Kay Donovan, 2012, ‘The ethical stance and its representation in the expressive techniques of documentary filming: a case study of Tagged’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 10:3, pp.344-361.
“Each one’s desire to have their story told on a bigger stage is a most truthful representation of the film”
An Australian-based researcher made a documentary film, Tagged, which traces the lives of four young people living in Bankstown, Sydney as they transitioned from being teens to adults. It usefully points us to the broader questions of ‘ethics’ that might be part of a media practitioner’s practice both in terms of the actual process of production (relationships with participants) and aesthetic choices made in the actual media work.
Debates about ethics in documentary tend to be sporadic, applying seasoned topics of ethical debate to documentary filmmaking or using textual analysis to examine the ethics encoded in specific films
- In taking the role of the story teller, it is up to the filmmaker to interpret the contempory, historical world, to create an argument about it that helps us to make sense of it.
Tagged draws on documentary and ethnographic filmmaking theories that examine ethics as an ideological argument embedded in the aesthetic choices in the film.
- Filmmaking practices influence the representation of ethics in the visual and aural elements of the film.
- There are concerns about what constitutes consent, truth and deception, the researcher’s (filmmaker’s) responsibility toward subjects, the right to know versus the right to privacy, the proprietary rights to the products of the research and consequently issues about the benefits and payment, and compliance with formal standards or codes of practice.
According to Nichols (1991), the key purpose of documentary is to create a representation of the historical world, which is focused around an argument that is being made about it and within that argument there is an ethical perspective. He argues that ethics is a discourse between the ideology of the filmmaker’s argument and the representation of participants and he questions how visual representations that are created through the camera place the filmmaker in relation to that historical world. He argues that ‘axiographics extends those classic topics of ethical debate … to include the ethical implications conveyed by the representation of time and space itself’
- Documentary and ethnographic filmmaking are two distinct fields of study
- Participatory cinema is built around concepts of collaboration and shared authorship between filmmakers and the subjects of their films.
- The unprivileged camera style is ‘a style based on the assumption that the appearance of a film should be an artefact of the social and physical encounter between the film-maker and the subject’
- The notion of collaboration is based on respect and humility. The camera work reflects the sensitivity of the filmmakers towards their subjects.
Ethics
The notion of an ethical stance describes a position in relation to ethics that the filmmaker either intentionally or incidentally develops for the film. It builds on the ethics that the filmmaker brings to the film as well as those that arise in the course of research and production. Ethical issues were the focus of questioning throughout the production whether they reflected the ideology in the classic topics of ethical debate such as consent and payment, or in the aesthetic and discursive elements of the film. The focus of this paper lies with identifying ways that the ethics can be seen in the aesthetic and discursive elements.
The ethical stance valuing their individuality was achieved through a number of aesthetic and discursive choices – for example, the conversations
Conversation
Constructing the film around a series of conversations was in part a search for an authorial device that would allow space for collaboration and avoid the discursive control that the filmmaker has in interviews. . ‘Conversation initiated a process through which original knowledge could be generated’ (Grimshaw 2001, 138).
