The Revival, Toronto| Today's "Filmmaker's Discussion" was marked by its divergence from yesterday's ethical certitude. Where the earlier panel dealt with the responsibility of the filmmaker towards its subjects, the four panellists on hand today spoke of the Faustian bargain between making a stirring film and keeping conscientious. Despite the talk's grandiose title "Epic Adventures and Heroic Quests"–alluding to the probing nature and uncertain outcomes of the panellists' films–the matter at hand was the fine detailing that keeps a documentary interesting, which is not necessarily the same thing as keeping it truthful.
The practical level of discussion was established when moderator Catherine Olsen asked: How does one pitch a documentary with no certain endpoint? Some found it easier than others. Barry Stevens, whose film Offspring depicts his search for the sperm donor who is his genetic father, said that interest in a film about artificial insemination was low until he mentioned his personal angle. Macky Alston told a similar story: his personal mission to understand the silence of God is what gave his film Questioning Faith its selling point to U.S. backers.
But that same intimate angle could also be a liability if it narrowed the focus. Finding money for Missing Allen, Christian Bauer's search for missing friend and filmmaker Allen Ross, was hampered by the fact that Ross was an unknown quantity and thus a difficult sell. Similarly, Daniel B. Gold revealed that his co-director Judith Helfland's relation of toxic vinyl siding to her own chemical misadventures with medication did not translate into many sympathetic backers. Like Bauer, she was forced to put up her own money to keep the project going.
After that question, the conversation never strayed from the balancing act of delivering the goods and not getting oneself into trouble. This conundrum was most deeply felt by Stevens, who by his own admission tried several times to get out of his own film in deference to his dead mother. Having hitched his film to some potentially devastating discoveries, he was in the unusual position of being split between filmmaker and subject; he found that success as a filmmaker meant horrible discomfort as a subject, and that while the filmmaker wanted to "leave it hanging" as to who his father was, the subject overrode him and he had to find out.
This implicitly raised two questions: how does the first-person documentarian decide what is important and what is not? And how does one go about finding useable footage in a sea of legal and moral uncertainty? Both Bauer and Gold revealed that there were a huge number of people involved in collecting information (a staff of researchers for Blue Vinyl and private detectives for Missing Allen) that were subsumed under the narrator/filmmakers that provided their audience with an in-point. Also, Bauer had to go through a legal minefield to get clearance to use taped phone conversations and discussed suppressing information to protect informers.
By the time Alston spoke of getting to "a deeper level than intellectual," I was awash in the very intellectual problems of suppression of information. (Alston, whose film hinged on a theoretical discussion rather than hard facts, probably belonged on a different panel.) The motto "you edit, you don't censor" was floated, but this only alarmed me further. Editors lie as frequently as censors do, and the nature of what's "important" is highly debatable–especially if you're under pressure to produce a boffo picture. Stevens's remark that he "prayed for conflict" shows that outside dramatic forces shape documentaries, and that those forces aren't necessarily looking out for the truth.
I don't mean to point fingers at the filmmakers, who are only human and are surely trying their best. I merely wish to say that the discussion raised questions that any responsible documentarian (and those who love them) has to consider about the nature of the form–it provided a queasy look at the pressures and logistics of making documentaries do particular things. As a result, I walked out with my faith in documentary shaken, hoping that the industry delegates who attended felt the same.
