In this seminar, we largely focused on the central concern of Project Brief 2: the ethical or aesthetic limitations in direct cinema approaches to documentary film making.

While this qualm is not per se a novel one in the scope of my academic experience (having studied True Lies as part of my contextual major last year), reviewing the limitations in relation to industry applications provided new argumentative angles both for and against that I’d previously not noticed.

For example, a central critique of direct cinema is the paradoxical and self contradictory argument that if a film lacks explicit or discernible manipulation of the reality its indexicalising, it therefore captures some transcendental notion of truth more readily than the counterparts which engage with their subject in both stages of filming and post production. The idea here is that in foregoing a selective gaze for a more fly-on-the-wall approach, documentaries might come to negate ideology for the more noble pursuit of authentic and untainted data gathering.

   

On a personal level, I see this idealisation of documentary practice as both fallacious and unhelpful. Largely, having a Post Modern understanding which negates transcendental idealising and further yet, a dialectical materialist perspective which highlights the necessary conflict and friction between opposing binaries as the central crux driving the art-making and art-work(ing) experience, direct cinema is somewhat simplistic in its conceptual framework of truth. Further yet, it limits its aesthetic embodiment to a series of laissez faire filmmaking practices which scaffold their artistic merits on the shaky grounds of spontaneity and loosely defined (or worse yet- deliberately ambiguous) goals.

Consequently, in aligning with a direct cinema approach to film making we limit the scope of artistic innovation from say, a deliberate usage of select moments in an interview with a black and white mindset and the unforgiving philosophy that if it’s selectively included, it is necessarily tarnishing of a more aloof cinema experience. The idea is of course, (and not recently critiqued as such) absurd, as we know by default of its temporal structure, cinema involves an editing process which curates specific narratives and gazes over others- whether it be for artistic reasons or political agendas.

I suppose largely what I am grappling with here, is the idea that perhaps in recognising the subjective and often underlying ideologies which inform our artistic motivations and inclinations, we can in fact move beyond the ostensible barriers which bar us from a ‘truth’ to more readily and savagely embrace a truth that is, in fact discernibly, ours.