After the screening I realised a few things about documentary and my own preconceptions of it and I was really pleasantly suprised by how amazing documentaries can be and also what works or doesn’t work as well. In terms of what works and doesn’t I think there are three categories documentaries with really great subjects, yet the film doesn’t take full advantage of them. Documentaries with not that great subjects yet the film makes the most of it and documentaries with great subjects who make the most of the opportunity. And then everything in between. I also realised that you can make talking heads work and what about that issue of subtitles? These are all my points today.
So what works?
To be honest I have no idea because documentary is so subjective and therefore what’s boring to someone is interesting to someone else. Therefore, I think it is always important to be original with style and explore the notions of things away from stereotypical representations. Example:
Australia’s Outback: The Whole Hog
This was one of my class’s documentaries and I thought that it was executed exceptionally. I thought they did really well from the rough cut, especially the ending by showing that the narrator was still unsure about the issue and therefore stopped this full sense of resolution. However, I personally have a few problems with it that reflect nothing bad about the production itself because I thought it was really clever, but proves my subjectivity point. Basically, what I wanted was to be shown that these pigs were more destructive that they were a major threat and I never saw this and therefore I think keeping in the killing of the pig still seemed unjustified in my eyes. This is a subjective point for me because I don’t think you should just kill animals for the sake of it, or for the sake of humans, even though I could appreciate where the farmer’s were coming from, they’re still farmers and they were represented this way through the very stereotypical country music. I felt that I was not seeing anything different and I left a little bit disappointed, because I wanted to be convinced and just wasn’t.
Oliver’s Girl
Another one from my class that I thought dramatically improved since the rough cut because it felt so polished and had Oliver in it more. This is my example where I think the talking head really worked because it was mixed with this really well shot active footage of Oliver. By incorporating this in more I think they really overcame the whole talking heads is boring a repetitive scenario, which happened with some of the other documentaries and shows that going out and sort of voyeuristically shooting is really worth the effort. This is because in other cases such as Making It and 43 Days there was not enough variety because you didn’t see anything else and therefore couldn’t stay engaged with the story, well this is what I found. I also thought the cut from one actress to the other in Making It was really abrupt and would have been more worthwhile and I wanted to see more of them not talking to break it up and show more.
was a key topic in terms of the issues surrounding subtitles, which is always an issue, where a lot of people made the claim that it would have been a lot better if we could understand what he said, but look were these people really listening. I agree it was hard to understand him, however I think it is our obligation as an audience to make the effort, even if it is hard to listen or maybe watch it again. We had a similar problem with our documentary because sometimes Maggie is difficult to understand, but I would never have given her subtitles because it is totally disregarding what she really has to say and stops people from actually listening. Also it makes fun of her and her inability to be completely clear, therefore I really think they made a good decision with this piece.
And now into one last point, you always have to respect the person you are interviewing. I thought that maybe the last documentary about the woman that talked to animals was a little bit a ‘make fun of documentary’ and maybe the group should have made a better effort to know this woman away from this that defines her because I thought it was slightly 2 dimensional. Even though I think it’s great to point out the contradictions of what people say, I think you always have to consider what else makes this person and present them as a whole, which I thought was lacking in this production. You need to make your interviewees 3 dimensional.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: cinematography, ethics, kirsten johnson, reading
Often I feel overwhelmed by the amount of men that seem to dominate the film industry and therefore found the interview from Kirsten Johnson particularly enlightening and particularly relevant to our own documentary. Whilst reading I found myself writing down words and phrases that came to mind regarding our own documentary that were extracted from the words of Johnson who has a great grasp of her own visual style and the ethical boundaries that forms her work, which really resonated with me. I truly thank Meenal for telling me about this reading as I feel that this will help our documentary move towards something more insightful.
What first comes to mind, is what Meenal talks about in her own blog post and I feel similarly about this, being that when you are capturing ‘questions of social difficulty’ it is important to capture them beautifully. We are definitely looking to capture this in our own documentary. Originally, we wanted to make it rough, handheld to reflect the hardships of her life. However, now we have stepped back and realised the necessity to shoot our documentary beautifully. We want to keep or audience engaged in the story and to feel an attachment and therefore feel that we need to portray visually a more flowing approach that will harness her life in a way that is engaging to the audience and pays respect to her as our subject.
In conjunction was something Johnson said in terms of expanding the scale of your documentary and making it universally about a certain subject. Yes, we are interviewing one woman but we are trying to say something about homeless women and therefore are using our subject as a spokesperson for homeless women. Johnson speaks of this in relation to a film she did on prisoners where by:
isolating the hands against the uniform that they’re wearing, indicates that we’re talking about prisoners, not just one prisoner
In saying this we need the visuals of a broader context, not only do we need her as our subject, but we need her hands, her feet, the streets, the houses, etc. We need to show that this is not just about her but about homeless women on a broad scale, and what it means to her (to all of them to overcome homelessness). I think it’s important that her words resonate and that some of the things she says applies on a more general level as well, this will also form the questions that I write to target in on contextualising her within the realm of homeless women.
Ethically I feel that from what she says Johnson steps back from her role as cinematographer and truly sees that she is dealing with people who are putting trust into her and her crew.
It’s often incredibly painful for people to talk about some of what they’ve experienced, and yet they have made some kind of choice to let themselves be filmed. In that arrangement, I think there’s a space for human attention.
My first principal is, “Do no harm,” which I think is possible within filmmaking, and it’s a constant question one has to ask oneself.
Both these quotes really resonated with me and emphasised the constant fact that you are dealing with someone’s life and need to know yourself what you are achieving and why, what are you asking and why. Ultimately, these subjects are trusting you and it’s your obligation to do them no harm. In our tutorial on Tuesday we had a group meeting and Sarah asked me if I’m willing to dig, because you have to be, you have to get the information. Even though I totally agree with her there is this need to get information, it is not the prime objective because if this documentary is going to upset our subject we are not making the film that we as a group went out to make, we are trying to strongly position ourselves as showing the realities of homeless women in a positive light. I think there is always a line and your role as a filmmaker is to not cross it, but to find a way that deals with your subject in a way you will get the information without forcing it out of them and I always think there is something to say about people that can’t share their emotions. Johnson talks about a similar case, where she filmed a subject that was very stilted, serious and unemotional, yet after watching him realised this was a cover for the deep emotion he felt, where everytime he took a glass a water he was drinking it to hold back the emotion. She claims it was one of the most emotional interviews she ever filmed. Therefore, there is this overwhelming need to capture movements, capture when the subject drinks, because every movement could be speaking so much louder than the subject can in words. This truly emphasised something Liam asked us last week being why are you making a documentary about this, what can you say that can’t be written in an article? This is it, it is every subtle movement that cannot be expressed in words, but more poignantly than words expresses your subject.
Reference:
Cunningham, Megan. “Searching the Frame, Exposing a Vision.” The art of the documentary : ten conversations with leading directors, cinematographers, editors, and producers, (p. 149-175). Berkeley, CA : New Riders, 2005.
Image Source:
KJ and masai man. “Interview: Director & Cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson.” Still In Motion. <http://stillinmotion.typepad.com/still_in_motion/2010/04/interview-director-and-cinematographer-kirsten-johnson.html>
As I have mentioned in a previous blog post when dealing with people that are naive in terms of knowing about the documentary process and filming it is your ethical obligation not to exploit them, and therefore I wrote this list.
Our ethical approach to informed consent:
It is a) important to tell our subject that she has the right not to answer questions and b) the right to tell us to turn the camera off. It is our obligation to tell her that she has these rights. It is also our obligation to c) tell her what is expected of her to eliminate as much as possible situations a) and b).
What we need to tell our subject:
a) That our documentary is looking to promote awareness of women in regards to homelessness, and not to discriminate against her cause.
b) That we will require her to respond to personal information about her life with the possibility of others (the general public) also viewing our documentary and therefore seeing and hearing her story.
c) However, if she feels we are being too pushy into personal details she has at any time the right to tell us to stop or to move on and we as filmmakers have the ethical obligation to do this.
d) In light of this we will tell our subject when the camera is rolling and when it is not rolling. We will keep her entirely informed of what is happening, including when we are and are not recording.
e) The technical aspects that will be involved before we film. We will have a camera and tripod, lapel microphone that is a small microphone attached to you top, a boom microphone that will be kept out of the way and used to capture background noises rather than our subject’s voice this will be held below our subject rather than in an intimidating manner. We also inform her that there will be four people there to film.
f) We will inform her that the filming will take place over a few days, which are convenient for both her and us.
g) We will inform her that we would like to film other aspects of her life and wish her to grant permission for her to show us things that are important to her to create our visual aesthetic.
h) We will tell her that we would like her to tell us about three aspects of her life: before homelessness, during and after-now.
In class on Tuesday I realised how a good a documentary depends on so many things not just a great subject. Due to us having to find a different subject than I orginally intended means as Liam pointed out that we’ve lost the structure to our documentary. We need to somehow retrieve this structure. Liam pointed out that we need to find something that they do in their everyday life that correlates metaphorically to their actual life story. This is something we need to find to give our documentary direction from beginning to end rather than just a talking head, which we wanted to avoid at all costs. This means a bit more site research to conduct and to figure out a few things. I feel that for me when I think of a documentary I think of that person and their story and don’t think enough about the logistics in terms of style because I just want to capture their story. However, as Liam again pointed out we need to ask ourselves why are we making a documentary instead of just writing an article? We need to capture the visuals that correlate to the stories we need to embed meaning to their stories, we need to make them stand out visually.
A further point. On ethics. Liam brought up a point that is specifically relevant to our documentary and that is someone who is naive to the filming process and how easily it is for the filmmaker to exploit this naivity and the need for us to ethically avoid this. To avoid this we need to give our subject explicit details in terms of what we are doing, such as we think we want you to sit here because it will make you look better, make your story more heard. The tendency with people like this is that they will just agree to be ethical about these situations you need to explain why you are doing everything and be as honest as possible. In the end these people are doing you a favour and you should respect that.
I thought today’s lecture was extremely important and informative in terms of defining the relationship between yourself as a filmmaker and your subject and again brought up the complicated aspects of ethics that was highly relevant in True Lies last semester. In terms of our documentary I thought a lot of key points became relevant. When I was first considering this documentary idea I had an ethical dilemma being what you do and don’t show in terms of your subject. For this I will bring in an example from Bastardy, a documentary that I talked about here. Bastardy opens with the main subject Jack telling the camera as he goes to inject heroin into his arm that he wants the camera to see this and that this is so big a part of his life that there would be no point hiding this from the camera. I think this is a brilliant way to get around some ethical issues concerning drugs and alcohol. The reasons for this is that it is obvious you are not exploiting this character by representing them in a negative way, and clears up this fact for the audience. In terms of what we learnt in True Lies this is about being reflexive of not hiding the fact that the camera is there.
So how is this relevant to our documentary?
I think when you’re dealing with people that are marginalised in one sense or another it is important to tell them exactly what they’re getting into and what they want to show about themselves. Obviously, Jack wanted to show that being a heroin addict was a major part of his life, yet the director wanted to portray this in a way that put the ethical issue onto the subject and made the subject aware that this could be an ethical issue and therefore needed to be justified to the audience by the subject himself. This is an extremely relevant point and I think that these are moments where it is important to be reflexive to ask the subject a simple question such as is it ok if we film this? Do you want this to be in the film? Or something along the lines of why is it necessary that we show this in terms of its significance to your life? If you cover these questions and keep them in the final version of your film as these profoundly reflexive moments you not only cover yourself ethically but you add another layer to your film that shows a trusting relationship between the filmmaker and subject that shows the audience that you as a filmmaker are being sensitive, especially when dealing with people that can be easily manipulated due to their lack of film knowledge.
In this sense it is highly important to go through a process of informed consent, which was something that was discussed in the lecture, of letting your subject know why you are filming them. In our case this is easy because we are not out to exploit, our purpose is to raise awareness and therefore it seems incredibly unlikely that we would want to negatively portray our subject. However, it is important to make this clear to your subject and to get to the heart of what you want your documentary to be about. I think this also guides your subject to hit on certain stories that will be deeply relevant to your, but I think in our case our subject’s cause as well.
For me a perfect documentary is this meshing of causes where you as a filmmaker has the same objective as the subject. In our case we want to raise this awareness about this hidden aspect of homelessness being women, and our subject also wants to do this to reveal herself as a component of homelessness and to show people that homelessness can be overcome to some extent. It is her story, but it is also our story and I think this is extraordinarily important.
What are ethics?
Captured in the law. It is important to talk about because a lot of ethical issues aren’t captured in law.
GOOD WOMAN OF BANGKOK (Dennis O’Rourke)
Essentially the film is a about a filmmaker that hires a Bangkok prostitute and challenges documentary ethics more than most other documentaries. Challenges the distance between filmmaker and subject and breaks that distance into subjectivity away from all objectivity.
Truth is always contested. Documentaries are not unmediated reality, they are representations of reality.
The mediation of reality:
- the presence of the camera. Change of behaviour in front of the camera. Some filmmakers become explicit about the camera being there.
- exclusion. The view of a documentary is always partial, not impartial. You’re always excluding certain events based on decisions that you make. Framing excludes things. The simple act of you turning on and off the camera. The major exclusion process is in editing.
- manipulation. Especially at the editing stage, constructing the reality of the scene. Compression and making things quicker. Juxtaposition, changing the meaning of things.
What are the moral/ethical risks in documentary film-making?
Because there is a lot of trust involved. Respect the trust that the subject has given you to film them. How are you going to respect that trust in the film you make. If you’re filming some form of observational manner, to what extent to you maintain the distance, what is your ethical position?
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.
Ethical consequences of portraying an event in a certain way.
How do you film people in a way that is fairly, that they think is fairly?
The film Stolen had great political impact, yet tricked the subject unethically by paying them money. The whole issue got very contraversial. At the Melbourne Film Festival they re-cut and changed the subtitles of the film. It immerged that the cameraman on the film didn’t allow them to use certain footage because they were unethical. It was re-subtitled due to a complaint by the subject that she didn’t say that.
‘What do we do with people when we make documentaries?’ (Nichols)
Issues are raised when we ask them to pretend that the camera isn’t there. In the art of documentary there are two unwritten contracts:
- A contract between you as a film-maker and your subjects.
- A contract between you as a film-maker and your audience, and what you want to present to them.
At the heart of your film is the relationship between you and your subject(s). The question is why does anyone want to participate in a documentary?
You know them. Publicity. Interested in the issue. Ego. Interested in filmmaking. Interested in the filmmakers.
Informed consent.
- participants should be explicitly told of the ‘possible consequences of their participation.’ (Nichols)
- you need to let them know what is involved. There are situations where this gets very difficult, especially if you’re trying to expose something, especially regarding political issues, or some type of wrong-doing.
- is it appropriate to film illegal acts? Are they aware of the consequences of what they are doing on the film.
- what is the filmmakers obligation to their subject? What is more important?
Release form.
It is important to do this to cover yourself, or a defence to cover yourself. However, make it an informed consent. Make sure they know what they’re getting into. They at any point can decide to not want to be in your film. Manage the relationship as much as possible, your film depends on them. They have a right to tell you to turn off the camera. Let them watch the rough cut, but they don’t have editorial control. The right to request certain material is not used. Yet, you can defend yourself.
How will the making of the film change the life of your subject?
CUNNAMULLA (Dennis O’Rourke)
They took him to court and sued him because he didn’t have informed consent. Legal battle that Dennis O’Rourke lost. Essentially it gets down to an issue of informed consent, that we as an audience don’t know what really happened.
Contract with the audience.
I speak about them to you
It speaks about them to you
ELVIS AT THE MARKET
The subject is vulnerable, and therefore shows how the filmmakers film him and therefore is a high degree of trust. You need to get around the issue of making fun of someone. Making judgements on how you portray your participant(s).
This semester I am going to verge away from simple summaries of lectures and try to pick out things from the lecture that interest me and things that I can draw from in terms of making my own documentary. Therefore for week one’s lecture I will focus on one of 2008 student documentary that we watched called ‘The Nest.’ ‘The Nest’ was about a boy named Reece that had autis, but was explored in a quite sophisticated way. The film begins with a metaphor- a fake bird in a cage accompanied by bird sound effects and the voice-over kicks in of Reece’s older brother. The image of the bird in the cage carries through as representative of Reece’s life, a life that’s boxed in due to his inability to do things that we take for granted, like his brother points out things like driving a car, where his parents will always have to look after him. The great thing about this film is its ability to not look at Reece in a patronising way but to look at his life insightfully, and realise that even though his life is much disadvantaged there is no overwhelming feeling of difference. This we discussed in our tutorial, where Liam pointed out that the brother who narrates the story never blatantly refers to Reece’s disability. Liam pointed out that this is because the brother still finds it hard to talk about it, where similarly to him not being able to tell his girlfriends he is unable to tell us as an audience. However, I would go further than this, where by leaving out the obvious notion that Reece does have autism it treats the subject equally not leaving Reece as a simple embodiement of disability, but more as his brother; where he speaks for Reece in a way that makes us as an audience understand, but without making us just think that this is a child with a disability.
As we learnt last semester in True Lies there is always the notion of ethics and the way we treat the subjects in our documentaries and I think ‘The Nest’ is the perfect example of documentary that could easily go down the lines of being patronising. However, draws away from it and spins a positive light on the disability, without being too caught up in it. It’s tasteful and real, capturing human spirit, which to me is what documentary is all about.
I am truly looking forward to this semester I loved True Lies and I am so grateful that they give us our own opportunities to make documentaries, as it is something I really like doing more so than making fictional films. I also think that I can bring so much knowledge from True Lies to make a successful documentary, well hopefully.
