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Making the Story Compelling: Perceptions of Reality
“Trending Society: Ethics in Documentary Production” Knowledge Quest. Volume 38. No. 4. March/April 2010. By: Jan Krawitz. Web accessed 2/5/11. EBSCOhost
Summary:
This article was written by an instructor at Stanford University who teaches a MFA graduate student class in documentary film. It asks several standard ethical questions inherent in nonfiction filmmaking: What is the potential impact of this project, more specifically on the lives of those portrayed? Who is the intended audience, and what message do you hope to convey? Who might benefit from the film? Who could be hurt by the film? These questions need to be asked before, during, and after production of the film to make sure that the push to make the story compelling does not harm anyone. These are still the standards all filmmakers pursue, but times have changed.
Forty years ago the occasional documentary such as “Titicut Follies” or “Grey Gardens” would cause negative press and discussions of the ethics involved in making the film and questioning the validity of the truth the films portrayed. Today’s abundance of mock documentaries, advocacy films, and personal films has reduced the number of these ethical discussions. People today are jaded by the amount of bias and dramatic films being feed to the masses as nonfiction. The ethical landscape has changed. Things are more permissible today than ever before in the name of entertainment.
Analysis:
The push for entertainment has changed what filmmakers do and portray in documentary films. The tendency to make the story compelling is endorsed by Hollywood and profit margins. However, the traditional ethical considerations discussed in Krawitz’s article are still important but often lost. The interest of the subjects in the film needed to be considered. No harm needs to be brought upon subjects as a result of a film being made about them. More and more often the interests of the production or distribution houses are considered the priority and the subjects’ interests are trampled.
Other articles discuss protecting the subjects interest include examples where directors left out footage that would be incriminating to the subjects. Even though the footage was dramatic and would add to the entertainment value of the piece, the subjects’ interests were considered more important. Some directors left out footage that was important in telling the story because the subject might be harmed. Another way of protecting the subjects interests is by compensating subjects for the time they spend making the film because the subject should not be left worse off, if even financially, as a result of the film.
Hollywood influences and modern editing techniques have undoubtedly changed what we consider the truth, but so has the natural progression of culture and science. The expectations of the audience have also changed overtime. Because of Hollywood people expect stories to be told and events to be portrayed a certain way. Audiences expect to be entertained when watching films, even nonfiction films. The audience understands that there may be a bias perspective presented by certain directors. And subjects understand that they will be portrayed in a certain way. This is especially true in reality television shows. The truth is implied in the name of the genre, but subjects understand that they will be portrayed in a certain light to increase the entertainment value of the show. The key is to balance the different truths that everyone expect to be portrayed while making decisions on a case-by-case basis according to what you as the director or producer feel is right.
Written By: Jessica East
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Making the Story Compelling: Perceptions of Reality
“Art of the Real: Aesthetic ethics are up for grabs in today’s documentary free-for-all” Film Comment. March-April 2007. By: Paul Arthur. Web accessed 2/5/11. EBSCOhost.
Summary:
Traditional documentary filmmaking did not contain background music, voiceover narrations, or dramatic reenactments. The use of such mechanisms was seen to minimize the reality of nonfiction filmmaking. Modern documentary filmmaking has been influenced by Hollywood, and documentaries use the same dramatic techniques as theatrical films in the name of entertainment. Arthur offers several examples throughout the article to show the increasing leniency of ethical standards in documentary filmmaking.
Traditional documentaries were journalistic, composed of interviews and observations of subjects with the ultimate goal of unbiased truth. Modern documentaries entail background music, voiceovers, and dramatic reenactments to help tell the story in an entertaining and not necessarily unbiased way. Arthur offers Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” as an example of modern dramatic documentary style. In the documentary Moore uses dramatic animations and voiceover narrations to get his point across. In some scenes his cameras seem to be flies on the wall and the viewer wonders how that footage was captured. When Moore is denied an interview, he accosts the subject on the street, resulting in a dramatic altercation that just makes the subject look like an ass, which is usually Moore’s point.
This is not a brand new practice. Hollywood has always influenced documentary style just as changing cultural norms have changed ethics overtime. There have been backlash movements back to traditional journalistic endeavors of unbiased truths. The Direct Cinema movement in the 1960s included directors Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers. They rejected voiceover narrations, parallel editing, background music, and even interviews. The ideal was to remain completely emotionally detached from the subjects and to just be a fly on the wall.
Analysis:
The goal of Hollywood is to make huge profits from of huge audiences. This has spilled over into documentary filmmaking. The ethical issue is between entertainment and the truth. Is the truth of the story compromised when a narrator explains the story instead of the subject? The real truth would be simple observations of the subject, unbiased footage of the subjects’ behavior. The story is told through the subjects’ natural action during the time of the event. This is not realistic. How can you tell a story if you do not know what it is going to be? Some documentaries just stumble across a story, but that is not usually how it is done.
Reenactment is important in modern documentary films because the action has already occurred- that is the whole reason there is a film being made. Modern filmmakers have solved the problem of missing the event by using the dramatic reenactment. The disclaimer that the footage is not authentic is usually given during the reenactment, letting the viewer know that they are not viewing the authentic truth. This seems to be a common practice, and an easy way to get around this intrinsic problem of documentary making.
The truth and perception of the audience is definitely altered by the use of modern editing mechanisms. The drive for profit and influence of Hollywood are the reasons for the drift away from journalistic documentary ethics. However, to get an audience to watch and hear any message at all, the film has to entertain. The ultimate goal of showing the truth is still present, but the film must also entertain, or it is pointless. Modern editing mechanisms may have altered traditionally defined truth, but like culture changes, so has the modern definitions of truth in nonfiction film.
Written By: Jessica East
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Paying Subjects
“Ethics and Documentary Filmmaking” Center For Social Media. School of Communication, American University. By: Marty Lucas. Web accessed 2/5/11. EBSCOhost.
Summary:
Documentary filmmaking has become more popular and widely taught in recent years. Documentaries have expanded from the public broadcasting networks to specialized cable channels for every kind of niche interest imaginable. Many recent documentaries have made blockbuster profits that once only feature films enjoyed. The success of films likes “Hoop Dreams” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” raise ethical questions about what compensation is due to the subjects of the films. Is it really fair for filmmakers to not share profits of films with the people the film is about? Or does the act of paying subjects make them actors in a film instead of subjects in a documentary?
Documentary films now gross millions of dollars in profits. Lucas recalls the dilemma of French director Nicolas Philbert and the lawsuit brought by one of his subjects, Georges Lopez, in his film “Etre et Avoir.” Lopez sued Philbert for 250,000 Euros because he claimed that as a subject, the film was partially his creation. Philbert ‘s response is quoted in the article and it cannot be paraphrased better than it was said: “One of the founding principles of documentary filmmaking is not to install relationships of subordination. If you start paying the people in your documentaries, they become your employees,” (Lucas 4).
Analysis:
Last spring I took Dr. McCoy’s historical documentary class. He discussed what he called the “Discoveryization” of cable. The success of the documentary style of the Discovery channel has led to the expansion of many niche channels that follow the same model. There is Investigation Discovery, Discovery Health, TLC, Animal Planet, and the Science Channel just to name a few. The subjects of these documentary-type cable programs are sometimes compensated. But how are all these different types of documentaries delineated? Are there different rules on paying subjects for different types of documentaries? Is it possible to apply a standard rule to all these different hard-to-define documentary types?
The easiest way to solve the ethical issue would to be to say that paying subjects is wrong in all cases. But then there is the ethical question of exploitation. Isn’t the filmmaker who does not share any profits with subjects of his films exploiting people for their stories? If the filmmaker does not make a profit, the question cannot be asked. But the recent trend of huge profit documentaries is changing the traditional rules.
As with all the ethical dilemmas in documentary filmmaking, a decision must be made on a case-by-case basis. It all goes back to the dictum, “Do No Harm.” If participation in the documentary will financially harm the subject, they need to be compensated for the price of participating in the documentary. Across all cases, the subject should in no way be harmed by participating in the documentary. Any compensation beyond the cost of participating needs to be carefully considered, with an accurate and true portrayal for the viewer the ultimate goal.
Written By: Jessica East
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Paying Subjects
“Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work” Center for Social Media. School of Communication American University. (www.centerforsocialmedia.org/making-you-media-matter/documents/best-practices/honest-truths-documentary-filmmakers-ethical-chall).
By: Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi, Mridu Chandra.Summary:
This article summarizes the ethical issues identified by 45 documentary filmmakers in long-form interviews. Many of the documentary makers considered ethical behavior to be the core of their work. They identified duties to three different groups of people to be most important: responsibilities to the subjects, to the viewers, and “their own artist vision and production exigencies.” The responsibility to the subject is to not do any harm or leave them worse off then you found them. The responsibility to the viewer is to honor the unbiased truth. In the long-form interviews, documentary filmmakers discussed the recent ethical decisions they encountered in their work. The filmmakers identified and discussed all the ethical dilemmas discussed in this paper. However, this summary will focus on the ethical dilemma of paying subjects.
There was a huge resistance to paying subjects if the filmmakers considered their film journalistic. Traditionally in journalism, paying subjects was seen as jeopardizing the unbiased truth of interviews. Do you believe Dick Cheney in an interview that you know he was paid for by the interviewer? Filmmakers who did not consider themselves journalists saw nothing wrong with compensating subjects for the costs of participating in the film. Of course, the theory here is to not leave the subject worse off than before they participated in the film. Some filmmakers thought that it was unethical not to pay subjects. The argument is that during the filmmaking process everyone else gets paid, why would the subjects not get compensated? After all, without the subject there would be no film. Not paying subjects is exploitation. Like all ethical questions, there is no ultimate correct answer. One thing that all the filmmakers agreed on is that ethical decisions have to be made on a case-by-case basis.
Analysis:
The most important obligation to subjects is not to harm them in anyway. In many cases, profiting from their story and not compensating them in the name of journalism could do harm to the subjects. It is not the purpose of the journalist to exploit subjects and profit from their stories. If there are profits to be made off of a story, it would be unethical not to share with those whose story it is. Paying public officials for their interviews introduces a new dimension that is not present in a standard documentary with subjects that are private citizens. Public officials that are paid for interviews may be biased by the payment, making the practice inherently unethical, and the viewer may not believe what is being said.
The obligation to the viewer is to portray the truth. If the truth will not be jeopardized by compensating the subjects of the film, again, it would be unethical not to pay them. Filmmakers should always consider the interest of the subjects during all courses of production as to not exploit them in anyway. It is very easy to do because the whole purpose of the process is to make a profit off a true story that happened to actual people. By definition, making a documentary is exploitation. It is the responsibilities that the filmmaker has that make the process beneficial and productive to all parties involved: the subjects, the viewers, the artist, and the production and distribution entities.
Written By: Jessica N. East
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Documentary Filmmakers and their Relationships with their Subjects
“Doc Talk: How Involved Should Doc Filmmakers Be With Their Subjects?” (blog.moviefone.com/2010/10/27/doc-talk-how-involved-should-doc-filmmakers-be-with-their-subje/). By: Christopher Campbell. 2010. Web accessed 2/5/11.
Summary:
This article explores the relationships filmmakers have with their subjects much differently than the last article. Campbell depicts the ethical issues involved in sitting back and filming situations that you could improve for the people involved. The article opens with a story about a filmmaker who captures a girl being beaten by her father. What is the filmmaker to do? Keep the camera rolling and capture the true reality, or intervene, befriend the girl, and use the profits from the film to help her get away from her abusive father? The latter solution does not maintain the truth, but it does improve the life of the subject involved? But which is more important?
Like the authors in the last article, Campbell discusses how establishing a relationship with the subject is very important in capturing trust and getting their behaviors and interactions on film as close to true as possible. However, when subjects are in dangerous situations and their lives or physical beings are at risk, does that personal relationship with the subject demand that as a filmmaker you put the camera down and stop what is happening? Most people agree that capturing the truth is important, but only possible when subjects are in comfortable and safe situations. As a human being, the director has a responsibility to intervene if the situation can be improved. But what if the threat is not an abusive father, but poverty or famine? Should documentary filmmakers improve the troubles of their subjects if even for a short period of time?
This article asked more questions than it answered because there are more questions than answers. This article, like many others, stressed the need for more empirical research in documentary ethics, the choices modern filmmakers make, and the outcomes of these choices. But ethical dilemmas do not offer easy answers, and the answers are different from case to case. This article calls for discussion and understanding among filmmakers, their subjects, and the audience.
Analysis:
This article pits human ethics against journalistic ethics. The first article asked a simple question compared to this article, it was just questioning the establishment of a relationship at all. The documentarian always strives to capture the truth and the best way to try to do that is to establish a trusting relationship with your subjects. But is this relationship restricted to asking questions? This article presents a scenario that takes the working relationship between filmmaker and subject and reduces it to a relationship between human beings. If anyone sees another person in a dangerous situation, such as being beaten, should they intervene? Where the problem of this scenario emerges for the documentarian is in the fact that he or she is not supposed to intervene. The normal person under normal circumstances does not have this dilemma.
What about the question of using profits from the documentary to help the subject out of a dangerous situation? It seems like the right thing to do. But what if the subject was just going to return to the same condition after all the profits from the documentary are gone? Is it ethically right to not give them money to prevent future suffering when they fall back into desuetude? Or is it ethically right to give them any sort of compensation at all? Would being paid for their work alter the way they behave, and the reality being captured on film? In journalism, the practice of paying for interviews is condemned because it is thought that paying subjects influences their responses. Would the same be true for documentary subjects? Or does the simple act of paying subjects change the relationship between them and the filmmakers?
Written By: Jessica East
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Documentary Filmmakers and their Relationships with their Subjects
“A Question of Ethics: The Relationship between Filmmaker and Subject,” International Documentary Association (www.documentary.org/print/19855). By: Wanda Bershen. 2010. Web accessed 2/5/11.
Summary:
This article is a practical expansion on the Center for Social Media study “Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work,” (discussed later) In this article, Wanda Bershen focuses on one of the issues brought up by many of the filmmakers interviewed for the Center for Social Media survey: the issue of what could be an inappropriate relationship between documentary filmmakers and the subjects they portray. Bershen offers several examples of ethical issues that individual filmmakers have encountered when depicting actual human lives on screen.
To capture an accurate portrayal of subjects it is important to know how they are, to make them comfortable around you, and to make them comfortable around the camera. Directors and producers of documentary films have to establish a personal relationship with their subjects to capture reality. Bershen’s article tells the story of directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington shooting their documentary, “Restrepo,” about a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Junger and Hetherington spent 14 months embedded in the platoon, doing everything the platoon did, including going into battle. Both directors were wounded during combat, only to return to the platoon after recovering in the military hospital. “The fact that we kept coming back gave us a lot of credibility with the soldiers,” Junger recalled in the article (Bershen 2).
Bershen continues throughout the article to cite more examples of directors gaining the trust of their subjects by putting themselves in the same situations. To get subjects to feel more comfortable talking about their disease on camera, director of the film, “In the Family,” disclosed to her film subjects that she also had ovarian cancer. Director Liz Mermin for her film “Team Qatar” spent a lot of time with the subjects off camera to establish a good trusting relationship. Mermin also decided not to shoot at times when the camera would be a distraction to everyone, ruining the true reality of the moment because people act differently when they know they are being filmed.
Analysis:
It is important for documentary filmmakers to have a personal but professional relationship with their subjects. Documentaries are meant to capture reality and to tell true stories. If the filmmaker does not know the subject, the filmmaker may not detect that the subject is uncomfortable, not being themselves, or not being truthful.
Sociologists do the same thing. To get truthful responses during interviews, the interviewer must make the respondent feel like an equal. The documentary filmmaker, a lot like the sociologist, can gain rapport with a subject by demonstrating that they are in the same situation (sorry, converging ideas from my two majors). However, it is important that the subject does not feel influenced by the interviewer. The Hawthorn Effect refers to how people act differently when they know they are being watched, and they do what you want them to do. In interview research, this is referred to as response bias. This is where the subject answers a certain way because it is the way they think the interviewer wants them to respond.
The purpose of documentary film is to capture reality. This can be difficult if the subject is uncomfortable with the interviewer or the camera. But, this can also happen if the subject is too familiar with the interviewer or is a show-off to the camera. Like all these ethical issues, they have to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Different subjects require different relationships to make the finished product as close to reality as possible.
Written By: Jessica N. East
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Ethics
For some reason I have been getting into a lot of ethical debates recently. Documentary filmmaking presents many ethical issues that fiction does not. In the next few post, I am going to cite academic articles found in my research to understand the ethical dilemmas inherent in documentary filmmaking. I will present two sources for each ethical issue addressed.This research I have done and my analysis is posted here in an effort to provide meaningful content and links to this web page, as well as, to present the evidence for the arguments I make when debating the ethics of documentary film.
Jessica N East
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Ready To Go
Dear Future Employers,
I, Jessica East, am ready for an internship position and I would love to work for any business media company. I feel an internship would be the perfect opportunity for me to use and improve on the skills I have learned in my four years at Kent State University and in the field. I am an electronic media production student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Upon completion of this internship, I will receive a B.S. in Journalism and a B.A. in Sociology.
One thing that comes with experience as a multimedia student is how to create professional quality work on a shoestring budget. I feel my experience in video production could be used to improve the quality and appeal of the videos on your website without increasing the costs of production.
I have spent ample time working in video, photo studios and in the field with various types of equipment. The focus of my training is in HD video production, but I have also completed coursework and freelance projects in photography, audio sweetening, website development and monetization, and nearly every area of multimedia.
For the past two semesters I have worked in the Student Multimedia Studio, which is located in the KSU library. At the SMS I assist students and faculty with a multitude of multimedia projects. Every multimedia project assigned at the university, and every program used is supported by the SMS. Some of these programs include Adobe Creative Suites 5, FinalCut Studio Pro, Audacity and Microsoft Office.
For nearly two years I have worked as the manager of the Equipment Services Lab. The ESL serves as the equipment checkout center for the entire KSU School of Journalism, including all the student media outlets. Here, I maintain a variety of video, photography, lighting and audio gear, as well as provide instruction to students on how to use the gear and software that accompanies it.
Please feel free to look around this website and comment on my work. I hope to hear from you soon,
Jessica N East
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Current Freelance
I am beginning a new freelance project this week and it ironically for another company that manufactures motorcycle accessories. Last month, I completed a freelance project for the Alpha Micron Co. With only one day’s worth of footage, I produced two 30-second commercials and one 10-second Flash introduction for the website www.e-tintproducts.com. During this project I encountered several technical difficulties that offered the best learning experience I have had while in college. The myriad of codecs and compression types for HD video made compatibility problems across operating systems difficult. When problems occur outside of the classroom, there is no professor to tell you how to solve it. It was a great learning experience because I had to solve the problem myself through research and trial and error. I learned a lot about compression and how the buttons I click on the screen actually transform the 1’s and 0’s to make the information readable in the format that you need. The client was thrilled with the finished product, which makes any problems during post-production seem minimal.
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Thanks
First, I would like to thank all of the companies that came to the job fair hosted by the business media class. Taking time out of your busy Friday to come interview a bunch of kids is really appreciated by the students.
The experience of speed interviewing was eyeopening. Ten minutes is not enough time for a job interview, so I hope that in the short amount of time I successfully communicated who I am and what I can do.
I am really looking forward to hearing back from two of the companies in particular. I feel like I would be a good fit for either.
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