Having done some documentary work, you are now ready to go further. Maybe you sense you aren’t yet using the screen to its utmost, or you want to make films that are more cinematic. Perhaps you want better subjects or to more effectively liberate the heart and soul of your participants and what they represent.

Part 6 explores several aspects of aesthetics. The word itself suggests choice when in documentary one often feels handcuffed by subject matter. In a film about a primary school, for instance, you may want to intercut classroom material with interviews with teachers and children, then add visuals of kids in the playground and at home. This is a norm that arises from one’s conditioning by television. It’s the result of flying visits by well-educated, sociologically inclined people whose habit is to illustrate recent trends and surveys through speech-driven filmmaking. Is this you, or do you want something different?

Imagine instead that you are Vietnamese or Lithuanian and speak little English. You have free rein to shoot in an English-speaking school. Everything strikes you as different: the children’s faces, clothes, schoolbooks. What they eat, the architecture of their school, the schoolroom layout, the children’s body language—everything feels particular, significant, and special. What you hear is not the meaning of their language but a vocal composition mixed with bird-song from an open window. You are feverish to record this new world’s textures and imagery. Later, the school sees your film and is astonished at the sheer otherness of what you’ve found in the familiar.

How to bring this anthropological freshness and sensitivity to our own tribe? Radical vision comes from purging oneself of the cultural packaging that muffles actuality, but it’s a tough undertaking. Picasso said he took three years as a child learning to draw like Raphael, then many, many years to draw as children do. More individual vision will come from choosing outside the obvious, default aesthetic options. Doing this rigorously is in effect to deprogram oneself. The resources to do this lie within you and are the subject of Part 6. Every chapter in this Part contains practical ideas not only for conceptualizing your documentary but also for directing, camera operating, and editing it.

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Table of Contents for PART 6: DOCUMENTARY AESTHETICS

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Part 6Documentary Aesthetics

Table of Contents for
PART 6: DOCUMENTARY AESTHETICS

Part 6
Documentary Aesthetics