How do documentaries help

For other documentaries, the goal is simply to entertain or delight the audience in some way. These are called human interest stories. Perhaps there is a unique character in your town you'd like to profile. This documentary might simply be an observational film, not to judge, simply to show and allow the audience to make their own judgement. Other documentaries may attempt to uncover a hidden truth or mystery.

Or the goal may be to profile someone famous like Abraham Lincoln. So the purpose would be to educate. Perhaps the filmmaker was fascinated with their family life and wanted to share the quirkiness of their family's story.

So the purpose may be to reveal some truth about society through their family's story -- not necessarily to change society, but rather to reveal and enlighten. These are just a few examples of the purpose of documentaries. As you can see, it is not a simple answer! Any one else have ideas to contribute toward this question?

Please comment below. Click here to add your own comments. Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. Simply click here to return to Ask a Question. Sign up for our exclusive 7-day crash course and learn step-by-step how to make a documentary from idea to completed movie!

Learn More. Return Home. Low-Budget Documentary Gear. Ulanzi Smartphone Rig. Give to documentary filmmakers when they ask you for a Kickstarter donation, talk to your friends about these films. In these times of fake news and alternative facts, we need the voices of documentarians more than ever to hold the powerful to account and explore the nuance of the world that cable news squawkers deny.

And, just perhaps, to help us make our world a little more compassionate. Simon Kilmurry is the executive director of the International Documentary Association , whose mission is to build and serve the needs of a thriving documentary culture. Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day. February 15, am. Related Stories. Related Story How 'O. Jon M. Chu Jon M. All Rights reserved. They daily felt the lack of clarity and standards in ethical practice.

They also lacked support for ethical deliberation under typical work pressures. This survey demonstrated that filmmakers generally are acutely aware of moral dimensions of their craft, and of the economic and social pressures that affect them. This study demonstrates the need to have a more public and ongoing conversation about ethical problems in documentary filmmaking. Filmmakers need to develop a more broadly shared understanding of the nature of their problems and to evolve a common understanding of fair ways to balance their various obligations.

Concerns about documentary ethics are not new, but they have intensified over the past several years in response to changes in the industry. By the late s, U. At the same time, documentary television production was accelerating to fill the need for quality programming in ever-expanding screen time, generating popular, formula-driven programs.

The growth of commercial opportunities and the prominence of politics as a documentary subject also produced tensions. Documentary filmmakers, whether they were producing histories for public television, nature programs for cable, or independent political documentaries, found themselves facing not only economic pressure but also close scrutiny for the ethics of their practices. Controversies emerged about several documentaries. Should films such as Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Standard Operating Procedure feature images that further embarrass and humiliate their subjects?

Filmmakers were drawn into criticism of their peers, while lacking common standards of reference. Unlike journalism, documentary filmmaking has largely been an individual, freelance effort. Documentary filmmakers typically are small business owners, selling their work to a range of distributors, mostly in television. Even producers working for large outlets, such as Discovery, National Geographic, and PBS, are typically independent contractors. Individual filmmakers may develop concurrent projects with and for a range of television programmers, from PBS to the Food Channel, balancing sponsored work for income with projects of the heart.

For the most part, however, when it comes to standards and ethics and even independent fact checking , documentary filmmakers have largely depended on individual judgment, guidance from executives, and occasional conversations at film festivals and on listservs.

At the same time, many of the filmmakers surveyed spoke of commercial pressures, particularly in the cable business, to make decisions they believed to be unethical.

They also blurred the line between traditional documentary, reality, and hybrid forms. It has no ethics. It has no ethical or redemptive value. In one case, for instance, a filmmaker was on location shooting a wildlife film, trying to capture one animal hunting another:. We tried to shoot a few, and missed both of them.

So we got one. I made the decision, let them break it. I regret it. It eats me up every day. I can sort of rationalize this, that it might be killed by a natural predator. But for us to inflict pain to get a better shot was the wrong thing to do.

Filmmakers also face pressure to inflate drama or character conflict and to create drama where no natural drama exists. They may be encouraged to alter the story to pump up the excitement, the conflict, or the danger. In one case, a filmmaker lacked exciting enough pictures of a particular animal from a shoot, and the executive producer substituted animals from another country.

The filmmaker believed this to misrepresent the conditions of the region. The assembly-line nature of the production process also threatens the integrity of agreements made between producers and their subjects as a condition of filming.

The producer who lines up subjects or oversees production is often separated from editing and postproduction. Filmmakers felt frustrated that stations did not always honor the agreements they had made with their subjects. That makes me uncomfortable; it puts them at risk. Where institutional standards and practices exist, as in the news divisions of some broadcast and cablecast networks, filmmakers felt helpfully guided by them.

However, even filmmakers who work with television organizations with standards and practices may not benefit from them because the programs are executed through the entertainment divisions.

The standards and practices share some common themes, as analyzed by project advisor Jon Else. They typically assert that an independent media is a bulwark of democracy, and that the trust—of both audience and subject—is essential. They eschew conflict of interest. To achieve those goals, standards uphold accuracy, fairness, and obeying of law, including privacy law.

Furthermore, producers, who were held responsible for the standards, are typically forbidden to offer subjects the right of review or to restage events; they are required to ensure that image and sound properly represent reality, and that music and special effects are used sparingly.

Furthermore, noncommercial public TV news programs explicitly placed journalistic standards above commercial mandates. Singled out for notice was the attention at some television networks—even when not in the news division—to factual accuracy. When documentary filmmakers do have to make their own ethical decisions, how do they reason?

What are their concerns? How much do their own reasoning processes correlate with existing journalism codes? As documentary production becomes more generalized, and as public affairs become ever more participatory, the question of what ethical norms exist and can be shared is increasingly important.

This study explores those questions. The core data was gathered in long-form, hour-long interviews, grounded in open-ended questions, conducted usually by phone. Filmmakers were asked to speak about their own experiences, focusing on the recent past, rather than generalizing about the field. Data were reviewed by an advisory board composed of two industry veterans—filmmaker and author Sheila Curran Bernard and filmmaker and professor Jon Else—and documentary film scholar Bill Nichols.

The interview pool consisted of 41 directors or producer-directors who had released at least two productions at a national level and who have authorial control. Most of those makers had experience both with nonprofit outlets, such as public TV, and with cable or commercial network television.

Also included were four executive producers in national television programming organizations. The population spanned three generations. All interviewees were provided with a consent form that had been approved by the American University Institutional Review Board, and all were offered anonymity.

Anonymity was important to many, especially to those working directly and currently for large organizations. Anonymity permitted filmmakers to speak freely about situations that may have put them or their companies under uncomfortable scrutiny.

At the same time, some people encouraged us to make their stories public and volunteered use of their names. Filmmakers identified challenges in two kinds of relationships that raised ethical questions: with subjects and with viewers. The ethical tensions in the first relationship focused on how to maintain a humane working relationship with someone whose story they were telling.

In both cases, militating against what filmmakers might prefer personally to do was the obligation to complete a compelling and honest documentary story within budget. In most cases, documentarians believed strongly in making informal commitments and employing situational ethics determined on a case-by-case basis. They nonetheless subscribed to shared, but unarticulated, general principles. In the case of subjects who they believed were less powerful in the relationship than themselves, they believed that their work should not harm the subjects or leave them worse off than before.

In the case of viewers, they believed that they were obligated to provide a generally truthful narrative or story, even if some of the means of doing that involved misrepresentation, manipulation, or elision. In thinking about their subjects, filmmakers typically described a relationship in which the filmmaker had more social and sometimes economic power than the subject.

In this case, they worked for a good-faith relationship that would not put their subjects at risk or cause them to be worse off than they were before the relationship began. They usually treated this relationship as less than friendship and more than a professional relationship, and often as one in which the subject could make significant demands on the filmmaker.

For example, any kind of romantic relationship would be unacceptable. You always have to be aware of the power that you as a filmmaker have in relationship to your subject.

In one case, Sam Pollard asked a subject to redo an interview in order to get a more emotionally rich version of a painful moment when he had been abused by police in prison. It was so powerful. After I wrapped, I felt like a real shit for the rest of the day, felt like I manipulated him for my personal gain. It is a powerful moment in the film but I felt bad to push him to that point when he broke down.

So there is a more profound relationship, not a journalistic two or three hours. They were acutely aware of the power they have over their subjects.