I’m back! Did you miss me? Awww. Thanks.

So I’ve been in India for the past two weeks, and though it was an incredible experience that was worth it all, it has put me a bit on the back foot in terms of my new studio, Go out Into the World and do Good Things.

The studio’s all about looking at documentary in a different light. Rather than seeing documentary as a hierarchical media form where a filmmaker creates a documentary about a passive subject, we’re focusing on the idea of participatory documentary (or ‘open space’ documentary, as it was called by De Michiel and Zimmermann in one of our early readings), in which the subject and the filmmaker collaborate to create the project together. This allows the subject to have more input over how they are portrayed.

Obviously, this type of documentary relies on the subject being a person or group of people (Sir Attenborough might struggle to ask the lions how they feel they are being misrepresented), and for me it brings up some interesting ethical questions. (Ethics was our focus in one of the weeks that I missed, but was explored also in that week’s readings from Patricia Aufderheide, Edwin Martinez and of course Bill Nichols – what kind of a documentary course would it be if there weren’t any Nichols in it?) On the one hand, there’s a constant push within the documentary genre – and a constant expectation from its viewers – for objectivity and ‘truth’. How many times have we seen documentaries criticized for being ‘biased’ or twisting the facts to suit their narrative? Famous documentaries Supersize Me, Nanook of the North and even crowd favourite Bowling for Columbine have all had their fair share of controversy regarding how ‘truthful’ they were. So on the face of it, it seems that allowing documentary subjects to actually control their own representation immediately eliminates the possibility of true objectivity.

But then on the other hand, can documentaries ever be truly objective? And should they have to be? I don’t think anyone watching Bowling for Columbine thought Michael Moore was attempting to be objective; he had a message to promote and he did it in an entertaining, persuasive way. Even documentaries that seem to attempt objectivity (such as expository or observational documentaries) often don’t achieve it simply because it’s only human for a filmmaker to be influenced by their own social context and values. If this is the case, is something like a participatory documentary actually more truthful for acknowledging and being clear about the influence of the subjects?

Obviously, the only way to answer these questions, and the others that will no doubt be posed throughout the studio, was to set about creating our own participatory documentary projects. We started small, with our first project brief in week three being a pitch to the class on our initial ideas for groups to collaborate with.

I was inspired by something I found in one of the Nichols’ readings: “Every film is a documentary . . . In fact, we could say that there are
two types of film: (1) Documentaries of wish fulfilment and (2) documentaries of social representation . . . Documentaries of wish fulfilment are what we would normally call fictions.”

I was fascinated by the idea that fiction could be considered documentary, in the way it demonstrates a greater truth. This reminded me of a film we’d watched in a documentary studies course I did last semester called Forbidden Lie$. Filmmaker Anna Broinowski’s portrait of serial conwoman Norma Khouri embraces Khouri’s lies and uses the interplay of fiction and fact to further highlight her deceitful nature.

Inspired to use a mix of fact and fiction myself, but in a lighter context, I thought of three groups who embrace fictions and alternate personalities: LARPers (live action role players), D&Ders (Dungeons and Dragons players), and cosplayers. I thought that collaborating with these groups could present an interesting opportunity to bring their imaginative fictions to life and to use those stories to say something about them as a group and as individuals.