Chapter 22
Values, Ethics, and Choices
The thought and planning you invest before shooting and the degree to which you anticipate problems all help ensure a trouble-free and creative shoot. Regularly review your working hypothesis in the light of your mission and its values, and amend it as necessary. Seasoned filmmakers seldom rely on spontaneous inspiration because once you start filming the pace and demand of the work are all-encompassing. Werner Herzog, questioned after a screening about “the intellectual challenge during shooting,” replied caustically that “filmmaking is athletic, not aesthetic.” Most filming, he told the startled audience, is so grueling that rarefied thought is all but impossible. François Truffaut makes a similar point in his fiction film Day for Night (1973, France), whose central character is a director running into a thicket of problems and compromises. Played by Truffaut himself, the director confides that at each film’s start he always thinks it’s going to be his best, but halfway through shooting can only think about surviving until the finish. My own fantasy, which returns at least once every shoot, is to escape further filming by miraculously turning into the owner of a rural grocery.
Checking your Embedded Values
Making a documentary is proposing a vision of reality. Films and video games, especially those exploiting the sensational, alter the threshold of what’s acceptable—as can be seen in the rash of shootings in places of education. We in documentary also have a moral responsibility for what we put on the screen.
Look back a few decades and you can see that the screen often represents people, roles, and relationships in particular ways. Criminals or gangsters are “ethnic” types; women are secretaries, nurses, teachers, and mothers; people of color are servants, vagrants, or objects of pity with little to say for themselves—and so on. All this is so familiar that it may seem like old hat. Three writers from the University of Southern California film school, who should know, think differently. They call these regressive assumptions embedded values—that is, values so natural to the makers of a film that they pass below the radar of awareness. In their book Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out: Five Keys to the Art of Making Inspired Movies and Television (2003, Simon & Schuster), Jed Dannenbaum, Carroll Hodge, and Doe Mayer demonstrate the traps in making art. Their examination of ethics in practice is especially pertinent to documentary, where unexamined assumptions silently guide the outcome of your film. Creative Filmmaking is mostly aimed at fiction filmmakers, but it poses some fascinating questions that I have adapted below. Will the world in your film reinforce stereotypes or reflect instead the complexity and injustices of life as it is? Step back to consider how your intended documentary represents these factors:
All stories include assumptions about the way things are. If your film unconsciously reinforces questionable norms, then your embedded values are in the driving seat. The point is not to become politically correct, which is just another orthodoxy, but to avoid supporting what cannot and should not be normal.
Participants:
- Class—What class or classes do they come from? How will you show differences? Will other classes be represented and if so, how?
- Wealth—Do they have money? How is it regarded? How do they handle it? What is taken for granted? Are things as they should be and if not, how will the film express this?
- Appearances—Are appearances reliable or misleading? How important are appearances? Do the characters have difficulty reading each other’s appearances?
- Background—Is there any diversity of race or other background, and how will this be handled? Will other races or ethnicities have minor or major parts?
- Belongings—Will we see them work or know how they sustain their lifestyle? What do their belongings say about their tastes and values? Is anyone in the film critical of this?
- Emblems—Do they own or use important objects, and what is their significance?
- Work—Is their work shown? What does it convey about them?
- Valuation—For what do characters value other characters? Will the film question this or cast uncertainty on the inter-character values?
- Speech—What do you learn from the vocabulary of each? What makes the way each thinks and talks different from the others? What does it signify?
- Roles—What roles do participants fall into and will they emerge as complex enough to challenge any stereotypes?
- Sexuality—If sexuality is present, is there a range of expression, and will you portray it? Is it allied with affection, tenderness, love?
- Volition—Who is able to change their situation and who seems unable to take action? What are the patterns behind this?
- Competence—Who is competent and who is not? What determines this?
Environment:
- Place—Will we know where the characters come from and what values are associated with their origins?
- Settings—Will they look credible and add to what we know about the characters?
- Time—What values are associated with the period chosen for the setting?
- Home—Do the characters seem at home? What do they have around them to signify any journeys or accomplishments they have made?
- Work—Do they seem to belong there, and how will the workplace be portrayed? What will it say about the characters?
Family dynamics:
- Structure—What structure emerges? Do characters treat it as normal or abnormal? Is anyone critical of the family structure?
- Relationships—How are relationships between members and between generations going to be portrayed?
- Roles—Are roles in the family fixed or will they be shown developing? Are they healthy or unhealthy? Who in the family is critical? Who is branded as “good” or “successful” by the family and who “bad” or “failed”?
- Power—Could there be another structure? Is power handled in a healthy or unhealthy way? What is the relationship of earning money to power in the family?
Authority:
- Gender—Which gender seems to have the most authority? Does one gender predominate and if so, why?
- Initiation—Who will initiate the events in the film and why? Who is likely to resolve them?
- Respect—How are figures with power going to be depicted? How will institutions and institutional power be depicted? Are they simple or complex, and does what you can show reflect your experience of the real thing?
- Conflict—How are conflicts negotiated? What will the film say about conflict and its resolution? Who usually wins and why?
- Aggression—Who is being aggressive and who is being assertive, and why? Who are you supporting in this, and whom do you tend to censure?
In Total:
- Criticism—How critical is the film going to be toward what its characters do or don’t do? How much will it tell us about what’s wrong? Can we hope to see one of the characters coming to grips with this?
- Approval/disapproval—What will the film approve of, and is there anything risky and unusual in what it defends? Is the film challenging its audience’s assumptions and expectations or just feeding into them?
- World view—If this is a microcosm, what will it say about the balance of forces in the larger world of which it is a fragment?
- Moral stance—What stance will the intended film’s belief system take in relation to privilege, willpower, tradition, inheritance, power, initiative, God, luck, coincidence, etc.? Is this what you want?
Creative Filmmaking has pertinent questions for every area of screen creativity and asks only that filmmakers take responsibility for the ethical and moral implications in their work.
Advise and Consent
Directing a documentary sometimes feels like being a doctor advising patients about the procedure, complications, and consequences of an irreversible operation. Some listen carefully, while others are inattentive or too unsophisticated to absorb the implications. In America during the 1970s, the Loud family consented to have their lives filmed (An American Family, 1973, United States; 12 hour-long episodes on PBS). The exposure, first to the camera and then to savage criticism in the press (as though they were performers), tore the family apart. Afterwards the Louds said that Alan and Susan Raymond, the series makers, had not explained the consequences adequately. Maybe so, but the open-ended nature of such undertakings makes comprehensive explanation virtually impossible. Nobody could have known that Bill would leave Pat or that Lance would come out of the closet in this first of all reality shows.
True, a signed release means you are legally free, but it doesn’t remove you from your moral obligations.
The best way to get people to participate is by explaining your film’s goals and the contribution they can make. After you’ve filmed them, their signed release only counts as informed consent if you warn them of the foreseeable consequences to what they just said or did on camera. Danger to your participants can arise from how you’ve used something in the completed film. This you can’t foresee at the time of filming, but you can surely guard against it during editing, and perhaps seek their agreement.
It is, of course, your responsibility to guard those who trust you from consequences that you, not they, can see possible. These may include physical or legal danger or damage to a person’s reputation. By including an unguarded remark, your film could damage or sever family relations. This is too high a price to pay unless the person stands by their remark. Informed consent is the permission that someone (or that person’s guardian, if they are underage) gives after being duly warned of foreseeable consequences.
FIGURE 22-1 Roger and Me—the first Michael Moore film, and the first to lampoon a haughty national institution using satire. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Warner Bros.)
Evidence and Ethics
Another ethical concern should be with the integrity of the arguments you use. Occasionally, the filmmaker employs artistic license to serve a larger purpose—as Michael Moore did with chronology in Roger and Me (1989, United States; Figure 22-1)—and finds his methods returning to haunt him. By simplifying and transposing some causes and effects, Moore handed ammunition to his many enemies. His later work, Bowling for Columbine (2002, United States), which targets the lethal inanities of gun culture in America, is more careful—and hits harder as a result.
A documentary is always more powerful if its themes and ideas arise out of an unfolding life rather than when you selectively illustrate a narrated thesis. Interestingly, the same principle applies to fiction films; it is the difference between signifying a situation versus showing it in the act of being. Once again, drama and the documentary share fundamentals.
FIGURE 22-2 Evidence—beginning and end of a shot in which a man demonstrates the price he believes he paid for doing his job (frames from A Remnant of a Feudal Society).
You may have to take special care to demonstrate that a point in your film is not contrived. In a documentary I made long ago about an English country estate, A Remnant of a Feudal Society (1970, United Kingdom; Figure 22-2), a head groom spontaneously held out his deformed hand to demonstrate what happened (as he thought) to horsemen made to ride in all kinds of weather. Because it was unclear what was wrong with the hand in the wide shot, the cameraman zoomed in close. I afterwards kept the zoom. Removing it by making a cut between long shot and close shot, though more elegant onscreen, would have undermined the spontaneity of the groom’s action by making it look prearranged. A simple cut in the footage would have demoted its credibility. Showing the origin and authenticity of evidence helps you maintain a good-faith relationship with your audience.
Truth Claims
Documentaries usually assert their truthfulness in one of two ways. The traditional approach is to make a film that is honest to the spirit of your best perceptions and trust that the audience can infer the film’s honesty.
Spectators judge a film’s contents by instinct and their knowledge of life, so “transparent” films—films that purport to show life happening as though no camera were present—can communicate very effectively. Participatory and reflexive films let you explore not only what you film but also your doubts and perceptions while filming it.
In participatory filmmaking, you can build into the film whatever doubts and perceptions would otherwise go unacknowledged. This explores perception as well as what is perceived and may include some self-portraiture by the makers. Robb Moss’s touchingly autobiographical The Tourist (1991, United States; Figure 22-3) examines the two currently dominant aspects of his life—his job as a documentary cameraman, often filming in Third-World countries where people have too many children, and his marriage to a nurse specializing in neonatal care, with whom he wishes to have children and cannot. Without falsely reconciling any of the open questions in his life, Moss chronicles the ironies that fate has dealt them. Finally, the film shows the joy of adopting a daughter.
FIGURE 22-3 Robb Moss examines his own image as cameraman and husband in The Tourist. (Photo courtesy of Robb Moss.)
How one sees, how one connects with others while making a film, is a Pandora’s box that cannot be half opened. Autobiography omits or suppresses some truths and, by this subtraction alone, elevates others. Truth, then, is always provisional and verging on the fictional.
For economy or self-preservation, autobiography never tells everything. By telling some truths and not others we recreate reality as though handling figures in fiction. It’s quite a paradox.
Behalfers: Speaking for Others
Speaking on behalf of others is almost a disease among documentarians, and (as I learned through Henry Breitrose, a fine writer on the documentary) documentarians so afflicted have a special name: behalfers. Behalfers make it their business to represent those without a voice, which in the end is everyone unable to make films themselves. This should remind us how charity gets dispensed by the privileged, how it can feel to the recipients, and how self-serving it can be to imagine one is promoting someone else’s interests.
Offering your participants a share in authorship may be the only way to overcome the distrust that poisons relations between the religions and races, say, or between feminists and well-meaning males. For decades, Europeans filmed indigenous peoples like small children or zoo animals unable to speak for themselves. Missionaries ran roughshod over native populations because they could not imagine that Africans or Aztecs were equipped to hold mature spiritual beliefs. So whenever you get the impulse to do good, be awfully clear about its basis. Participants need accountability when you elect to speak for them and agreement about who has the right to control their image.
Belief is dangerous when it legitimizes superiority, so being ethical means treating others, their values, and their lives with the respect and humility that you’d like applied to your own.
As ordinary people learn more about film’s processes and purposes, they become less trustful of those electing to speak on their behalf and demand more control over the outcome. This is less a loss of rights for the filmmaker than a maturing in the relationship.
Giving and Taking
So far this discussion makes the documentarian’s lot sound burdensome. Luckily, you don’t just take from others: You also give. Plato said that “The unexamined life isn’t worth living,” and your film examination often helps transform the very lives you thought you were capturing intact. Because filming can compromise, subvert, improve, or even create the end result in your film, you face a conundrum. The solution may be to admit the paradoxes to your audience rather than hide them. Today’s audiences are sophisticated and very interested in what filming does to the situation under study.
Documentary often proves its worth by encouraging participants to examine their lives. The changes that follow are frequently because the attention of a film crew made someone feel they mattered and could take action.
What do you Believe?
The self is joined to the world, and the world to the self. Documentary filmmaking—the corner of nature seen through a temperament—helps you fully explore the beauty and mystery of this nexus.
The two alternatives outlined earlier—transparency and reflexivity—can be described a little differently as either using the camera to look outward at the world (transparency) or using the world as a mirror in which to examine aspects of the art form or of the self that are reflected back. This difference is supposed to distinguish the classicist temperament from the romantic, but either can be valid and fascinating so long as you recognize your purposes and priorities from the outset. Do you know what you believe? How will your beliefs guide and inform the way you see the world in your film?
The decision about which route to take should arise from the subject and what you want to say about it. Often finding the right approach is a question of emphasis and of how, temperamentally, you function best as a storyteller.
How will you accommodate your human subjects when they make some adaptations for your camera? Do you trust your audience to make its own assessment of your relationship to truthfulness? Will you need to assist this, and if so, how?
The process of recording and interpreting requires justifying to your participants, who need to trust you as you make your recordings. If the complexities of this relationship affect important truths, will you acknowledge this, either implicitly or explicitly? The recording process may be too intrusive to document some intimate occasions or will seem so to the audience. Can you draw a line and if so, where? These seem like theoretical questions until they engender real consequences. Luckily, it is the real that helps us decide—not only what to do but also what we believe and who we are as we do it.
Documentary as Exposure to Life
Most documentary can’t be made in retreat from life unless you make premeditated essay films. You create documentary by intruding into some area of life and learning from the consequences. Until you turn on the camera, many issues and aspects of personality (yours as well as those of your participants) are latent and invisible. Once you start, you may have to argue for your rights as chronicler and critic. Some will attack you for daring, as one person, to make an interpretive criticism of another. What do you believe, and can you stand by your judgments?
During filming, you’ll often have to defend your right to record and evaluate. You’ll do this best when you believe passionately in the worth of your endeavor. Knowing how documentary has helped social change will make you particularly effective.
Aesthetic and ethical decisions are seldom made from a position of cool intellectual neutrality. More often we struggle with conflicting moral obligations. We have an allegiance to people who trust us on the one hand and an allegiance to truths we hold dear on the other. Does obligation to a grand truth allow you to violate someone’s trust or legitimize turncoat behavior? Can you let go of a conviction and make a different film if new evidence shows that you were wrong?
Sometimes you are in trouble no matter which way you turn. In these circumstances, I remind myself that my movie is just one little person’s view at one little moment in time.
Don’t try making yourself responsible for definitive truth. That’s like wanting your children to be perfect. Your films will always be an imperfect attempt to convey the spirit of what’s true.
Mission and Identity
Luckily each of us carries one or two certainties taught by life. Recognizing this, you can say, “This I know from life, so this is what I’ll enjoy showing.” It’s important to work from this kind of energy because documentaries take months or even years to if your heart isn’t in it. Films, especially “transparent” films that aim to present life in an authorless way, often hide the roots they have in their maker’s psyche. Yet most films are displaced autobiography. All the filmmaker has done is search out others’ living truths that the filmmaker knows from his or her own deeply felt experience.
Most documentary is displaced autobiography—though you start from a personal story or conviction, you look for examples unconnected to yourself out in the world. These lead to a film free from the taint of egocentricity.
By finding other people and other situations that somehow convey what you need to say, you put your convictions under test. It’s no longer yourself as subject, but how you see things. You do this by identifying your counterparts floating in life’s stream. By catching and tethering them in a structured statement, they mirror the truths life has taught you and further refine and develop your convictions.
Probably we make documentaries to put our convictions under test—to find other people and other situations that somehow convey the heart of what we need to say.
Much of this happens at an unconscious level. Looking at someone else and trying to see through their eyes creates useful restraints on your ego. Seeking your enduring preoccupations in others and outside yourself leads toward film-making with overtones of universality. The discipline of such a process brings its own rewards. With growing maturity you can identify the surrogates to your own values and temperament and allow them to achieve a life of their own in your film. Your work quietly alters how you see the fundamentals of your own life—the very source from which your documentary process sprang. In this way, each project is midwife to the next.