Monthly Archives: March 2018

They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Case studies in objectivity

For the past three years I’ve been a part of the feature film programming panel for the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, which means I get to watch dozens and dozens of documentaries through the year hoping to find some that might fit HRAFF’s mission to screen challenging, high-quality films dealing with human rights-related subject matter. It can often be brutal viewing, but it’s also given me incredibly deep exposure to all kinds of films from around the world, and a continually growing love for the documentary form.

After seeing such a wide variety of films, the idea of “objectivity” has become particularly interesting to me, because objectivity is usually a flexible concept in the sorts of films that would expect to be screened at a human rights film festival. The conventional wisdom is that true objectivity cannot possibly exist (since by turning on a camera or making a cut you are creating a perspective), but that filmmakers should strive for objectivity and fairness anyway. I guess this comes from the pre-Maysles idea that documentary films should be educational, and thus should attempt to convey everything as accurately and true-to-life as possible, e.g. by presenting both sides of an issue, or by attempting to be a comprehensive as possible when depicting an event, or by being a fly on the wall and not influencing anything, etc.

But now, there is a whole world of “activist films” that intentionally choose to have no respect for the entire notion of objectivity: think An Inconvenient Truth, Chasing Asylum, 13th. These films’ goal is not to be comprehensive or show both sides of an issue, but to convince an audience to think or behave a certain way. They understand that every single film ever made is subjective, even the ones that try to be objective, so you might as well just go all the way and embrace subjectivity and the ability to manipulate your material to make it as convincing as possible.

While we’ve been discussing the ethical concerns of documentary filmmaking in class, I’ve found myself applying these discussions to some of the films I’ve watched for HRAFF, and there are a few that I’ve found particularly interesting in this context, so I thought I’d do a couple of case studies around the notion of objectivity and the role of the filmmaker in participating in (or instigating) the actions captured in their film.

The White World According to Daliborek

Daliborek is a forty-something Czech man who lives with his mother, makes YouTube videos that get single-digit views, traces drawings of pornography off the television, and makes really terrible heavy metal music in his spare time. He’s also a hateful, neo-Nazi skinhead. The film is a portrait of Daliborek and his extremist views, but told with an eye to the banal, ordinary details of Daliborek’s life. The film doesn’t seem to challenge his views, and instead subtly shows their ridiculousness by having such an utterly pathetic character profess them.

The director has participated in workshops with Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), and as a result there is an air of performativity and theatricality to many parts of the film. It can often be difficult to identify which events occurred naturally and which were influenced by the filmmakers, but there is a moment towards the end of the film where the line is completely obliterated. Daliborek and his family travel to the Auschwitz concentration camp (at the suggestion of his mother’s boyfriend, but again it’s debatable whether this was devised by the filmmakers), and take a guided tour during which they are introduced to a Holocaust survivor who recounts her experiences during the war. Daliborek begins peppering her with questions about the veracity of her story, denying that it would be possible for that many people to be killed, and other such ridiculous neo-Nazi talking points. The poor woman is incredibly distressed, but Daliborek continues until the film’s director actually steps out from behind the camera, into frame, and begins arguing with Daliborek. Even in such a theatrical documentary, it’s still jarring to see a filmmaker literally walk into frame and shatter the illusion of objectivity.

In press materials for the film all the director says about his actions is “I had to, it was unbearable” — referring to the act of standing by and watching while the subject of his documentary, someone who was only at Auschwitz because he brought him there, began to accost a Holocaust survivor. But I wonder why that was the moment he chose to finally step in and put a stop to Daliborek’s antics, and not when he was recording racist videos to upload to YouTube, or laughing with his family about killing “gypsies”. When the director brought Daliborek to Auschwitz, what did he expect would happen? Did a part of him hope that Daliborek would act in this way so the documentary would be more compelling? Because that’s certainly what happened — the documentary is fascinating and the ending in particular had me staring at my TV in disbelief.

A Woman Captured

The origin of this film is somewhat difficult to ascertain. The opening titles state that the director was travelling through Hungary when she was introduced to a woman, Marish, who worked as a “domestic slave” — she lives with a middle-class family and cooks, cleans and does other work around the house for them, without payment and withstanding constant abuse, and without the ability to look for other work or an improved living situation. The filmmaker, shocked at the discovery that domestic slaves even exist in modern Hungary, asked to film her and was allowed to spend months observing. (The fact that the “host” family even allowed their slave to be filmed shows how little they cared about the legality of keeping a slave.)

From the very beginning, it feels like the filmmaker is attempting to convince Marish that her situation is not normal and she should try to escape. She asks Marish leading questions about the morality of keeping a slave, asks her about her life before moving in with her host family, and even helps her make arrangements for her eventual life outside (such as driving her to a job interview, and of course filming it). There’s never any suggestion that the filmmaker is anything but an interested party — the film is really just her documenting her efforts to save Marish, it doesn’t pretend to be objective in any way and the filmmaker’s voice is very much present in the film. It’s a fascinating choice, and it works really well — the film is one of the most cathartically emotional and powerful I’ve seen in many years.

Would either A Woman Captured or The White World According to Daliborek have worked without such obvious intervention from their directors? Possibly, but I don’t think they would have been anywhere near as successful at achieving their aims.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Documentary ethics and The Wolfpack

What do documentary filmmakers owe their subjects?

Should subjects expect their actions/views/opinions to be accurately represented? What if the subject lies about something? Should the filmmaker include the lie, include it with additional context/contradiction, or remove it entirely? What if the lie is the story (e.g. The Thin Blue Line)?

Should the subject get final approval over which of their statements (and how much of said statements) make it into the final cut? Or should filmmakers be able to use anything they capture on camera?

The article The Wolfpack and the ethics of documentary filmmaking1 has really got my brain working overtime trying to untangle all these knots.

Documentary filmmaking seems like an odd kind of collaboration.

On one side you have the subject/s, whose story is being told and should therefore have the right to tell the story how they like. On the other side you have the filmmaker, the person who has decided to make a film in the first place and should therefore control the shape of the final product. Without the filmmaker you have no film, but without the subject you have no film either.

In some ways it’s a weird kind of adversarial collaboration, because if the filmmaker goes too far to appease the subject and doesn’t approach the story with a critical eye, they leave themselves open to manipulation from the subject. But by the same token, if the filmmaker completely disregards the subject’s wishes and treats the subject as nothing more than a source of information, the subject could pull out of the project and deny the filmmaker access to a crucial perspective.

These ideas were ruminating in my head as I watched The Wolfpack, which concerns a group of siblings holed up in a New York City apartment for essentially their entire lives without any contact with the outside world. The kids and the filmmaker each had a vested interest in this story being made: the kids were obsessed with movies and wanted to get into the entertainment industry (and saw a film about them as a potential avenue towards this goal), and the filmmaker had stumbled upon an incredibly rare and interesting situation to make a film about. The filmmaker — Crystal Moselle — was in a precarious position, because her ability to tell this story was entirely dependent on her continued access to the Angulo family and their apartment, so if she did anything the kids didn’t like they could have asked her to leave and never come back, leaving her without anything to film. Moselle has complete power over the finished product of the film, but the kids control her ability to create that final product.

The Wolfpack strikes me as more of a willing collaboration than many documentaries: Moselle seemed happy to allow the Angulo kids to drive the story, to talk about only what they wanted to talk about, to leave certain areas of potential interest unexplored. The resulting film is as much the Angulos’ film as it is Moselle’s, at least in my estimation. It’s very different in tone and style compared to, say, Senna, which is about Ayrton Senna but obviously had no involvement from him, since he had passed away years earlier. The ethical concerns in that case are much different to in the case of The Wolfpack, though no less important and interesting to think about.

After watching the film I went looking for some interviews with Moselle, because I was really interested in how she found this incredibly unique story. In an interview with Flicks from around the time the film played at MIFF, she answered this question:

FLICKS: I’M SURE THIS IS A FAMILIAR QUESTION BY NOW, BUT IT HAS TO BE ASKED – HOW DID YOU MEET THESE KIDS?

CRYSTAL MOSELLE: I was just walking down the street in New York City and they ran past me. And something about them just really intrigued me.

As a filmmaker I find inspiration from characters, usually people that I just see around. And so I went after them. I just instinctively ran. I don’t even know why.

The director literally passed some interesting looking kids on the street in NYC and approached them — that illustrates the kind of attitude you need to have as a documentary maker. You need to be willing to break or ignore social boundaries and investigate things other people would never investigate. It’s a lot like being a journalist: you need to be comfortable picking up a phone or walking up to a stranger and just asking them questions. I really want to be the kind of person who can do that — I often find myself on a tram noticing someone and wondering what their story is — but I need to get over the social anxiety that stops me from doing it.

  1. Thomas, S. (2015), ‘The Wolfpack and the ethics of documentary filmmaking’, Pursuit, <https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-wolfpack-and-the-ethics-of-documentary-filmmaking> ↩
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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

TFPDT Week 1: What am I doing here?

Through my degree so far I’ve discovered that my talents — such that they are — most certainly do not lie in the narrative fiction side of filmmaking. For one thing, I struggle to come up with creative ideas for stories and characters. That seems like a major area that a filmmaker should generally be across. But I’m also rubbish with devising/setting up shots, and my technical camera skills are nowhere near as good as most other people I’ve worked with. Stanley Kubrick I am not.

But I have realised that I harbour ambitions of working as a writer, journalist, radio producer or documentary maker (in audio or film) — creative fields that align with my interests but also align with some of the skills that I do already possess. In previous studios I’ve dipped my toe into short subject documentary and audio narrative nonfiction, both of which I really enjoyed, and the They Film People, Don’t They studio seems like one that would help me further develop those skills (and, hopefully, the technical side of camera work and sound recording too).

Also, after being a part of the Room With a View studio last year, I decided that one of my goals for 2018 is to work more on audio production and radio narrative nonfiction, so if I’m able to work in audio this semester I would be stoked.

The other major aspect of the studio that appeals to me is the question of ethics in documentary making. I was going through my ratings of documentaries on Letterboxd and noticed that many of the ones near the top (i.e., my favourite docs) deal with complex moral subject matter or have interesting ethical concerns related to their production: Hoop Dreams, Night and Fog, The Fog of War (and, let’s be honest, all of Errol Morris’s films), The Act of Killing, The Work, the Paradise Lost films… I think I tend to gravitate towards films that pose questions about consent/conflicts of interest or somehow blur the line between fact and fiction. I’d like to delve deeper into questions around what “actuality” is, and how different filmmakers deal with (or don’t deal with) these ethical concerns.

So at the very least, I hope one thing I’ll draw from this studio is a deeper understanding of the films I love to watch, and the critical faculties to better understand the documentary making process.

In summary, what I want to learn from this studio:

  • Film production processes and best practices
  • Camera work / cinematography skills
  • Tips for finding subjects and the interview process
  • Audio storytelling
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