http://www.cinematical.com/2007/07/02/film-clips-pierson-moore-and-the-ethics-of-doc-filmmaking/
What do you think of choices before a filmmaker?
Ponder on subject/filmmaker relationship?
What can be an equal situation?
Is it possible?Whow?When? Have you seen a film like that?
We attach 'ethics' to every field and in this case every style of filmmaking. But i guess documentary is supposed to be structured, scripted and directional. as in the director will and should choose the direction and then document evidence supporting it.i mean thats my understanding of a documentary. But, at the same time it does become problematic as through this documentation and so called evidence, we believe in it more and forget to question the other sides which were 'missed out' by the filmmaker.
ReplyDeleteThats y i will term documentaries as one sided and unidirectional,whether thats good or bad is subjective.......
Any film , according to me is storytelling , once you lose the story , you lose the interest of the viewer. A documentary , though when literally broken dowm means 'documenting an event' but does it really mean that? That would basically mean shooting facts onto the screen , which may/may not make sense to the audience. hence one has to have a gripping storyline so that the facts can be channeled in an interesting way.An example would be nanook of the north. When the film-maker came back with all the footage that he had , he had 100 hours of footage that didnt make any sense.
ReplyDeleteBe it bowling for columbine , ram ke naam , Jash-e-azadi , india untouched or any of the documentary films that we have seen in the recent past, a filmmaker has to 'make' a film. It doesnt rise out of simple switching on a camera without thinking about it.
I would agree to rozita's point that most documentaries are one-sided/biased , but i also observe that , that applies to all forms of products risen by human/creative involvement. A journalist/film-maker/artist is not supposed to be an ideological eunuch. Any kind of creative involvement would have a point of view.
An eual situation would be something like abbas kiarostami's Ten's first part where the camera is set on the dashboard of a car and simply captures a conversation between a mother and her son. But here too , i would point out , that the presence of the camera changes a lot also the art of editing means that the film maker choses to have something and choses to edit out the rest.
Nikita B.