Reading Notes
Documentary is important:
"You will see that documentary is that rare medium in which the common person takes on large, important issues and shakes up society"
Documentary cannot be defined rigidly
"Get two documentarians together, and the chances are high that they argue about what documentary is. Even though documentary has evolved continuously from its inception, its preview and methods remain ambiguous, and its parameters keep enlarging...The disagreement arise over allied issues:
- What any given actuality really is
- How to record it without compromise and without injecting alien values
- How to honestly and truthfully convey something that, being more spirit than materiality can only be discerned subjectively"
Documentarians think highly of themselves
"People who make documentaries put a high value on the joy, pain, compromise and learning that come from being completely alive. No wonder they make great company"
Documentary is socially critical
"Documentary always seems concerned with uncovering further dimensions to actuality and at the same time implying social criticism"
Documentary is an organised story
"Successful documentaries, like their fiction counterparts, tell a good story and engaging characters, narrative tension, and integrated point of view."
True documentary goes beyond and incites more in the viewer
"True documentary reflects the richness and ambiguity of life, and goes beyond the guise of objective observation to include impressions, perceptions, and feelings. Human reality under pressure becomes surreal and hallucinatory, as you see so memorably in Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line (1998). Modern documentarians must be ready to represent not just the outward, visible reality of those they film but also their inner lives, because thoughts, memories, dreams and nightmares are the inside dimension of their lives"
Documentary must be fair and balanced
"Fairness. In a world of ambigiutiies the documentarian's responsibility is to be fair...A film may be accurate and truthful, but it may fail unless it is perceived as such"
Documentary is
"a branch of the expressive arts, not a science"
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