Record of Relationships
I presented at SWPJC a few years ago, and at the time basically faked my beliefs on stage. They were hunches. But in the last year or two of doing more web documentary work, my hunches have turned into convictions. One of them is documentary video is a record of your relationships. It’s a self-recognition that I’m a part of something, a relationship, and that the level of “truth” that my work presents is in direct proportion to the transparency, access and trust that I’ve built with my subjects.
I recently found the gem of a site that brings me face to face with all the historical documentary film legends. I’m listening to Errol Morris talk about his initial work:
Documentary wasn’t just one thing, it was many kinds. Then for whatever reason it devolved into a certain style of filmmaking. Call it verite, call it the handheld school, the fly-on-the-wall school. People started to take this idea of truth cinema seriously … But it evolved into a kind of cinema journalism. And I never liked that idea. It’s not that I don’t like journalism. I consider myself a kind of journalist. But I never liked this idea that this film journalism had to be practiced in a certain way. Like the documentary film police telling you it has to be shot this way or that way. In Gates of Heaven, I wanted to break every single rule of documentary. Instead of being a fly-on-the-wall, let’s make everyone completely aware of our presence. Let’s have people talking directly to us, perhaps performing for us. Let’s put the camera on a tripod. Let’s not use natural light, let’s light everything. Let’s not get portable gear, let’s get the most obtrusive. So that’s the start of it.
Then there is the voice of Silvain L’Esperance, who says that cinema verite is not objective truth at all, that’s a subjective truth of a relationship that’s eminently personal, and if there’s any truth to yield, it comes from the authenticity of the relationship between creator and creation (filmmaker/subject).
As I listened to their voices, I was head-nodding their statements to my experience. Coming from a photojournalistic background that stresses fly-on-the-wall tactics, but yet in the pool of many photographers who have, in pursuit of ‘multimedia’, moved into video production, the jump in mediums requires an additional realization: compelling documentary will take advantage of cinematic liberties, and non-compelling won’t.
Now why does this matter to me? It allows me to make more confident decisions when selecting whether to use music, whether to record my own voice asking the questions during an interview (I might cut myself into the edit to make it more honest of a feeling, much like Ira Glass does on This American Life shows), whether to recreate scenes and cuts that present many angles (when in fact it was one camera that shot it all), and overall cinematic impressions.
There are many genres of documentary. If I have a nervousness about a particular one, it’s about mixing heavily dramatized or recreated scenes. Errol is known for this, as I saw Standard Operating Procedure earlier last year. The idea of including footage that is completely made from my mind and conception and doesn’t offer any voice from my subject, is hardly a relationship between me and my subject at that point.
In conclusion, I’m discovering that cinema verite, from the point of view of documentary filmmakers who had no journalism background, considered it a point in the evolutional history of documentary film, and saw it as an approach that hardly afforded the creative expression of a relationship. Relationships by nature are fluid and expressive, and how comfortable someone feels talking with me as a camera is rolling is a direct result of the previous off-camera conversations and histories that we’ve shared together. My relationship is what I have to offer to my audience: a condensed record of my experience with others at a certain place and time, and one that is deeply personal, full of mystery, honesty and transparency. That’s probably why I love this form so much. It’s a personal journal in a way. I’m always timid when I show my work to others for the first time. If it was truly cinema verite, I don’t know that I would be … So for us journalist-converted filmmakers, the leap into personally expressed stories might require a big gulp, but is enthralling and pushes me towards my subject even more than I might otherwise be willing to go. Far from the wall.
Thoughts?
5 Comments
Cat
January 19, 2010Oh goodness, this post gets me thinking…
Setting out my three point sermon below. Forgive me for my abundance of thoughts:
So even if you could obtain objective truth in what you have captured, were that even possible, what you select, edit-out and present to the public eye is still your hand deciding what ‘truth’ represents. In a video or audio narrative, your influence on what is included, and what is left out, belies what you find important. It is a marker of your perception more than it can ever represent ‘truth’.
And the timidity at showing your own work only proves that it represents you personally as much as, if not more than, your subject. If feel the same when I post a picture I have taken to my blog or site. I am worried what the viewer will assess about me and give little thought to whether it is a flattering image to my subject or not….
Also, I think that representing your point-of-view can be more valuable than attempting to represent ‘truth’ anyway. Lately it seems that our societies crave nothing more that to peer through another’s eyes. It seems that more documentary’s and biography’s win our best selling book and movie award than ever before. Even the rise of social media like facebook and twitter and eye-witness reports show that viewers accept, and even love, that they are getting one man’s perspective on any story. We crave interaction with each other, relationships. It’s no longer taboo at all to hear the interviewer as the questions (like TAL) or have the photographer be the key witness in their own multimedia project. ‘Journalism’, in its truest form, is racing to keep up with these changes and, like you said, “compelling documentary WILL take advantage of cinematic liberties”. And that makes it a wonderful, growing, adapting medium.
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Oh, and have you seen Gonzo: Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson? Your mention of play acting made me think of it. I think the clips from the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” interspersed through the documentary really add a lot. It’s a good example of that working I think…
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Ok, coming off the soap box I just discovered that I had. If you’ve taken the time to read this, thanks. And thanks for providing and environment to foster thoughts on the subject!
Cooper Strange
February 9, 2010I can see how it would be a leap for those trained to negate their own presence to then begin to allow for the opposite to happen. Not having that specific training, it is not a hang up for me.
In still photography, telling a story also relies heavily on the relationship between photographer and those inside the story, but I can see that with moving film, when you have a person, all their mannerisms, and maybe that awkward reaction (to an unknown inverviewer) which could ruin that passage of the film, some things do change. It seems to me that both styles would be helpful (and everything in between): both the fly-on-the-wall to focus entirely on the subject and also the naturalness which would come from the conversation with the filmmaker.
Chris
February 10, 2010you assert that moving film picks up more subtleties. More accomplished photographers would argue not. A discerning, trained eye.
In the end, it’s not so much if both have their uses, as much as are you presenting an honest piece of work? Are you calling it what it is? As Schaeffer says in his work Art and the Bible, how much “validity” does your work carry? How true are you to documenting what happens for the sake of documenting what happens, not for dedication to a documentation style.
~C
Gordon Brander
March 15, 2010Whatever the style of film, the person behind the lens has an immense amount of power over the perspective of the viewer.
I think the strength of cinema verite is not that it somehow forces objectivity, but that it leaves in some of the raw awkwardness of real life. It’s a sort of earnestness captured on film that says to the viewer “I’m doing my best to show what I believe is real here”. This earnestness can really be powerful and emotionally compelling.
Tim Berryman
July 26, 2012I was in attendance at the SWPJC at which you spoke. While you may have “faked” your beliefs, God still worked through your presentation. Your images and stories had a profound impact on me and my long-term goals as a young photographer. I have since received a Bachelor’s degree in Photography, participated on two overseas missions teams, and recently made the difficult decision to leave the commercial photography world to pursue a career in missions-driven photojournalism. Whether or not your words at the conference were completely genuine, God used you and your work to affirm his calling to me. I hope that someday I may be in a position to be used in a similar manner. Thank you for your transparency. Many blessings.