Documentary has always been a tad vague to me. I’ve never been too concerned with non-fiction as I saw television as a time to escape, rather than be immersed in intellectual discussion.

However, throughout the previous 4 weeks, I have gained an understanding and appreciation for the work that documentarians do. Throughout watching documentaries in my own time and researching social issues, I came across The Melbourne Period Project, and the social issue of homelessness and menstrual periods while living on the streets. I see this social injustice as such a deep issue that has hardly been touched by documentarians.

According to Renov, there are four fundamental ‘tendencies’ of documentary including “to record, reveal, or preserve.” (Renov, M 1993) This is the tendency that has struck my attention and is what I have always considered to be ‘documentary.’ I find documentary similar to journalism, as it aims to provide information to the public. Although, documentary tends to have a more aesthetically appealing streak. News can be bland, documentary has the affordances to be bold and abstract. Although, what they both share, is the aim to promote truth.

With the particular subject of The Melbourne Period Project, the issue of ethics is creeping into the project. The idea of creating a documentary that is appropriate and sensitive to matters including homelessness, particularly women’s homelessness will provide certain restrictions to the creativity of the documentary we are recording. To be able to effectively present a documentary, the documentarian needs to “consider the ability to promise subjects that they will be represented with some fidelity to their expectations.” (Aufderheide, P 2013). To maintain an appropriate representation of our subject we need to act and film in a professional, sensitive manner.

I feel that with such a socially prominent issue, the importance of this documentary is to record and reveal, as well as preserve, rather than to entertain or provide some sort of abstract piece of art. I want an audience to be able to discern their own thoughts and actions from the documentary. I tend to want to promote facts and let an audience persuade themselves or develop their own opinions, rather than drilling into their heads and planting all my thoughts there. Documentaries still are skilful and depend upon “integrity to convince their viewers that they were watching something honestly told about something real.” I think reaching this point of truth through carefully places camera angles and techniques, we will be able to provide persuasion through what’s real. It’s the human condition that people want to believe the truth – therefore, when we produce real, raw, situations there will be nothing to see but what’s actually happening on the streets.

Of course, it’s still very apparent in my own mind, that there needs to be some sort of voice over (preferably during B-roll footage) of narration. While narration can seemingly indicate fabrication, it is rather necessary to provide a more factual account. By denying the audience of a narrator altogether, the documentary begins to feel like a ‘setup.’ “The absence of any clues to the narrator, turns out to be a particular form of fiction, the result of what might be called the referential illusion, where the historian tries to give the impression that the referent is speaking for itself.” (Barthes, R 1970).

References:

Renov, M 1993, Theorising Documentary, Toward a Poetics of Documentary

Aufderheide, P 2013, Ethical Challenges for Documentarians in a User-Centric Environment

Barthes, R, Historical Discourse, Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), 149, 154.