Post by chris on Dec 9, 2005 13:25:08 GMT -5
After reading Jeff's post on The Corporation (Corporate Greed for Dummies), I'm reminded of something that was the subject of conversation in my film school back when Fahrenheit 9/11 came out, and that is, the difference between a documentary and an essay film.
I personally think the word documentary gets used more often than it should; or perhaps I mean it's more broad a word than people realize. People usually put films into two categories (though they might not call them this): narrative and documentary [there's also experimental, but that's for another day], narrative being recreation, documentary being actuality.
But the word documentary, when spoken by most people, has an additional implication of objectivity. And if what people call a documentary doesn't have objectivity, then it's automatically a sub-par doc. This is a very limiting and incorrect way of looking at docs.
The documentary can be divided into two different types: objective/journalist types (Harlan County USA, March of the Penguins); and essay films (Fahrenheit 9/11, Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price). Essay films do not attempt to bury the opinion of the filmmakers, but wear them on their sleeves, while the objective types try to keep the fingerprints of the filmmaker out. Now, all these films are shades of gray between those two extremes, and there is of course, no such thing as objectivity in filmmaking, but you get the idea.
I think essay films get a bad rap, and I've long dreamed of making one. Back when Ian Allen and I were talking about doing "Trapped by the Mormons," another project he had made a play out of, "Kenneth, What is the Frequency," (about Dan Rather's attack in the 80s and its supposed relationship to the writer Donald Barthelme) was on our minds as well. In fact, it was my wet dream that "Kenneth" would be my thesis film. For reasons that are too long to go into here, the film couldn't be done (it was based on an article in Harper's: www.harpers.org/TheFrequency.html), but I'd love to do something like it. "Kenneth" blended doc-style recreations and factual presentation and used them to create a very strange narrative of events. I wish, oh wish, that I had something like that to make a film out of.
(by the way, Thanin, I haven't forgotten your story... I'm just mulling it and procrastinating)
I personally think the word documentary gets used more often than it should; or perhaps I mean it's more broad a word than people realize. People usually put films into two categories (though they might not call them this): narrative and documentary [there's also experimental, but that's for another day], narrative being recreation, documentary being actuality.
But the word documentary, when spoken by most people, has an additional implication of objectivity. And if what people call a documentary doesn't have objectivity, then it's automatically a sub-par doc. This is a very limiting and incorrect way of looking at docs.
The documentary can be divided into two different types: objective/journalist types (Harlan County USA, March of the Penguins); and essay films (Fahrenheit 9/11, Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price). Essay films do not attempt to bury the opinion of the filmmakers, but wear them on their sleeves, while the objective types try to keep the fingerprints of the filmmaker out. Now, all these films are shades of gray between those two extremes, and there is of course, no such thing as objectivity in filmmaking, but you get the idea.
I think essay films get a bad rap, and I've long dreamed of making one. Back when Ian Allen and I were talking about doing "Trapped by the Mormons," another project he had made a play out of, "Kenneth, What is the Frequency," (about Dan Rather's attack in the 80s and its supposed relationship to the writer Donald Barthelme) was on our minds as well. In fact, it was my wet dream that "Kenneth" would be my thesis film. For reasons that are too long to go into here, the film couldn't be done (it was based on an article in Harper's: www.harpers.org/TheFrequency.html), but I'd love to do something like it. "Kenneth" blended doc-style recreations and factual presentation and used them to create a very strange narrative of events. I wish, oh wish, that I had something like that to make a film out of.
(by the way, Thanin, I haven't forgotten your story... I'm just mulling it and procrastinating)
