Craft v. Topic: Is the Real Value In the Conversation?

A fascinating and well thought piece yesterday at Pop Matters by Shaun Huston that uses the DVD release of Lynn Hershman Leeson's STRANGE CULTURE - the narrative/nonfiction hybrid that dealt with the arrest of professor and artist Steve Kurtz (whose case was recently dismissed) - to revisit the discussions that we had here late 2007 over the relationship of art, journalism and craft in nonfiction filmmaking.  Much of that discussion led to our eventual creation of the Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking.

The entire piece is worth reading, even if one hasn't seen STRANGE CULTURE.  Huston spends a significant portion of the article recalling the dispute between us and film critic John Anderson, who found much to like in STRANGE CULTURE despite his statements here:

"(I)f you want to create fiction, create fiction, If you want to co-opt the immediacy and urgency implied by the word ‘documentary’ it behooves you to follow some rules. Don’t mislead your audience and don’t use the cutting room to fabricate what you couldn’t capture in your camera."

As Huston notes, Anderson praises STRANGE CULTURE for its important subject (he calls it "urgently topical") although he also accepts the stylistic detours (primarily the use of actors) the film takes:

"It is the opening line of Anderson’s review that puts the most interesting spin on the craft/subject discussion: "Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work exists within the cinema of ideas, a lonely outpost at best and one likely to remain that way". This is an interesting claim, and one that raises the question of what kind of license is opened up to a documentarian who traffics in “the cinema of ideas” as opposed to, say, “the cinema of daily life” (perhaps where Billy the Kid resides)? The ways of documenting an “idea” seem limitless, but maybe the ways of documenting “life” are necessarily bracketed by “actualities”.

Or are they? How one answers that question would seem to shape one’s view of the meaning and significance of documentary film. Schnack wants a world where there are no limits on the ways that a filmmaker can seek to document the world. Anderson, while maybe not quite as closed-minded as Schnack suggests, clearly thinks there should be limits on what counts as “documentary”."

Huston goes on to say that the value of STRANGE CULTURE as an entry point to the debate is that the film has value both in breaking stylistic norms as well as importance of subject matter.  I'd argue that a similar case could be made for TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE, LAKE OF FIRE or any number of well made or stylistically innovative films that tackle socially relevant or politically challenging subject matter.  The debate is not that so-called "important" films can't be well made but that one shouldn't have knee-jerk approval of shoddily made films just because the subject matter has external value.

Huston may be right to summarize that much of the benefit of this debate is in having the discussion in the first place, rather than searching for definitive answers.  But if pressed, I'd say that the true worth of a hybrid film like STRANGE CULTURE is not in whether Steve Kurtz' story is worth telling (or whether audiences "need to know" about his plight) but in the artistic choices made by Hershman Leeson.  Kurtz' story may be good, valuable or even important, but without an artist behind the lens, the worth of Kurtz' tale may be lost on all but the most like-minded and agreeable viewers.

Comments

[Shaun Huston]

Thanks for the link and constructive criticism.

I agree that Hershman Leeson's artistry and creativity, and not so much Steve Kurtz's story, is what, ultimately, makes Strange Culture the film that it is. However, I think that it's significant that she chose to put her artistry in the service of that story and not something else. It is a deeply political film, and form and politics are clearly intertwined in this case. Where one begins and the other ends is, for me at least, fairly impossible to tease out. Just as I can imagine a far less well made, only-capable-of-preaching-to-the-choir version of Steve Kurtz's story, I can also imagine the film's artistic devices being far less elegantly, and appropriately, used, and that's primarily due to the way in which the hybrid style of Hershman Leeson's film "works" with her subject.

For me, the crux of the matter is in how you weigh what's important in the first place. If the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and people dealing with disease or "disabilty" are both "important", they are important in radically different ways.

One of the films cited a lot in your original discussions of this issue is King of Kong, which is easy to dismiss as trivial because of its subject, but from the perspective of its protagonists, and their friends and family, the game and the record are personally important. Billy and Steve both have a lot riding on those outcomes as far as their identities are concerned and I think the film would be less compelling if that weren't the case. But, of course, the story doesn't tell it self, and what makes the film work so well is Seth Gordon's ability to find and tell the story in a compelling way. It's sad that the surface triviality of the subject would lead critics, awards committees, etc. to discount the movie as being "worthy" of attention or recognition.

What makes this discussion difficult is that good filmmakers will be able to convey to an audience why their subject matters, even if it seems from the outside to be insignificant. So, while it's easy enough to point to films that, in some sense, are able to hide behind the "importance" of their subject, it's more challenging for me to separate art from the importance of subject in the case of a well-made film. I think that form and content are almost invariably related to each other. Which brings us back to your original point, which is that too many people with the means to honor and draw attention to documentary films seem to react to the surface importance of a work without looking beneath that surface to see how, yes, even arcade games can be "important".

(BTW, I'll just take this opportunity to mention that I'm working on a documentary about comic book culture in Portland, Oregon. My project is fundamentally about people and place, and I've taken a lot of inspiration from About of Son in thinking through what the film should look like and what it should *do* for the audience).

[Stephen Hyde]

I saw Shaun's piece in Pop Matters and now again here. This is an important discourse on craft and the language of cinema. Cinema is a useful language for illuminating seemingly insignificant things in surprising ways.

My filmmaking approach is a response to this observation - that if we look closely at the remarkable ways that mundane things are tied together in this world - we can gain access to fascinating points of view that are truly new. For me the art of documentary is the art of making unseen things visible.

I think the rules of journalism are like a ball and chain on makers of documentary cinema and they should be cast off.

How to creatively do that will be good material for conversations to come.