MEDIA IS A PUBLIC PRACTICE

I was absent for this lecture thus I will make my comments based on the reading The ethical stance and its representation in the expressive techniques of documentary filming: a case study of Tagged Kay Donovan a Centre for Creative Practice and Cultural Economy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology , Sydney.

This paper discusses the ethics of documentary film making. The writer, Kay Donovan,  uses her own film as an example: the 60 minute documentary Tagged about four young people over three years as they transition into adulthood. Donovan states that ‘we expect a documentary to represent in a fair and honest way somebody’s experience of reality’ and that ‘In doing this, documentarians make judgements about inherent right or wrong, goodness or badness, and they also contribute to our social discourse about what we value in our society and how we deal with it.’
Therefore, filmmaking becomes reflexive, that it is ‘checking in on itself’ as it tries to follow an ethical path. However, the portrayl of the subjects comes with the director’s own set of values and so can not be considered authentic but rather a subjective examination. There are dilemmas that the film maker must encounter from omissions of material, editing out truths to portray one that suits the narrative and the consent of the subject become a blurred proposition (i.e. how much are they consenting to?).
‘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.’ (Donovan)

Donovan goes on to describe that axiographic space that is ‘the Gaze’, ‘the observer and the observed’. When does the filmmaker intervene? We have seen this recently on the SBS program Struggle Street when neither the crew nor other subjects intervened to stop a pregnant woman smoking. Whereas, John Pilger in Land of Fear, actually stopped filming to help a boy that had become trapped in a trench he was digging. Pilger appears to be acting within his own and widely accepted set of ethics as opposed to the SBS filmmakers who were roundly criticised for their lack of theirs.
For Donovan, on her making of Tagged, concludes that it was reflexive one, that she took into her account her ethical standards and reflected those in her work with her subjects.

REFLECTION

Having made short documentaries, it is all too tempting to make subtle changes of ‘a truth’ of the subject in the filming and editing process. You can portray your subject positively or negatively simply with taking what they’ve said out of context or through gross omissions. I’ve always tried to make my subject to be put into a position to be judged unfairly. This aside, if we examine the famous documentary maker, Michael Moore, we can see that he has manipulated events and people to tell and push his own agenda. In a Canadian documentary Manufacturing Dissent: Uncovering Michael Moore (2007) about him, it was exposed that he had indeed had meetings with the head of General Motors when he had claimed in his own documentary Roger and Me (1989) that he had been continually rebuffed. Furthermore, there were scenes he had staged such as when he was at a shareholders meeting and the lights were turned off on him as he tried to speak. Apparently this never happened.
Anyway, it’s something to keep in mind when approaching a documentary making project in the future for we assume that if it is this genre then we assume it is documenting reality.