Documentary filmmaking is a tool to gauge the weight of truth in a story-driven format. It expounds on the reflection of examination of characters and their perspective to assay the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a given narrative. Documentary filmmaking is a platform for the exchange in ideas, opinions, facts, and evidence that carries a story from its nascent developmental stage to its final denouement. What else work in our global media-saturated abyss that encompasses us all, can you have a measure for something radical, bonafide, intellectual, didactic, engaging, revelatory, engrossing, and revolutionary? Key and fundamental to the documentary filmmaking pursuit is the tendency to delve into deep elements of a narrative that is enmeshed in the complexity of time, nuance, viewpoints, mindset, perspective, opinion, and understanding. This is a tall task for documentarians. A real reason few dare tread the troubled and often murky waters of documentary filmmaking.
In terms of truth, complexity is the reality of things, subjects, people, events, and places. It is the stuff that sets the foundation of how things work and operate, what motivates and inspires people to create circumstances, and the why and how such things come to fruition from a once-agreed upon thought. Shining a camera on the facets that make up the entire world is taxing in pursuit. It calls a director and producer and their engaged, dedicated team to peel back layer after layer of such realities. Given any historical context the same team must venture through interpretation and sided explanation to “get to the bottom” of such things, subjects, people, events, and places. The beauty and the challenge, the “beautiful struggle”—in other words, of documentary filmmaking is to deconstruct such elements of reality in a simplistic manner in visual-spatial form. Such a pursuit is a hit or miss.
Documentaries like Kirby Dick’s The Hunting Ground misses because it totes the line of informing and persuading. His team chose advocacy over accuracy. This is what happens in the creative undertaking of a documentary film project when all information is laid out in front and the manner in which one breaks down to the core the complex nature of human stories and its development. Couple this with a film addressing a social issue that carries heavy weight on both sides of an argument, a documentary like Kirby Dick’s ends up becoming a documentary that misses in its attempt at the complexity of uncovering the truth. Honesty and integrity to one’s work is essential—how exactly one ends up treading the complex aspect(s) to telling a nonfiction story on film is what is left to judge in merit and full head-on understanding. Documentary filmmaking serves its audience best when it does its homework to its fullest extent possible—delving through the exhausting nature of information, tidbits, the breaking down of the meticulousness that reality often always comes with, and exposing the hidden expressions and nuances of characters and human factors involved (i.e. feelings, emotions).
Think of documentary filmmaking as telling a nonfiction, true-life story as in a book but with piles and piles of impartial information from multiple—often varying perspectives—to sift through, all with the eventual anticipation toward entertaining a future audience. And, whether or not a documentary filmmaker and her team is closely engaged with the storyline(s) and character(s) of the documentary such a story will only hold up to water in how it can explain itself without misguided notions nor arbitrary whims. In other words, documentary filmmakers do not have the liberties to expand a story in direction as other art form do. Moreover, to construct a full-length documentary feature is to expound thoroughly on a journalistic approach with all the motivations of an artist willing to convey a message and a highlight a morale of a story creatively in a visual-spatial dimension. Every graphic utilized, every camera shot used, every soundbite articulated, every narration voiced all comes with the full anticipation that something complex is rendering itself comprehensible. This task can be met through an art-house, experimental filmmaking approach as seen in the recent 2015 film, Heart of A Dog, accomplished by performance artist Laurie Anderson. In the film Anderson delves into profound themes of love, death, philosophy, and religion by narrating a story of her relationship to her now deceased dog. With sketch illustrations, old film reels, and visual cinematography of random places she guides the viewer in a world driven by subtle wisdom worthy of philosophical undertaking.
It takes a certain character to pull of a well-constructed, thoroughly investigative, and profoundly revelatory documentary film for audiences near and far, today through tomorrow to resonate with. A person who is willing to engage in an impartial search for truth bent on explaining the complexity of a given story is worthy of being a documentary filmmaker. A person willing to delve deep into the arduous task of seeking necessary information on a given topic all with the hungry task of sifting through opinion and perspective one after the other is worthy of taking on the task of documentary filmmaking. If one is self-motivated in informing slightly more than entertaining, teaching and exposing rather than rendering laughter or sadness, and explaining more so than persuading than the power of documentary filmmaking is put in the right hands. Complexity is what should be anticipated, sought through, met all the way, and fully grasped in the documentary filmmaking journey. In the end, the best documentary films are complex in its simplicity.