Film, Literature, and Point of View

Point of view as a concept comes from literature, but film and literature are very different. Reading is a pensive activity during which you create the narrative in your mind’s eye. Film you experience as an onslaught of events in the here and now. Literature can direct the reader into the past or in the future, but film grips the spectator in its relentlessly advancing present so that even a flashback quickly turns into another ongoing present. Watching a really engrossing film is thus rather like dreaming. What a difficult medium to control! Yet control is possible.

Documentary realism strives to make us feel we are seeing unmediated reality, but analysis soon reveals that its makers and their values dominate any documentary. Like the fiction films they resemble, documentaries are authored constructs, and this will become abundantly clear if you analyze one (see box on the following page).

When you collect the evidence from which your film will be made, you have more control than you know. For the different filming situations discussed in this chapter I have provided explanatory diagrams. The camera outline symbolizes a recording eye and ear, but to this you must add the human hearts and intelligences guiding their attention as they collect evidence. The lines connecting the camera, director, and participants represent their awareness of, and relationship to, each other. If you view the film examples (as I hope you do) you will quickly realize that any diagram is a simplified view of a subtle and complex range of realities.

Collecting Evidence: Observational or Participatory Approach

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.

The first major ideas concerning the camera in relation to everyday truth arose, as we have said, in Russia with Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda, or “cinema truth.” In France of the 1960s, Jean Rouch revived this approach under the equivalent name in French, cinéma vérité. But because English speakers corrupted the term to connote spontaneous shooting, documentary using these intercessional methods is now called participatory.

Figure 17-1 represents how filmmakers collecting evidence with an observational camera do their utmost to remain onlookers with minimal effect on the proceedings. Figure 17-2 represents participatory cinema, in which camera and crew are avowedly present and inquiring, ready to catalyze, if necessary, an interaction between participants or between participants and themselves. 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.

The distinguished American documentarian Fred Wiseman, a former lawyer, only ever uses the camera observationally. To minimize compromising his intentions, he uses no lighting, no directing of participants, and no questioning. He shoots massive amounts of footage and makes his films from the evidence he collects. If you are an ethnographer or have similar convictions about the worth of observation, then you may well use this approach. But, should you want to film an

FIGURE 17-1 Diagram representing direct or observational cinema, in which the camera records life and intercedes as little as possible.

FIGURE 17-2 Diagram representing ciné ma vé rité or participatory cinema, in which the camera and crew may alternately be discreet onlookers or catalyze responses and situations.

interview, then merely asking questions and leading the conversation means you’ve catalyzed the record—even though all the questions are subsequently edited out.

A modern example of observational cinema is Yoav Shamir’s Checkpoint (2004, Israel), discussed in Chapter 5, Documentary Language. It has no central characters and concentrates on observing without comment the social process of filtering human beings at arbitrarily created boundary points. An example of participatory cinema is Ross Kauffman and Dana Briski’s Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids (2004, United States), a film they started during a photography project in India. You see them invite the stigmatized and impoverished children of prostitutes in the Red Light District and teach them how to document their surroundings using photography (Figure 17-4). The children learn not only remarkable camera skills but also how to pursue their own observations and values, and ultimately to respect themselves—which was the underlying hope for the project. (See the children’s pictures at http://kids-with-cameras.org/kidsgallery/, and read how the project has since spread to other countries.) The film chronicles growing skills and relationships and ends with the kids giving a gallery show. Some go on to get an education but others return to their dead-end environment.

Whether to use participatory or non-intercessional shooting is usually a commonsense decision. Where 15 fire engines are hard at work putting out a fire, you won’t need to exert any formative pressures by interceding. But if a naked environ-mentalist has chained himself to the Ministry of Agriculture’s railing, you will have to question him, or the filming won’t get beyond a single enigmatic image.

FIGURE 17-3 Diagram representing a single point of view (seeing through a character in the film).

FIGURE 17-4 Born into Brothels grew out of teaching Red Light District children to document their surroundings. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/HBO/ThinkFilms Company, Inc.)

Point Of View (POV)

We often associate point of view (POV) with, say, a Marxist political or Freudian psychological outlook used as tools of social or psychological analysis. In fact, cinematic point of view describes something rather more intangible that is intrinsic to films with a mature identity. 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.

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.”

FIGURE 17-5 The Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens—eccentric characters taken on their own terms. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Portrait Films.)

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
• Is fully mature in its embrace of other human beings, however different

Points of view begin to arise during ideation (elaborating the central idea) and continue to solidify during creation (researching, writing, shooting, and editing). They will strengthen as you crystallize your film’s identity and purpose and make it serve what you feel. This happens most tangibly during editing.

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 involvement will help counteract the endless distractions that come with using cinema tools. Picasso was lucky; he could work alone in silence with a brush or pencil. You, however, must often work in a hubbub of equipment, lights, and people. No wonder inspired cinema is rare.

The next major question a dramatist asks is, Who is my central character? This is where developing your skills as a dramatist will help. With whom do we empathize, and whose story is it? This can lead to a variety of very interesting answers that we will examine, beginning with the simplest and moving toward more complexity.

Single POV (Character in the Film)

From Figure 17-3, you can see that the film is being channeled through, or perhaps even narrated by, a main character. This person, who is observing, recounting, participating in, or reenacting events, may be a bystander or major protagonist. This type of film is often a biography or, if the central character talks in the first person, an autobiography.

The seminal single point-of-view documentary is Nanook of the North (1922, United States), with its heroic central figure struggling to uphold his family unit and survive. Though the film is silent, it nevertheless leaves a strong sense of intimacy with the father of the family and establishes that POV emanates from what someone does just as powerfully as from anything he might say.

POV is established mainly through what a person does rather than what he says. Actions speak louder than words.

Vesting a film’s point of view in a leading character tends to restrict its scope to what that person can legitimately know, understand, and represent. Flaherty implies that Nanook stands for the Inuit nation and so places a heavy onus on a single delegate. He also represents the heroic, unspoiled native fighting as part of an endangered species. The man who played Nanook had a strong historical sense of his people and probably approved of these representations. Flaherty’s noble savage idealizations became more uncomfortably visible in Man of Aran (1934, United States) onwards. George Stoney and Jim Brown’s How the Myth Was Made (1978, United States) is a sympathetic documentary accompanying a DVD version of Man of Aran. It revisits the scene of the film, talks with participants in Flaherty’s film, and makes clear the apolitical selectivity of Flaherty’s gaze. In his later work, Flaherty declined to collaborate, and by Louisiana Story (1948, United States) the passion in Flaherty’s storytelling had become sentimentality and his dramatizing manipulation.

FIGURE 17-6 Through its character-within-the-film point of view, Werner Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness shows that for the deaf–blind, contact with the rest of the world is by touch alone. (Photo courtesy of New Yorker Films.)

A rather different biographical documentary is Werner Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, Germany; Figure 17-6). It has such a strange andfascinating subject that it can use non-intercession most of the time. It follows Fini Straubinger, a deaf–blind woman who lay in an institution for 30 years until taught the deaf–blind tactile language. She takes a journey around Germany to locate others as isolated and despairing as she once was herself. As the film progresses, her eerie, prophetic simplicity gives you the shivers; you realize how we take human contact for granted and how devastating its absence or loss is to those whose senses have shut down. She emerges as a gauche angel who personifies the love and nobility latent in the human spirit. Because the film includes interviews, it also uses participatory elements.

FIGURE 17-7 The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun—an unlikely love story. (Photo courtesy of Danish Film Institute Stills & Posters Archive/SF Film.)

Pernilla Rose Grønkjær’s The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun (2006, Denmark; Figure 17-7) chronicles the interaction between two central characters. The main POV comes through Grønkjær’s fondness for and fascination with an eccentric old man nearing the end of a very long life. He happens to own a dilapidated castle and has always wanted to start a monastery. When he offers it to the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow sends a lovely and very businesslike nun. She sets about organizing both the project and the exhausted Mr. Vig. This delicately beautiful film, set around a huge, crumbling building that is returning to Nature as Mr. Vig must soon do, tells the story of a growing respect between two very unlikely people. Grønkjær mostly observes with her camera, but she sometimes interacts with her subjects from behind it. To see the film’s trailer, go to www.imdb.com (the vast database of world film information).

FIGURE 17-8 Diagram representing the multiple point of view. We may “see” anyone by way of anyone else’s perspective.

Multiple Characters’ POVs within the Film

The viewpoints represented in Figure 17-8 are of multiple characters, in which none tends to predominate. The combination of camera and editing may look at the other characters, or through each individual’s consciousness of the others. Through what each seer sees, we intuit what he or she is feeling.

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.

Of the key films discussed in Chapter 5, Documentary Language, the Maysles brothers’ Salesman (1969; United States) is such a film, and so are Michael Apted’s longitudinal study films in the Up series (1964 to present, United Kingdom).

Barbara Kopple’s classic Harlan County, USA (1976, United States; Figure 17-9) covers a strike by impoverished Kentucky coal miners. The film has prominent characters but no ruling point of view, because the central issues are exploitation and class conflict between workers and big business. Ironic protest songs often carry the narrative for ward, and these laments, creating a powerful aura of folktale and ballad, help make the film live on powerfully in one’s memory afterward. Shot mostly as observational cinema, there are moments—most memorably when company goons shoot at the crew one night—when the filmmakers become participants in the events.

FIGURE 17-9 Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA. Music as an expression of suffering and protest adds to the multiple characters’ viewpoints. (Photo courtesy of Krypton International Corporation.)

When each character represents a different thread in the social tapestry, you can build a texture of different, counterbalancing viewpoints.

Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003, United States) and Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street (2005, United States; Figure 17-10) are each about the extraordinary dynamics within a family. The first concentrates on the closet homosexuality of the father, and the second on the unfulfilled love life of the mother. By exploring their family’s multiplicity of views and allegiances, each looks at the emotional sources for each aspect of “questionable” behavior. 51 Birch Street must be one of the most revealing journeys yet made into the hidden pain of a normal, outwardly comfortable, middle-class family. Block’s diary style creates an intimate portrait of himself as well as the complex crucible of his family while he grew up. We come to understand, as he does, the intolerable burden that women carried—and perhaps carry still—and the cost to normal women in terms of personal fulfillment. Best of all, the film’s outcome is amazingly constructive and positive. Here is the emotional liberation that intelligent documentary can bring its participants—and the ultimate posthumous tribute to Block’s mother.

FIGURE 17-10 The Block family during the 1970s in 51 Birch Street—concealing their stresses like any normal family. (Photo courtesy of Doug Block.)

Omniscient POV

Omniscience is comparable to the eye of God, who (I’m told) looks down on us, is everywhere, and knows everything. The limitations of my diagramming (Figure 17-11) suggest that omniscience is mostly free camera movement. Certainly the camera is no longer limited to what one character can see or know, and the eye of the omniscient storyteller does indeed move freely in time and space. In the hands of corporations and government agencies, this POV becomes an impersonal mirror whose purpose is authoritarian instruction, but in better examples the storyteller makes witty and entertaining use of omniscience’s agility to convey a decided outlook and moral purpose.

The omniscient viewpoint is really the all-knowing intelligence of the story teller transporting us magically to any place and time in pursuit of the story. Typically in the third person, the narrative often expresses a collective rather than individual viewpoint.

FIGURE 17-11 Diagram representing the omniscient point of view, in which the camera moves freely. Because POV comes from the storyteller, not a particular character, it’s free to roam in time and space.

Typically narrated in the third person, the omniscient documentary often expresses a collective rather than individual viewpoint. The central organizing vision may be institutional or corporate or that of the filmmaker, who as storyteller need make no apology or explanation.

The early documentary seems to have acquired its stance of omniscience from the gentleman’s slide lecture of earlier times. For modesty, he (rarely she) avoided speaking in the first person by presenting his material as science or ethnography. Older documentaries adopting this stance don’t always have such humility. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935, Germany; Figure 17-12) and Olympia (1938, Germany) used an omniscient camera to camouflage a proudly partisan view of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Her masterly use of narrationless documentary serves to ascribe power and inevitability to her subject, and this should warn us that “art for art’s sake” is a dangerous mask.

All film seeks to persuade, but films that hide their subjectivity by glossing over the paradoxes and conflicts in the world they reflect intend to condition more than enlighten.

FIGURE 17-12 A Hitler mass rally in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.)

Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, United States; Figure 17-13) and The River (1937, United States) use poetic narrations that turn each film into a long, elegiac ballad—a folk form that legitimizes the films’ omniscient eye and seemingly egoless passion. Their powerfully aesthetized imagery and ironic montage establish an unforgettable vision of a land plundered through ignorance and political opportunism. This is propaganda at its best, though 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.

Few documentaries are set in the future, but Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1966, United Kingdom; Figure 17-14) appropriates a news program style to posit the nuclear bombing of London. Here the omniscient POV, appropriating the authoritarian voice of the newsreel, relocates the facts of nuclear bombing in Japan and the fire-bombing of Dresden to a hypothetical present with devastating effect. With grim impartiality it constructs an infernal, incontestable vision of nuclear war, all the more mesmerizing for its veracity. Passionately seeking to

FIGURE 17-13 In his omniscient classic The Plow That Broke the Plains, Pare Lorentz uses stark imagery and ironic montage to set up a haunting vision. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.)

FIGURE 17-14 Peter Watkins’ The War Game, a frightening view of nuclear disaster that was kept from the public. (Photo courtesy of Films, Inc.)

persuade, it shuns heroics and avoids the personalizing normal in screen treatments of disaster. Somehow this forces us to include ourselves and our loved ones among the doomed. As a new parent when I first saw it, I found it nearly unbearable.

Omniscience seems appropriate for complex and far-reaching subjects like war or race relations in which an individualized point of view would seem parochial. Al Gore in his extended slide lecture An Inconvenient Truth (2006, United States, directed by Davis Guggenheim) takes a magisterial overview of a world choking under the assault of human intervention.

Personal POV

Here the point of view is unashamedly and subjectively that of the director, who sometimes narrates the film. The director can alternatively supply filmmaking skills for someone in front of the camera. In the 1960s, I made a film about the peace-campaigning pediatrician Dr. Spock in a BBC essay series called One Pair of Eyes. The personal film may thus present its views in the form of a first-person or third-person essay. There are no limits to the personal point of view beyond what the author/storyteller can demonstrably see and know. In Figure 17-15, the director is behind the camera but can step forward into the visible world of the film.

Barbara Sonneborn’s Regret to Inform (1998, United States) is a personal journey to the place in Vietnam where her first husband lost his life when they were both young. Undertaken as an exorcism, the ten-year journey to make the film put her in touch with both American and Vietnamese war widows, and the result is a searing examination of what war does to those left behind.

Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are (2004, United States; Figure 17-16) is a first-person account from behind the camera of growing up in the shadow of his peppery and famous father, the Hollywood cinematographer Haskell Wexler. What makes it unlike a retrospective is that the two filmmakers couldn’t avoid playing out their tensions as they filmed. Nothing of the friction and pain between them is resolved, but it was the engagement that probably mattered, and this is sometimes uncomfortably revealing.

FIGURE 17-15 Diagram representing the personal point of view, in which the author/storyteller is the point-of-view character.

FIGURE 17-16 Filmmaking father and son battle it out in Tell Them Who You Are. (Photo courtesy of The Kobal Collection/Wexler’s World, Inc.)

Enter the Storyteller

Under the largely discredited auteur theory of filmmaking, the authorship of each movie is the director’s, but controlling how a collective (the film crew) creates such a complex perceptual stream is simply beyond any one person’s control. I therefore personify this as the role of the Storyteller. The whole crew helps fulfill its purpose, which is to give the tale a narrative identity or “voice,” as they call it in literature. For different films, the Storyteller might be grave, saucy, brazen, nonplussed, sarcastic, resigned, pleading—whatever the nexus between story and audience calls for. Part of Michael Moore’s force is the playful charm his films exert through the persona of his storytelling voice.

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. While the characters grapple with their situation, the Storyteller highlights the implications of their story so the audience is entertained, and learns something.

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.

Werner Herzog has always entertained with a purpose. In Grizzly Man (2005, United States) he took the tapes that Timothy Treadwell made of himself and used them to tell how Treadwell came to identify with grizzly bears. Like the Titanic on track for its iceberg, Herzog shows us Treadwell heading for a gruesome destruction of his own making—and taking with him his unfortunate girlfriend. The span of Herzog’s fable is complete when the incoming pilot spots the human ribcage on the ground below. This is no exploitative tale of mistakes or bad luck; its message is about granting human feeling to dangerous animals and, more important still, of sentimentalizing the blind forces of Nature.

Balseros (2002, Spain, directed by Carlos Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech) has a strong storytelling voice, but since it is a largely observational film the voice is implied, not personal. The film follows several Cubans who escape the geriatric Castro revolution for the Promised Land whose fulsome enormity begins in Florida. It then shows in merciless detail what befalls each of them. Loneliness and homesickness in the face of a sybaritic culture send most down paths of self-destruction. Though they have survived all sorts of hardship, prospering amid plenty takes skills for which paternalistic Cuba never equipped them. This film shows people unprepared for Nature of a different stripe—human nature.

Reflexivity and Representation

Reflexive documentaries are those that acknowledge and even investigate the effect of filmmaking itself. Figure 17-17 shows that the filming process can now monitor the directing, shooting, and editing in the filmmaking process itself. This I have symbolized, not too confusingly, I hope, by a mirror. The anthropologist Jay Ruby, whose specialty is assessing the cultural content of photographs, film, and television, says that:

FIGURE 17-17 Diagram representing the reflexive point of view, one able to share salient aspects of the filmmaking process with the audience.

By dispensing with the conceit that we are watching unmediated life, reflexivity acknowledges that films are “created, structured articulations of the filmmaker and not authentic, truthful, objective records.”² You can find Jay Ruby’s long essay, “Exposing Yourself: Reflexivity, Anthropology, and Film,” at http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/ruby/exposing.html. As he says, the investigation of documentary language began with Vertov in the 1920s, whose Man with the Movie Camera (1929, U.S.S.R.) is discussed in Chapter 5, Documentary Language. Like documentarians everywhere, Vertov aspired to show “life as it is,” but he had also become fascinated by the mysterious processes of cinema itself. His life-embracing Kino-Eye manifesto, not exactly a hit with the Russian authorities at the time, prepared the ground for cinéma vérité 40 years later. Vertov believed that the dynamics of camera and montage transcended human agency, and though we often see shots of the cameraman at work, he seems more the camera’s servant than its master. To deny personal authorship, Vertov vested film truth in the apparatus itself—an ebullient mystification that he didn’t quite pull off while trying to have his ideological cake and eat it.

A film that exposes the paradoxes of its own evolution draws the audience into issues dogging all documentary. For instance:

• 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?

Reflexivity allows the filmmakers to open a window on filmmaking itself and to share thoughts about whatever ambiguities arise during the process. Ethnographic filmmaking, supposed to be uncontaminated by the filmmaker’s own cultural assumptions, is a prime candidate for such scrutiny.

Jay Rosenblatt is an experimental filmmaker unlike most because he has real mastery of the subtleties of the medium and its history. I Used to Be a Filmmaker (2003, United States; Figure 17-18) is ostensibly about film practice and film terminology but is suffused with the joy of discovering his infant daughter Ella. Playfully, the film bridges two essential relationships—with one’s child and with one’s art. The interplay compares the development of a medium with the development of a human being—even the development of a new love.

Aside from investigating film’s boundaries, its distortions, subjectivity, or misinformation, there are further issues to concern us:

• Under what circumstances do we as an audience suspend disbelief or withhold believing?
• When does the medium deceive its makers?
• What may or may not be ethical?

Self-Reflexive

The ultimate in reflexivity is the self-reflexive film, which not only reflects on its own process but also incorporates its authors’ thoughts, doubts, and self-examination, as well (Figure 17-19). This can become the snake that eats its own tail or the pool in

FIGURE 17-18 Jay Rosenblatt faces the new force in his life in I Used to Be a Filmmaker. (Photo courtesy of the filmmaker.)

FIGURE 17-19 Diagram representing the self-reflexive point of view. This allows examination of both the film’s process and that of its makers. Approach this form cautiously, because little separates self-reflexivity from self-indulgence.

which a certain young man drowned. Treacherous and difficult though it is to pull off, it can be wonderfully rich in the hands of someone with the maturity to evade its seductions.

Michael Rubbo’s Sad Song of Yellow Skin (1970, Canada) is an Australian/Canadian filmmaker’s search to define Vietnam amid the flux of that war-torn country’s tragic paradoxes. By confining his attention mostly to city street kids and the young American dissidents working with them, Rubbo exposes the seamy side of a peasant civilization torn apart by its wealthy, technocratic, and self-involved occupiers. Rubbo’s ironic view of himself and the world saves his films from sentimentality.

FIGURE 17-20 Nobody’s Business by Alan Berliner—a son challenges his irascible father to reveal him self. (Photo by D.W. Leitner.)

Alan Berliner in Nobody’s Business (1996, United States; Figure 17-20) uses documentary to approach his crabby father in the hope of achieving a better understanding. He is roundly repulsed—hence the film’s title—when Berlinersenior is adamant that he is an ordinary man with nothing to say. This, a challenge to any documentarian, sends the son to family film, photographs, and letters in search of the father he hardly knows. His dad being the son of an immigrant Jew, the quest broadens by association to include ethnicity, ethnic identity, and even America as the melting pot that failed, thank goodness, to alloy its citizens into one culture. What emerges more than justifies the intrusion it takes to get there. This film shows, as do all those that really illuminate family life, that the most important doors never open until the director pushes and pushes. Power (that is, vital information that tells you who you are) is never given. You take it when you decide to grow up.

Explore authorial voice using Project 1-AP-8 Assess a Director’s Thematic Vision.

The Authorial Voice

Today’s movement toward a more confident, individual “voice” confirms that documentarians no longer have to suppress the ambiguities and contradictions they encounter along the way. 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.

Finding New Language

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.

Questions to Ask Yourself About POV

Each possible POV offers a different way of entering the people and their world. Switching POV creates a vital contrast between what different characters see and feel as they navigate their predicaments. Seeing through eyes other than our own, we retain our values and have a double experience that helps us define both ourselves and others. Of your film, ask yourself:

• How many POVs are possible in my film?
• Which POV should predominate …
  • Throughout?
  • Through different parts of the documentary?
  • Through one or two parts?
• What is my brief description of each POV in relation to the …
  • Character’s agenda?
  • Character’s limitations and blind spots?
  • Overall development of the story?
• What must I shoot to serve each necessary POV?
  • How should I shoot each so I complement the character’s nature and biases?
• How do I, as the Storyteller, want to color the story?
  • What role does my Storyteller play in order to further the nature of the story?
  • What should I shoot to show the Storyteller’s POV?
  • How should I shoot to imply the Storyteller’s POV, so I build the storytelling atmosphere and emphases?
• Should my audience be able to take into account …
  • Aspects of the filmmaking that surfaced during production?
  • My experiences during the filmmaking that are significant to what the audience will think and feel?