Documentary Viewings and Research

 The first big production project we had this year to create a documentary. Obviously, to do that we had to watch some documentaries to learn what one should look like. One of the big take-aways was that documentaries can come in various forms, and while there are conventions of the genre, there are no written rules as to how it should look or feel.

Take the first feature documentary we viewed in class, American Promise from 2013. This film showcases the lives of two black boys living in New York City and attending the prestigious Dalton Prep School. It highlights the stress put on students in high pressure school environments and the experience of growing up black in New York. A very interesting aspect of this film is how it is filmed by the parents of one of the boys, and thus the entire thing can be seen as a really long home movie. Describing it like that may be an exaggeration, but there is something very raw about the handheld footage from average cameras that makes the movie feel more real and immersive. The interviews were mostly conducted at impromptu moments and it had a strong honesty to it, with people saying things on camera that others may not because it may paint them in a bad light. Watching it, I knew that for my documentary I wanted that sense of rawness. I wanted to show something real, and something that people may not often think about or want to show.

The second film we saw was Exit Through the Gift Shop from 2010. I'm gonna get it out of the way and say that this was my favorite of the documentaries we saw, and it might be one of my new all time favorite movies. Exit Through the Gift Shop takes on an odd structure, being a documentary made by the street artist Banksy about videographer Thierry Guetta, showcasing the footage he shot of other street artists and Banksy himself and discussing the relationships he formed with them. Around halfway through, the film shifts focus to Guetta's attempts at becoming a street artists himself, the instillation he created, and the controversy that sparked from it. What I love about this film is the style of it, using handheld camera movements, jump cuts, b-roll edited into hard hitting montages, and a soundtrack of punk and electronic music to represent the boldness and aggression of the street art community while being always exciting to look at and listen to. I also love the choices of b-roll regarding Thierry Guetta and the interviews of him, which let him be himself and show his eccentricities, making him one of the most interesting people you could learn about. Like American Promise, Exit Through the Gift Shop is raw, but it's also stylish. I immediately decided that my documentary would be inspired by this film, both in having a strong aesthetic and identity and showcasing interesting subjects and letting them give insight into who they are.

After viewing these two film, we moved to episodic documentaries. In class, we watched a 2019 episode of the Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design. The episode we watched was about costume designer Ruth Carter, discussing her career, her background, and what her work represents. This series uses a lot of staged b-roll to represent what the voice over is discussing, which is something that would become very important to my documentary once I decided what it would be about (more on that in a future post). Overall, while I found the episode well made, it didn't stick with me or impact me the way the other documentaries did. It felt artificial on a visual level, it's crisp cinematography and bright colors look nice but only served to take me out of the realism and make me think only of this as a staged production. If I was to have staged b-roll, I didn't want it to look staged.

The last documentaries we watched were two opinion documentaries (op-docs) from the New York Times. We had the choice of which two we saw, and the ones I chose were Modern Goose and Roach's Lullaby. Looking back on them, they both had similar subjects, both relating to the relationship between animals and humans. The way that they each portrayed this idea, however, was very different. Modern Goose has no dialogue, and shows the life of geese in a city through a verité style, simply filming them partaking in aspects of their life like searching for food and swimming in the lake. Roach's Lullaby uses interviews to discuss how New Yorkers in the 70s deal with roaches, and has a far more gritty look and feel than the sleekness of Modern Goose. Despite my love of 70s grime, I would I say that I preferred Modern Goose mainly because of how it tells a compelling story with no dialogue, and the beautiful way it humanizes nature. Watching these back to back, it solidified the truth that documentaries can look and feel like anything.