This week I watched High School, Frederick Wiseman’s 1968 documentary about a suburban high school in Pennsylvania. I’ve seen some of Wiseman’s more recent work whenever it screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival, but it was pretty fascinating to go back 50 years to one his very first films and realise how little his filmmaking philosophy has changed since. Wiseman’s signature is to create long-form, almost longitudinal studies of social institutions (some of his films include Hospital, National Gallery, Juvenile Court, and Public Housing, and those titles alone give you a sense of the kinds of subjects he’s interested in). He’s a pioneer of “direct cinema”, in which the filmmaker himself (or herself) is not present in the film, does not instigate actions to be captured on camera, does not narrate what’s happening, etc. A direct cinema filmmaker is supposed to be a fly on the wall, “capturing reality as it happens” — reality that would have occurred even if the filmmaker wasn’t there to capture it.

Previously I would have watched a movie like High School and assumed that Wiseman was genuinely acting as a fly on the wall, capturing the minutia of a suburban high school in the late 1960s and presenting that material in a way that accurately reflected what was happening at the school. But now, thanks to everything we’ve discussed in this studio, I watched it with my eye much more attuned to the ethical questions that Wiseman would have contended with while he was shooting it, and especially while he was editing it. I now know that “what was happening at the school” can mean extremely different things depending on your point of view, and how Wiseman chose to present it.

The late 1960s was one of the most turbulent periods of the 20th century, with the U.S. engaged in both the Cold War and the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle spilling over into violence (the filming period of High School includes the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated), and the young baby boomers actively rebelling against the old-fashionedness and repression of the previous generation. This was a year after the Summer of Love and a year before Woodstock. Generational tensions, racial oppression, sexual freedom, the devastation of war — all of these subjects are covered in High School, but they are covered with such subtlety that you could easily miss them all. The film is masterfully constructed in the edit: the sequence of shots, how scenes play off one another, how and in which order topics are introduced, all of these things are manipulated to make this a film about much, much more than just a high school. In Werner Herzog’s parlance, Wiseman isn’t a fly on the wall at all, but the hornet that stings.

That Wiseman was able to achieve all this when the form was still in its infancy is really unbelievable, and I don’t think he’s really been given his due. Obviously he’s adored by film nerds and cinephiles, but if there were any justice in the world he’d be as well known as my old mates Werner and Errol.

Yesterday we shot our second and final interview for She Drives, and let me tell you, it’s much more fun to travel to Brunswick in the afternoon than it is to get up at 4am to go to Ballarat!

After the rough cut session we decided to go ahead and scrap the Shebah driver altogether, because they were an absolute nightmare to deal with. Izzi would get someone to agree to an interview, only to have them drop out a few days or a week later, so she had to start all over again with someone else, who would also then drop out… it was pretty frustrating, but I think we’re happy enough with the material we already have that we can make it work without talking to a Shebah driver.

So our interview with Marz, a former Uber driver, suddenly became much more important. I’m friends with Marz and I know she’s an extremely articulate speaker and comfortable on camera, so I knew that the interview would be pleasant, but I had no idea what she would say about her experiences as a female driver. Thankfully she gave us plenty of great stuff, personal anecdotes, stories from other drivers she knows, historical context, all kinds of things. I think it’ll fit together nicely with what we got with Elizabeth, our taxi driver, but it’s fair to say now that our original pitch has been slightly modified for the finished product, since neither Marz nor Elizabeth had much personal experience with harassment. But the general theme and topic of our film will stay the same, the challenge now will be to craft what our subjects said into snippets that build on (or bounce off) one another.

We’re a little behind the eight ball since Marz only had a very small window in which she could give us her time, so this interview was conducted a little later than any of us would have liked, but this is the nature of the beast when you’re asking people for favours. We have a little over a week until the finished film is due, so we’re in the home stretch now.

Today we presented our rough cut of She Drives to the class, and overall I’m pretty happy with how it went. Here are the notes I (shoddily) jotted down from our feedback session:

• topic is topical — female centric stories in the workplace, tick
• shot beautifully — shows the world she lives in
• include more of her active day to day problems, how she deals with things?
• more anecdotal specific stories of how things have changed in the last 30 years?
• needs a hook — part where she says a taxi driver is a psychologist, doctor etc. should go at the front, then move into chronological beginning of the story

This is the first studio of my entire degree where the rough cut feedback we received is detailed, specific and extremely useful. Identifying structural issues (and proposing fixes for them) is so valuable, and I’m really glad that we were able to get the feedback we did because the final result will be much better for it. Once we have our second interview we’ll hopefully be able to slot everything together pretty quickly based on the above.

We still have a lot of work to do from here, because Shebah aren’t really cooperating as we hoped they would. We’re currently discussing whether we should just scrap that part of the story and just go with the taxi and Uber drivers, which will necessitate a big shift in the central question of our film, but I think in the interest of delivering a cohesive final product it will save us a lot of time and effort not to have to worry about wrangling a Shebah driver.

4am starts are not my idea of a good time, but on Tuesday we dragged ourselves out of bed at an ungodly hour to travel to Ballarat and conduct one of our primary interviews for She Drives, with a veteran taxi driver named Elizabeth. In our pitch for this project we had the idea to code each of our interviews visually through time of day, and in order to get some morning light for our taxi driver segment we had to start travelling as early as possible. We missed the actual sunrise itself because by the time the sun rose it was completely overcast, but after about an hour the clouds dissipated and we got some really beautiful landscape shots from the window of our V/Line train:

This is exactly what we were hoping for, and it felt great to know that the early start was totally worth it.

Elizabeth was a wonderful subject, very accommodating of our endless requests (driving her taxi, standing in front of her taxi, getting in and out of her taxi…) and happy to answer all of our questions. What surprised me, though, was that she was adamant that she’d never really been treated differently because she’s a woman. She seemed very modest about her experiences, never said she felt threatened or disrespected, and was almost trying to “sell” taxi driving as a safe and viable profession for women, which makes sense since she’s in the business herself. But it kind of flies in the face of what our original pitch was — we were expecting to find people who could speak about the flaws and dangers of professional driving. Eventually I think she let her guard down and let slip about a couple of instances where she was discounted or dismissed because of her gender, but they came right at the end of the interview and I was honestly worried that we’d have barely any usable interview footage.

Obviously with a university project we have set deadlines that can’t be changed, but I think on future projects it would be a good idea to pre-interview each of our subjects so we know what they’re going to say before we hit record. Firstly, it will help us select the right subjects, since there’s no reason to talk to someone who’s not going to talk about what you want them to, but also because once you know what someone is going to say you can then start planning and editing in your head. Now that we’ve spoken to Elizabeth we can re-order what she said to fit our structure, but if we’d pre-interviewed her beforehand we could have gone into the interview already armed with that information, which might have helped hone and refine our questions so that we didn’t waste any time on questions we wouldn’t use.

I’ve seen Grizzly Man at least three or four times, and my opinion of it has changed quite a lot since my first viewing. Watching it through the lens of ethics and this studio has given me a new appreciation for Herzog’s complete disregard for the rules of documentary filmmaking.

I was surprised to hear people in our class discussion say that they felt Timothy Treadwell’s ex-girlfriend Jewel seemed inauthentic, like her emotions in the scene where Werner listens to Treadwell’s death tape were too “perfect” to be impromptu. But I don’t think people have taken into account that being on camera naturally compels people to look within themselves and really feel their emotions. Werner Herzog isn’t above playing tricks, but he’s always in search of some kind of authentic and genuine (if not literal) emotional truth. Jewel doesn’t seem to me like the kind of performer who could pull off a scene like that.

The coroner, on the other hand… that guy is fascinating. The scene in which he speaks directly to the camera about Treadwell’s death (and the recording of it) has always been my favourite scene in the whole film, and emblematic of what I love about Werner Herzog. The coroner seems so comfortable in front of the camera that I’ve always suspected he may be an amateur actor or something — maybe in local theatre — and Herzog decided that he was too compelling to just shoot in a standard talking-head style. The scene is so strangely shot, with the coroner awkwardly standing still for a few seconds before he begins speaking (like he was waiting for Werner to call “action”), and then staring directly into the camera across multiple different shots as he recounts the tale. It completely breaks every rule documentary filmmakers are supposed to follow, and yet it feels completely authentic in the final product. Perhaps I’m only saying this because I’ve seen a bunch of Herzog films and have been conditioned to expect anything from them, but the scene is just right.

I think some of my classmates can’t shake their expectation that documentaries should only show literal truth (“the Real”, as all our readings call it), which is interesting to me because they’re all much younger than me and have presumably always existed in a world in which filmmakers are radically experimenting with the rules of what a documentary is.

I’ve previously mentioned my dislike for the film Finding Vivian Maier on this blog, and I was reminded of it again this week watching Born Into Brothels (though for different reasons): I am suspicious of any filmmaker who makes a film with them as a main character. John Maloof made a film “about” Vivian Maier but ultimately concentrated more on his part of the story than on Vivian’s. Advanced Style (2014) pretends to be about stylish ladies of advanced age but really it’s about Ari Cohen, whose blog the ladies were featured on (and there’s even a scene, shot and left in the final edit by Cohen, who produced the film, in which the ladies talk about how much they love Cohen and his blog). It’s a surprisingly pervasive issue in documentary filmmaking, and one I am extremely sensitive to.

In Born Into Brothels, its focus on the white woman, Zana, as a main character only made me question her presence. If this film is about the children of sex workers in India, why not focus on them? Why does Zana need to be a character at all? I think it’s because in actual fact, Zana wanted to make a film about herself and her quest to get the kids into boarding schools and education programs, and not about the kids themselves, which actually means that the kids are only minor characters in their own story. I felt as if Zana was exploiting the kids and their situation for her own purposes, noble as her actions may have been.

To me, Zana comes off as a White Saviour with little understanding of the cultural context she finds herself in. While it’s tempting to say that it’s admirable that at least she’s trying to help these children, I think that’s actually a dangerous position to take. White people behaving as if is their responsibility to “elevate” the “uncivilised” people of the world and “improve” their lives by “educating” them (using white culture’s understanding of what education is) has led to centuries of colonisation and the decimation of cultures around the world. While I believe strongly in the ability of rich nations to eradicate poverty and disease around the world, a top-down approach where white people unilaterally decide where and how their “help” will be applied — regardless of the wishes and context of the culture they’re trying to help — is not the way to go.

One white lady taking some gifts to India and shoving a movie camera in the face of some poor people isn’t going to benefit anybody in the long run, and in fact may do more harm than good.

So, ultimately, I think Born Into Brothels is an interesting case-study in how not to shoot a documentary in a developing country, and I’m honestly surprised it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Today we pitched our documentary project to the class. My group — Alice, Anna, Izzi and Zitni — and I all agreed early on in the process that we’ve made several “documentary portraits” already and we wanted to tackle something slightly different, like picking a topic or issue and finding interviewees who would fit into that topic.

Coming up with ideas is my biggest weakness, honestly. I’m pretty confident with my ability to use camera equipment and translate my creative vision to the screen (though I have a lot more to learn there, too!), and I think I’m a good collaborator in that I can develop other peoples’ ideas, but I don’t have a large social network of acquaintances and have struggled in the past to think of interesting subjects to make films about from scratch. (And yes, I recognise that having ideas is fundamental to being a filmmaker…)

Anyway, as a group we came up with the idea of talking to female drivers. At first we were going to base our film around a single driver for the female-only ride-sharing service Shebah, but with help from Rohan we decided that it might be more interesting to compare a Shebah driver to other professional female drivers (taxi and Uber), and see if they have common experiences or outlooks in their life and work.

We have collaborated well so far to develop that initial nugget into a fully-fledged idea — something that could conceivably be turned into an actual film. We’ve got a central question, a structure and some ideas for the visual style we hope to achieve. The biggest question mark is whether we can find not one but three interview subjects who: 1) are willing to be interviewed, 2) are available during our filming schedule, 3) are comfortable on camera, and 4) have something interesting to say. But our initial enquiries have been positive, and I think we’ll benefit from the fact that professional drivers are generally quite personable because they communicate with people all day.

I’m a little anxious that the success or failure of our film lies entirely in the hands of people who we’ve never met, but I want to get out of the comfort zone of only interviewing people I know personally. Here goes!

I asked Heather to recount her experiences in Egypt during the 2011 revolution for the TFPDT editing exercise. She spoke for 17 minutes in total, and the biggest challenge was to cut that material down to two minutes while maintaining narrative coherence and the structural integrity of her sentences. She warned me beforehand that she’s not a natural storyteller, so I had to occasionally chime in and remind her to speak in terms of what she saw or felt, and to paint a picture of what she experienced, so it took quite a bit of cajoling to get enough material to use. It also made it challenging to edit down, because I almost had to manually shape fragments of her story into a succinct, coherent whole.

Being in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution or walking down a deserted street and being stopped by a van full of men wielding machetes are the kinds of experiences that a natural storyteller could turn into quite compelling first-person narratives, but Heather was almost embarrassed by the idea that I was asking her about what happened. She’s naturally very modest and I think she didn’t want to come across as if she was big-noting herself for being close to a major world event, which is an impulse I understand, but she told the story with a lot of self-deprecation — which certainly doesn’t help the process of making a documentary about her experiences!

But having said all that, there were some major advantages in filming Heather for this exercise — she had a selection of photos she took while in Egypt that could be used for cutaways, and there’s obviously a wealth of archival material about the Egyptian revolution that I could use to illustrate what she was talking about. The major disadvantage is that I couldn’t think of any relevant B-roll footage to shoot. It would have been easier if she was talking about a hobby or something like that, so I could film her participating in that hobby, but since she was speaking about an experience in the past it was difficult to think of anything to film in the present.

Ultimately, there were pluses and minuses to this first assessment exercise and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into something a bit more in-depth.