## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Rabiger]] - Full Title: Directing the Documentary - Category: #books ## Highlights - To be successful, your documentary must have engaging characters, narrative tension, and something to say about the human condition. ([Location 443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=443)) - Every compelling story, fictional or documentary, has characters striving to accomplish something and overcoming obstacles from their circumstances. How they do this and whether they succeed provides the dramatic tension that keeps us enthralled. ([Location 449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=449)) - Right versus wrong is easy to decide—more interesting and challenging is right versus right. ([Location 535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=535)) - All successful stories center on some aspect of human development, no matter how minimal and symbolic this happens to be. In a world convulsed with evil and pain, stories leave us with hope and some optimism, for unless we see the most important characters learn something and grow just a little, then watching their struggles produces a feeling of defeat that discourages us from taking any action of our own. ([Location 545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=545)) - Memorable documentary does not sit on the fence and balance opposites. It tries to value and interpret people and events in a way that history would vindicate. ([Location 565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=565)) - “A documentary is a corner of actuality seen through a temperament. ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=717)) - documentaries are usually improvisations about people improvising their way through life ([Location 4239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=4239)) - No audience likes stories made too easy. We prefer to interpret and weigh information as we do in everyday life. An “unreliable” character is particularly interesting because he or she challenges us to use our judgment. ([Location 4496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=4496)) - After considerable editing, a debilitating familiarity sets in and your ability to make judgments seems to go numb. This is most likely to cripple director–editors who have lived with the intentions for the footage since their inception. Soon every alternative version looks similar, and all seem too long. Two steps are necessary. One is to make a flow chart of your film like a block diagram so you can see its ideas and intentions anew. The other is to show the working cut to a trial audience of a chosen few. ([Location 4592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=4592)) - At screenings for a trial audience, never explain the film or explain what you intended. Your film is supposed to do that. Instead, turn any questions around and solicit the audience’s perceptions. These will tell you how your film is actually functioning. Listen carefully and keep notes. ([Location 4640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=4640)) - Your first and most fundamental choice is between the two approaches you will recall from Chapter 5, Documentary Language: one being to observe without inter-ceding and the other allowing the director and crew to intercede and interact. ([Location 5185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5185)) - Few films take a purist attitude—most use whatever strategy is effective. With each new sequence you film, you will have to choose between these two polarities. ([Location 5199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5199)) - Yoav Shamir’s Checkpoint ([Location 5213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5213)) - When POVs are strongly present you know, because you get that enormously exciting sense of temporarily vacating your own existence and entering someone else’s emotional and psychological experience. How this works almost defies explanation, and filmmakers able to convey it seem to practice it more viscerally than conceptually. Experiencing a character’s or storyteller’s point of view means temporarily leaving your own existence to enter someone else’s and to experience their emotional and psychological reality. ([Location 5236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5236)) - It begins from this: As a film storyteller you must aim not only to convey your perception of your characters but also to get us emotionally involved in their perceptions and feelings. It is hard to believe you can control any of this during a shoot and hard even to locate these qualities in a finished film except in an intuitive way. Maybe you can see now why throughout this book I have stressed that all film technique came from human experience. When practiced from the head, it becomes an intellectual design, or just commercial packaging. If you want to change hearts and minds (in that order), your heart will have to rule over the tools of your trade. I don’t mean you must inject sentimentality; I mean you must recognize and share in the emotion that’s present. Everyone while growing up arms himself against feeling vulnerability and pain by denying his emotions. That’s why it took Picasso half his lifetime to paint with the emotional receptivity and openness of a child. Making documentary will help you undo this damage, and your films will directly reflect where you have got to. See the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975, United States; Figure 17-5) for a film that fully accepts, and never patronizes or mocks, its highly eccentric mother and daughter subjects. This is a filmmaking team for whom “nothing human is alien.” ([Location 5241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5241)) - Such empathy and points of view begin spontaneously emerging whenever the filmmaking team: Has a clear and guiding purpose for telling the tale Knows at every point what they want the audience to feel Relates empathically, not just intellectually, to the characters and their story… ([Location 5255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5255)) - A surveillance camera can have no POV because it has no empathy. You, however, are making a film and relating to the participants, shot by shot, day by day, issue by issue. Your involvement translates to… ([Location 5259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5259)) - The clearer and stronger your inner attitudes are—both to your participants and to the film’s purpose—the more your film acquires heart and soul. That’s why this book insists on, first, self-exploration as the foundation of creative identity and, second, creative identity as the springboard to purposeful and inspired empathic… ([Location 5264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5264)) - The uniqueness and force of a film’s major POV depend on its tension with other, minor POVs. In art, as in life, everyone… ([Location 5270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5270)) - The multiple-character POV approach, excellent for demonstrating a social process, its actors, and outcomes, works with either observational or participatory approaches. It particularly suits a cross-section film, revealing cause and effect within a collective such as a family, team, business, or class of society. ([Location 5323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5323)) - my late friend and mentor Robert Edmonds, author of Anthropology on Film (1974, Pflaum Publishing), contended that all documentaries are propaganda because all seek to persuade. He liked to be provocative; all documentaries argue for something, but one that simplifies the evidence to make its conclusions unavoidable is seeking to condition, not argue. This is undoubtedly propaganda. ([Location 5385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5385)) - Screen language at its most compelling implies, as we have said, the course of a particular intelligence at work as it grapples with the events in which it participates. ([Location 5432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5432)) - In a sometimes dark and hopeless world, we need stories reminding us of the constructive options that are always present. This is the role of the Storyteller and represents a power for good. ([Location 5436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5436)) - Nobody will recognize you and give you the storytelling authority you long to exert. You must take it. Choose the Storyteller role your film needs to adopt, and play it to the hilt. We expect stories with meaning, humor, style from you … stories that reverberate with meaning. You won’t entertain us by reflecting reality. Holding up a mirror is seldom enough. You need to give us a reality that is heightened, unusual, and marked with purpose and personality. ([Location 5438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5438)) - Documentary storytelling means assembling pieces of reality with verve and style and saying something about what it means to be alive. Nothing else is enough. Only those of large heart and large mind and willing to do a large amount of work can carry this out. Today, with so many people making documentaries, only the outstanding can prosper at it. ([Location 5442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5442)) - To be reflexive is to structure a product in such a way that the audience assumes that the producer, the process of making, and the product are a coherent whole. Not only is the audience made aware of these relationships, but it is made to realize the necessity of that knowledge.”1 ([Location 5465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5465)) - You can find Jay Ruby’s long essay, “Exposing Yourself: Reflexivity, Anthropology, and Film,” at http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/ruby/exposing.html. ([Location 5473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5473)) - How often are we really seeing spontaneous life rather than something instigated by or for filmmaking itself? How much of a film’s purview is inhibited by ethical concerns for its participants? Do the participants know how we will judge them? Does the film reflect reality or does it manufacture it? ([Location 5484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5484)) - most important doors never open until the director pushes and pushes. ([Location 5528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5528)) - Digital technology liberates you to subtitle, freeze, or otherwise break out of actuality’s hypnotic advance. By slowing the image, playing it backwards, filtering it, superimposing or interleaving texts at will, you can invite us to question, doubt, and reflect—not simply accept as heretofore. ([Location 5535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5535)) - Digital technology lets you comment on actuality, rather than simply reproduce its appearance and hope the audience will look deeper. More subjective and impressionistic, this freedom of treatment unshackles the screen from servitude to real time and its byproduct, realism. ([Location 5538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5538)) - Your greatest challenge as a filmmaker will always be finding fresh film language. You’ll do this best, I contend, by journeying inward to comprehend your own emotional and psychic experience and finding equivalencies to render it on the screen. Only in this way can you connect us convincingly with other realities—those of your subjects and those of yourself and your associates. Perhaps someone will see your work and echo André Malraux’s words about the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Cé line—that he wrote “not about reality, but about the hallucinations raised by reality.” Documentary is a young genre in the young art of cinema; it has only scratched the surface of its potential. You are entering a time when documentaries no longer have to pretend to present objectivity or transparency. The only restraint is still that documentaries must relay aspects of actuality (past, present, or future) and imply a critical relationship to the fabric of social life. ([Location 5542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5542)) - Heroes are central characters writ large—characters of magnitude who challenge what people consider normal and thus seem to contest the rules of the universe. ([Location 5584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5584)) - It’s seldom straightforward to forecast how documentary shooting will turn out. Applying the traditional dramatic curve to your ideas, however, is useful during research. It’s vital to your judgment as action unfolds in front of your camera, and it’s outstanding as an analytic tool during editing, which is really the second chance to direct. ([Location 5629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5629)) - Pinpoint the apex or crisis of a scene, and the rest of the dramatic convention arranges itself naturally before and after the peak of the curve. ([Location 5646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5646)) - Hollywood uses the three-act formula with awful fervor; some screen-writing manuals even prescribe a page count per act, with page numbers at which “plot points” should take the story lurching off at an unexpected tangent. Documentary is too wayward to enable such control, but it still needs to be dramatically satisfying. This remains true for essay, montage, or other forms of documentary, not just those that are obviously about struggle. Indeed, you find this escalation of pressure up to a crisis then lowering down to resolution in songs, symphonies, dances, mime, and traditional tales, because it is as fundamental to human existence as breathing or sex. ([Location 5671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5671)) - A documentary scene can be a drama in miniature, following the curve of pressures that build to a climax then release into a new situation. ([Location 5685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5685)) - When you see someone go through a moment of irreversible change of consciousness, such as realizing his love is recognized or being faced with incontrovertible evidence that he lied, you are seeing a beat ([Location 5687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5687)) - Other characters in the scene may not notice anything, but that character (and the informed onlooker) registers that moment of change, and knows that he must now take a different course of action. ([Location 5692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5692)) - A beat is when someone in a scene registers an important and irreversible change. Often it’s when participants realize they have lost or gained an important goal. A beat signals a new phase of action, so you must film them astutely since they are your film’s most intense and dramatic moments. ([Location 5696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5696)) - Following an agenda, the central characters face an issue. They encounter complications that raise the stakes. They reach the apex of the problem. They develop a strategy to solve the problem. It either works or doesn’t, leading to a beat—which is a point of irreversible realization. Success or failure is the resolution. Resolution leads into a new issue or problem. A scene may have one dramatic unit or several. As you learn to recognize them taking place all around you in daily life, you mentally practice how you’d film them. For the example above, how much attention should your camera give to the fridge? How do you show the obstacles? How much do you dwell on one or other of the two men? What character traits does each manifest during this revealing interaction, and how can you bring them out? ([Location 5711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5711)) - Being able to recognize this dramatic breathing action, being able to cover it sensitively with the camera as it takes place, is the preeminent skill for directors in fiction or in documentary. ([Location 5721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5721)) - Directing or shooting, you are always trying to see ahead and discern each character’s agenda. How to cover the scene only emerges once you have clues and a hypothesis. ([Location 5734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5734)) - Every documentary needs some consuming, ongoing process that generates momentum. This, called the through line in drama, is the spine of your film, the forward movement of quest and revelation that is central to the film’s purpose. Once you have one, you can attach the digressive elements of your story along the spine like so many ribs. Each digression in the story holds the promise of returning to the through line. ([Location 5777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=5777)) - Since you are always a surrogate for a first-time audience, not being an expert in the film’s subject is a positive advantage. Experts seldom understand what a lay audience needs—that is your expertise. ([Location 6656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6656)) - The more closely you work with partners, the more you can cross-check your ideas and impressions with other reliable minds. Pay careful attention to your teammates’ impressions and reservations, especially those from the other gender. ([Location 6703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6703)) - prolong the conversation with your informant to flush out all the information you can. Tap his views on unrelated issues to see how perceptive and fair he seems across the board and what his attitudes to authority are in general. ([Location 6714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6714)) - Avoid leading questions (“Do you think the mayor is authoritarian?”) and instead ask open questions (for instance, “What kind of person is the mayor?”) that give no hint of what you expect. ([Location 6717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6717)) - Leading questions are closed questions because their wording indicates what answer you expect. Open questions are value neutral and give no hint of what is most acceptable. ([Location 6723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6723)) - Sometimes as part of breaking the ice—with young people, in particular—you can let your subject handle the camera and experience interviewing you. By demystifying the camera you imply a more level playing field and that control is to be shared, not imposed. ([Location 6778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6778)) - Making field notes enables you to look at your notebook and really listen. Your preoccupation in turn frees the speaker to look more naturally within. The alternative is to get sucked into providing facial reactions as support to the speaker instead of listening for subtexts. ([Location 6786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6786)) - You choose people for their characteristics and for what they know. Documentaries must often present conflicting accounts, so you choose those whose presence is going to be persuasive. ([Location 6813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6813)) - The language historians and critics use about documentary—witnessing, recording, testifying, evidencing—suggests that the documentary presents its case to an audience rather like evidence to a jury. Perhaps your film is about workers in a scientific laboratory, one running according to safety conventions unfamiliar to the lay person. Giving too much information (exposition) before it becomes relevant will numb the jury, but providing too little will leave them unable to make the right connections. Keep these questions in mind while you research: What world are we in and what does it feel like? What is this world’s main condition, activity, or purpose? How does this world operate under normal conditions? What has gone wrong? What is at issue? Who represents what? As in the opening stages of a trial, a documentary must give a setup—that is, introduce its characters, their special world, and what their problem is. ([Location 6816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6816)) - By flushing out conflicting accounts, the audience, like any jury, can assess people’s motives and decide what “really happened.” So: What qualifies each person to give evidence? Is testimony coming from direct experience, or only from hearsay? Is this person’s testimony primary (witnessed by themselves) or secondary (someone else’s experience reported)? What do they know from their own experience that is relevant to what’s at issue? How credibly do they convey what they know? Do other views or facts support or undermine their views? What loyalties, prejudices, or self-interests may be skewing their viewpoints? What other evidence might alter, prove, or disprove their testimony? Is there anything demonstrable from the person’s background that puts their motives, preparation, knowledge, and identity in a new light? Can an opponent interpret key testimony differently? How authentic and credible are the documents, pictures, memories, or records used in evidence (for instance, are documents originals or copies)? In the investigative documentary we frequently see testimony by a range of witnesses to support or undermine key allegations. Testimony is strong when: It conveys compelling facts or information. It is primary evidence that consists of opinions and inferences based on their own firsthand perceptions. Witnesses use reliable principles or methods to interpret those facts. Testimony is weak when: The witness has already heard the testimony of other witnesses. It involves hearsay. It involves specialization that exceeds the witness’ competency. Witnesses: Should be open to challenge by others involved in the issue. May not get all the facts until just before shooting or during it and on-camera. This can be explosive but also ethically dubious. ([Location 6848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6848)) - Texts and archives as well as material from the camera and sound recorder provide their own kind of testimony. What they demonstrate can be enigmatic or misleading and not appear so. Each is an authored construct that should be open to question: Under what circumstances was the footage or document compiled? What intention or sponsorship lay behind its authorship? Is there more than one hand behind the materials; if so, are the differences or inconsistencies significant? What variously are its intended, unintended, and received meanings? What does it exclude? How will a contemporary audience receive it? What proof do you have that it is what it’s said to be? What assumptions lie behind its making, of which its makers may have been aware or unaware? Has original material been edited or reused in a way that changes its meaning? If the materials originate in another language, can you rely on the translation? The images, sounds, and speech you collect will provide the evidence for your film’s actions, atmosphere, ideas, conditions, and appearances. The audience cannot ask for elaboration, so the filmmaker must anticipate when the jury needs context, confirmation, or interpretation. ([Location 6869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6869)) - What will you have to arrange, say, or do to put a participant under pressure to reveal the next levels of truth? How can you raise the pressure so there is more at stake? Can you evoke verbal or written testimony with existing visual archives? Will you need to demonstrate unreliability in a participant to ensure your audience watches critically? ([Location 6891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HSMEQ9Y&location=6891))