Telling the Truth

I had bookmarked this article sometime back and thought it would be appropriate to now share with the class. The article is covering this year’s Silverdocs in Maryland.

If there’s an aesthetic lesson conveyed by the premieres at AFI Silverdocs this year, it’s that cinema verite continues to thrive — and the classical approach to documentary filmmaking hasn’t frayed with age. Not that it had been showing signs of a slow demise, but the ongoing talk of meager box office prospects for the form — coupled with Herzogian declarations of “ecstatic truth” and projects like “Chicago 10” trying to take the practice in new directions — suggested a demand for evolution that doesn’t actually exist. As it turns out, great stories work when they’re told well. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, but last year’s oft-repeated trend piece about lukewarm box office reception for documentary releases suggested a broken system in need of revitalization.

Full Article

http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2008/06/dispatch_from_m_7.html

Beyond Words: Photographers of War

Driving home late Thursday night I was listening to Ideas a radio show from the CBC. The topic of the program was photographers of war. I wish I could find a link to the radio broadcast as it was quite chilling to hear these photographers wrestle with their responsibility to their subject. Having tuned into the program in progress and ending my trip home before the show concluded, I did not learn until later that the radio show was actually highlighting a documentary on the subject of photographers in war.

Beyond Words: Photographer of War – a ten minute version

Herzog & Morris

Here is an interesting conversation between Werner Herzog and Errol Morris that was done last year.  There is a large section at the beginning where they talk about verite and the truth which ties into what we’ve been discussing in class.

Also in the conversation Errol makes reference to Werner’s “Minnesota Manifesto” which is something he presented when he made an appearance at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis in 1999:

“LESSONS OF DARKNESS”

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.”

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can´t legislate stupidity.”

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

And here is a video where in the first few minutes Werner expands on what he calls “ecstatic truth”:

Trusting the Filmmaker

One of the cornerstones of documentary filmmaking is trust. The subject trusts that the filmmakers will present them in an honest and accurate light. The audience trusts that what the filmmakers are presenting is truthful.

Because the filmmaker is often exposing the audience to a portion of the world they are not familiar with or providing them with information they do not already know, the audience must take what is presented to be truthful, even factual. Audiences seasoned in documentary form have found particular tropes, such as confident narration from a fatherly male speaker, to make the work more believable.

It’s hard to believe that back in 1957 a false-documentary or mockumentary about a spaghetti harvest in Switzerland could have fooled many people in London. When the BBC originally aired this piece the home viewing audience expected news and information from the BBC and they were accustomed to Richard Dimbleby’s deadpan voice. What they weren’t expecting on April 1st, 1957 was an April Fool’s Day joke in the form of a documentary.

When many phoned in the next day to ask how to grow their own tree, the BBC apparently told them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.