(Dis-)Connection with documentary contributors

Travelling upon the trail of a day, it’s quite easy to forget those footsteps that came long before our own that laid the path we now traverse. Invisible now the mistake they made that took the path veering to the right, and all those footsteps that followed. Gone too the inspiration that led the path round a thousand obstacles that would have taken many more lives to overcome before reuniting with where we now trod.

I have taken a path away from filmmaking in the life that I embrace in this moment. But inspiration has come pouring into my soul in the opportunities and challenges afforded. It has brought me now to a consideration of the ethics of the professional connections made in documentary filmmaking. An art which has its seed germinated in a soul of exploration and exploitation in equal measure. The western eye poised strongly to observe with anthropological curiosity, the very same way it once glared upon living African “natives” as museum curiosities.

We connect with those who are willing to open in vulnerability to the digital eye. Their bravery here should not be underestimated. Many of us would find it difficult to open in our barest truth and vulnerability to another, let alone to an unknown, undisclosed public eye. They lend us their vulnerability and their bravery, and there are measures many of us take to ensure the message is true to those from whose lips it passed. But still, might we not see a trace of exploitation in the model itself.

We often create work to raise awareness, to give voice to some story, person, group in our society who do not have a voice. Who are often denied their voice. But at what cost? Often the narrative line is tossed between one party to another in their vested (often financial) interest. Yet, this becomes necessary, and all for the greater good. Until it is not. Perhaps a contributing voice may say “yes that is fine to publish, I give my consent” when really they are thinking of the parts of their truth that lie on the (now often proverbial) cutting room floor.

Often too our relationships with contributors is weighted toward the research and development phase, we maintain contact after production but not perhaps with the same fervor as when building toward creating the narrative peice. What for those who have shared their lives? Where does that leave them really? We create a safe place for them to share and open up to, only for that teather to eventually fizzle due to professional distance or priorities. Is this just? Is this the truest nature of an art-form dedicated to truth?

I have no answers but perhaps it starts with the equal vulnerability of those who craft. The eye that beholds and shapes should be answerable to the voice that demonstrates its truth, contributors as co-authors. With less doctoring and editing to please the demands of investors who lean toward the illusion of narrative ends tied in the messy demonstration of reality. Who’s to say that an audience isn’t capable of requiring less leading, allowing the craft to lie elsewhere. To lie perhaps in the crafting of the connection forged and demonstrating this in its unrefined, uncensored power.

Perhaps we should return to that observational capacity, without the illusion of passivity.

All this marginalized in an age of mediation. Perhaps we have forgotten how to really connect, and this could be our savior.