In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

 1 introduction In the last twenty years, tremendous changes have taken place in documentary and nonfiction filmmaking. These changes include subject matter, form, rise in the number of university film and video courses, but very few books explain how to consider, create, write, produce, and direct the “new” film. One object of this book is to fill that gap: to provide you with a thorough, down-to-earth grasp of documentary filmmaking, from idea to finished work, and from raising money to enjoying the fruits of your efforts. But above all, this is a book about ideas and concepts. Its goal is to help you to think about the film as a totality before the camera is switched on. This approach may seem obvious, but it is not always so obvious in practice. Many people jump into a film, shoot hours of material, and then wonder what it’s all about. To me, that is putting the horse before the cart with a vengeance. In essence, this book is about the daily problems that the filmmaker faces: from concept to finished film, from financing to distribution, from censorship and political problems to breaking into the networks, from the complexities of location shooting to problems of ethics and morality, from difficulties with the crew to the problems of dealing with real people and the complexities of their lives. Finally, the book deals with research, problems of style, varieties of approach, and the challenge of new technologies. Introduction  This book does not deal with equipment. This omission is deliberate because this subject is thoroughly covered in other books and is well taught in most film schools and universities. And therein lies one of the problems. Most film schools provide a level of technical training that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Students graduate having handled more editing equipment than Eisenstein ever did; they know how to take apart and rebuild a Nagra in ten minutes and how to light a set using the best techniques of Néstor Almendros and Vilmos Zsigmond. So the last thing they need is additional advice on bounce or direct lighting. But students do tend to be deficient in what to say and how to say it. Documentary writing, for example, is often the weakest subject in the curriculum. One of the aims of this book is to redress the imbalance. A second topic deliberately left out of this book is that of documentary history. The subject is tremendously important, but I assume that most readers of this book are familiar with the history of documentary filmmaking. If not, then Erik Barnouw’s Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film is the best introduction around. If you know some history, you can proceed without reinventing the wheel. If you are familiar with the films of Flaherty, Riefenstahl, Jennings, the Maysleses, Drew, Leacock, and Pennebaker, you already have a good sense of evolving styles and objectives. So, for the rest of this book, I will assume that you learned about cinema verité at your mother’s knee, and that you know that Nanook of the North is a film rather than a Canadian hockey star. Origins This book arose out of a series of discussions and seminars I had with students, first at the Australian National Film School and later at Stanford University. These students knew everything about technology but undervalued ideas. Most of them had grown up in the tradition of cinema verité, which one student interpreted to me as “shoot before you think.” Cinema verité has an absolutely vital spot in any film curriculum, but if mishandled it can act detrimentally on other film disciplines, especially writing. This is exactly what I found: raised on a diet of cinema verité, the students knew nothing about planning a standard documentary or industrial film and were completely lost when it came to writing commentary. Further exploration showed that they had a highly romantic vision of what happens on location and a completely Introduction  unrealistic view of how a documentary film director works. When I gently suggested that a documentary director’s main task was listening to people, they thought I was joking. One thing was clear. Though the students knew everything concerning the realities of feature filmmaking, they had only the faintest idea of what documentary was all about. So we talked, and gradually the idea of this book was born. At first I thought the essay would discuss only writing, as that seemed...

Share