jumped straight in and asked the question directly without further preamble or warm up questions. Because of the nature of the topic raised, whatever answer I got would be interesting enough and have enough weight to it that I could carry a conversation on from that point. Which is exactly what happened. I found it awkward at first to ask the question, but once I had asked, the interview just flowed naturally as a conversation. We were asked afterwards how we had spent the time in between interviews, whether the atmosphere was tense or awkward or totally natural. The problem that arose was that we didn’t have any time spare between interviews because the conversation had just carried on until time was called and we swapped roles.

When we did swap roles, and I became the interviewee, it was a similar, but also entirely different experience. The topic question had been changed to “Did you have a happy childhood?”, and while the points of conversation had changed, the free flowing nature of the conversation had not. However, being asked the questions instead of asking the questions brought about a different dynamic for me, a more personal, private dynamic and I’m glad that we had to be on both sides of the interview. Providing the answers felt almost like sharing a secret, even though what I was saying isn’t something I keep secret or am ashamed of. I think it’s pretty easy to see why people being interviewed on camera share as much as they do; it’s an environment where speaking openly and honestly feels rewarded, which is quite a rare thing in day to day life.

Being open and honest, I found that being the interviewer to be quite difficult. Not the asking of the questions, that part was quite easy. The hard part for me was not compromising the interview by talking over the top of the answers I was getting. It wasn’t me being rude either, it’s my natural instinct to give constant feedback during a conversation, making sounds of agreement or disagreement or just curiosity. To get better at interviewing, this is something that I need to be acutely aware of and be able to control. But moving forward, at least I am now aware of that and can make an effort to improve in this area.

Being interviewed, on the other hand, was quite easy. I think it was made easy by having an interviewer who asked his questions and then just let me talk. He asked the questions and then sat back until I had completely finished talking, and I’ve always found it pretty easy to talk about myself, like most people I think. The difficult part is opening up and telling people about things that you wouldn’t usually. This difficulty didn’t exist for me, though, because the topic we were talking about was not in any way confronting to me, allowing me to talk about it endlessly without hesitation. In this way, I don’t really think that I got the most out of the exercise.

The workshop did help me get over some nerves about interviewing people, as I feel better having dealt with a question that could have gone poorly leading to such an in-depth discussion without awkwardness getting in the way. Moving forward, I think that the lessons I have learnt here will definitely help me in future interviews, and this will only improve as I continue to interview more people about a variety of topics and I increase in experience and confidence.

Documentary Modality

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sticking with the documentary theme, trying to improve my understanding of it and how documentaries are designed and created. It helps make the subject much more interesting to me and has been the driving force behind why I’m still trying to watch more documentaries, both short and long form, and get into the genre in a bigger way. But because I’m not massively interested in what is commonly thought of as a ‘normal’ documentary, with overlay visuals on top of talking head interviews, I have been actively trying to explore some of the weirder, less common types of documentary.

To this end, I’ve been learning about modality, which is essentially a classification of sub-genres of documentary developed by American film critic Bill Nichols, and using this learning to come up with my own documentary idea. I’ve actually pitched this idea a couple of times now as well because there is no better way to test out a pitch than delivering it to people and getting their reaction. My idea, at its core, was pretty simple: I wanted to document an athletics group and portray them in a way which emphasised the community and friendships the group members had built up and downplayed any rivalries or competitiveness within the group down to zero. This wasn’t a total fabrication, either: members of the group that know are all only a part of the group primarily for fun, with their actual results being less important to them. I think that it helps that the athletics group is specifically for people aged 30 and up, but have a strong focus on older members, accommodating many athletes in or past their 80s. At that point, every race finished in an achievement, regardless of times or placement.

The most interesting thing about this story to me was the was that I wanted to tell it. Initially, I proposed the idea as told through a poetic modality with observational influences, but looking back I don’t think that is quite what I really was trying to do. On reflection, the project I was proposing was at its heart an observational documentary with poetic elements to it. Let me explain what these mean, and then how they relate to the story of an athletics meet.

Observational documentary is a mode of documentary that exists, as the name suggests, simply to observe the chaotic swirling of life around the camera without interfering with how that life plays out. It tries to show, first hand, the experiences of those that it is observing, trying to achieve a level of intimacy with ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. These types of documentaries traditionally are centred around an event of some note or importance, which are used to give this otherwise potentially unstructured form a framework to work around (Nichols, 2001). An excellent example of this type of observation documentary is Gimme Shelter (Maysles, 1970), a documentary following The Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour, with a particular focus on their infamous free concert at Altamont. This is really the main modality of the documentary I pitched because it best lines up with the type of story I was trying to get across. My idea was to simply observe what happened at the meet, to watch as events unfolded, and create a connection between the audience and the people we see on screen, even if we don’t hear them in voice overs, or see them get interviewed.

The poetic modality of documentary, however, is more abstract, even more so that just watching life go by. Poetic documentaries are closer to experimental films in some respect than they are to other documentaries. They often focus purely on aesthetic, and use symbolism, juxtaposition, repetition and other visual devices to get across their meanings and themes. Mood and tone take precedence above developed characters, with people often being used as representative of some greater whole rather than in their own right (Nichols, 2001). Films like Samsara (2011) and Baraka (1992), both directed by Ron Fricke, are exemplars in this modality but are both examples of the directorial vision of an individual, so don’t really explain what the full depth and breadth of this modality can be. The elements from this modality that I took to expand upon in my pitch were the lack of well-rounded characters, substituting in people as representing a wider group, and strong use of visual associations, mood and tone to create feeling and theme, neglecting in the process traditional narrative.

Furthermore, in the short documentary I was proposing, I wanted to combine elements of these two modalities and create something that observed this event, the athletics meet, happening, but also prescribe meanings and values to the vision being seen by the audience. I wanted to make something which followed along similar lines to For the Hell of it (Yoke Creative, 2016), but with much more of a focus on people rather than environments and landscapes, yet creating a similar emotive experience. A tough ask, to be sure, but definitely something that interested me a great deal more than a more ‘normal’ expository documentary of an interview enhanced with B-roll.

As for my pitch, it received the very fair feedback of it was very difficult to pull off, to the point of near impossibility. While the core idea was potentially very interesting and compelling, the mode I wanted to use to tell the story would make it very difficult for an audience to interface with or care about any of the characters involved. This was an angle that I hadn’t even really considered, because I was so focused on the way I wanted to tell my story, and because it made sense to me, I had forgotten to make sure that it would not only make sense to everyone who watched it, but that it should make people want to watch it. Just because I want to make it doesn’t mean other people will want to sit through the final product. This is a problem at the very core of the idea, and I don’t think that it can be solved without changing the idea drastically, which means that you won’t see my idea of a screen anywhere anytime soon. However this was something that I wanted to explore, to see whether the idea could work in some form, so I’ve recently filmed a much shorter, cut down version of the idea which focuses on a single athlete completing a training run, with some intercut photos of the competition she is training for. When it’s edited and complete, I’ll put a link here so you can see what I’m getting at.

Bibliography

Fricke, R. (Director). (1992). Baraka [Motion picture]. USA: Magidson Films.

Fricke, R. (Director). (2011). Samsara [Motion picture].

Maysles, A., Maysles, D., & Zwerin, C. (Directors). (1970). Gimme Shelter [Motion picture]. USA: Maysles Films.

Nichols, B. (2001). Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Yoke Creative (Director). (2016). For the Hell of it [Video File]. Yoke Creative. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/191660097

Truth and Documentary

So I’ve just begun a subject about learning how to construct a short documentary, and more broadly understand the documentary genre and is nuances through deconstruction. I admit, it’s a subject matter which I am unfortunately not passionate about at all. I’m not really a fan of the documentary genre in general, but I may be going through a eye-opening experience by being forced to consume so many and create my own. I tend to prefer fiction films, because, as it was so elegantly put by people with vastly more experience than me in the documentary “Capturing Reality”, documentary is just another type of fiction, but almost one that is deceitful towards it’s audience, because it seeks to identify itself as he ‘truth’, when it is instead a biased retelling of a true story, as it is understood by the director in charge of the documentary. This is still how I feel now, but I fully acknowledge that this view is subject to my previous bias, and lack of experience and personal enjoyment with watching documentary format pieces.

Even the statement I made about documentary being deceitful towards it’s audience, is flavoured from my bias. I don’t like documentary, so I picked out a quote painting documentary in a negative light. I could have chosen from a number of positive grabs which speak to the good parts of documentary, about how it aims to inform and educate the public, highlight real issues being faced in the real world, right wrongs, about how documentary aims to change the world for the better. These are good, strong ideals and I fully endorse any film that is trying to achieve these. I just feel that, in my very limited experience, the documentaries that I watch get flavoured too much by the documentarian, and  the stories being told get twisted to fit their agenda.

But this is just my limited and biased understanding of the genre. Surely there’s more to it, right, otherwise no one would watch these films. So lets go back to Capturing Reality, and see what some of the experts have to say. What is documentary? The Capturing Reality user guide explains “filmmakers see documentary as an archive of human experience, a conversation, a provocation […] but not necessarily the way to ‘truth'”. To get more individual, Syvain L’Esperance describes documentary film making as “an art form that offers a way of looking at the world, or giving it shape.” I really think this captures the essence of what documentary is at it’s heart. It doesn’t invent a fantasy world as fiction film making does, but instead looks at real world situations. This quote does not insist that documentaries are presenting some overarching truth, but instead are used as a lens to examine the real situations captured on film and share this experience with others.  As Errol Morris says: “They’re not meant as pure fiction, they’re meant as stories about real events, real people. We piece together reality, each one of us, from bits and pieces of stuff. Reality isn’t handed to us whole.” The ‘reality’ in Morris’s documentaries (e.g. The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Standard Operating Procedure (2008)) are piece together with real hard evidence (interview, photos, documents) mixed with recreations that create an enthralling narrative experience for the viewer. But does this recreation taint the ‘truth’ that Morris and other documentarians are imparting?

Both fiction and non-fiction film work with a script, use staging, can have very similar pacing and story structures, and can contain reenactments and performances by actors. We can see similar stories in both. So why are documentaries seen as ‘true’, with fiction therefore relegated to being ‘false’? In his book, Introduction to Documentary (2010), Bill Nichols suggests that it is the “different assumptions about purpose” that the filmmakers are making, and that documentary involves “a different quality of relationship between filmmaker and subject, and they prompt different sots of expectations from audiences.” However, mere purpose doesn’t provide an unbreakable defense for the filmmaker, and certainly doesn’t automatically authenticate all the material presented in documentaries as absolute truth. Nichols addresses this by putting forth that “the documentary tradition relies very heavily on being able to convey an impression of authenticity.” He goes further, and asserts that “we believe what we see at our own risk.” By the same standard, however, documentaries do not become lies just by being in documentary format, and the documentarian’s purpose to describe the truth of the situation means that what is presented should be at least their perception of the truth. After all, as Jessica Yu states in Capturing Reality (2009) “only a high degree of “personal curiosity” can justify “the very long, enervating process that is making a film”” (Nelson, 2009), and after all that effort why would the filmmakers lie to themselves?

My truth is that I’ve only really been exploring the genre of documentary in more depth over the past 2 weeks and have been watching more documentaries in a shorter span of time than I ever have previously. I think it’s starting to grow on me a little. I still don’t really like the genre in general, but I’m realising it has a lot more to offer than I’ve ever seen. Certainly, the documentaries I’ve been watching all do have a bias. It’s natural, and human, to apply your own understanding to a story when you tell it. But there are documentaries that make this influence as non-existent as they can, and I’m becoming more excited to find all of these different documentaries and documentary modes I’ve never thought existed.

 

Bibliography

Aufderheide, P. (2009). Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary User Guide (1st ed.). Canada: National Film Board of Canada.

Ferrari, P. (2009). Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.

Nelson, M. C. (2009). Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. PopMatters. Retrieved from http://www.popmatters.com/review/115575-capturing-reality-the-art-of-documentary/

Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to Documentary (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN, US: Indiana University Press.

 

Images Sourced from:

Notes on Truth (Or, Documentary in the Post-Truth Era)

http://www.altfg.com/film/the-art-of-documentary-jessica-yu-werner-herzog-truth-reality/

http://www.documentary.org/feature/messy-truth-behind-day-job-documentarian