The word “directing” suggests ordering people around, and is particularly misleading for documentary since you guide or lead the process, rather than command it. Your job is to know what motivates people, what psychological blocs you must remove, and what subtle pressures you can exert to catalyze behavior, or uncover hidden narratives. As leadership, this is very indirect. How best to prepare yourself?
Acting experience of any kind, particularly improvisation, is most valuable because it gives you firsthand experience of doing things in front of others, and in response to them. This is what your documentary participants will have to do for you. To understand them, it helps to be familiar with the ideas of the Russian acting and drama theorist Constantin Stanislavski (1863–1938). His work clarifies the psychological difficulties that bedevil anyone under intense scrutiny, and makes apparent what practical steps exist—whether you are an actor, director, or documentary participant— to alleviate the paralyzing curse of self-consciousness.
The relative comfort we feel in everyday life depends on assumptions about our function, identity, and worth in the eyes of others. In unfamiliar social situations our psychological equilibrium is apt to suddenly depart, as everyone has experienced. Through his study of acting, Stanislavski discovered aspects of human psychology that are very helpful to nonfiction film directors.
Certain actors excelled because they had invented ways to ward off the self-doubt that is apt to cripple anyone in the public eye. From questioning them, Stanislavski discovered that each had found particular work to occupy their minds and bodies, and as a result could put all their mental energy into pursuing their character’s actions, mental processes, and interactions with others. By stilling the judgmental self, they could play their parts naturally and believably, and function as normally as if they were alone. Today, actors are trained to sustain psychological focus by maintaining an inner dialogue “in character,” and, most importantly, by keeping up a stream of their character’s physical and mental tasks. Paradoxically, these actions awaken genuine feeling, whereas an actor who tries to reach directly for feeling hits a wall. Stanislavski realized that emotions arise out of actions, and that going through certain actions awakens accompanying emotions.
What impedes the free movement of this psychic interplay is the neurotic ego, always ready to judge how one is doing. In new or unexpected situations it pops up like a jack-in-the-box, creating insecurity of all kinds, and disrupting the normality of relaxed concentration. When we are being watched, any opportunity for unstructured thought, even the fear of losing focus, allows the ever-anxious, ever critical mind and judging mind to rush in. Immediately the unlucky actor loses conviction in everything he says and does, and since no inner state is without an outer manifestation—another Stanislavski observation—the audience straightaway notices something is amiss. The fiction director is there to help remove whatever is breaking the actor’s focus.
Your function as a documentary director is similar. Apply these simple human principles to directing documentary, and,
● A person’s body language tells you whether they are unified and focused, or divided and troubled. Is the filming situation causing it, or something else?
● You can lower participants’ self-consciousness by giving them familiar mental or physical work to do.
● The most intense focus for an actor or documentary participant—and thus the greatest relaxation—comes from pursuing something compelling, since this shuts out other forms of consciousness.
To help participants take part naturally and spontaneously, you must reiterate trustworthy reasons for making the film. You must ensure that the participant is doing something comfortably routine, or something that involves him or her with its special meaning. A sheltered middle-aged couple, for example, will happily fall into a recurring discussion about which food is best for the dog’s arthritis. A self-conscious construction foreman, asked to supervise the loading of a heavy steel beam, will immediately fall naturally back into his officious everyday self.
In quite a short time, participants become used to working with you, and come to enjoy being who they are in the presence of your camera and your crew. I once filmed elderly miners discussing the bitter days of a strike, one in which they had derailed a train manned by “scabs” or strikebreakers. We shot them outside their old mine, and because they were reliving the deepest, most divisive issues in their lives, they were completely oblivious of the camera even though it came within feet of their faces.
The easiest people to work with are those unmindful of their effect on others. Old people and small children can be naturally themselves because there is no ego, no internal censor at work. Knowing this, you can predict who lies at the other end of the scale, and will need help to get over their self-consciousness. Those with nervous mannerisms who are compulsively careful of their appearance won’t settle easily in front of a camera. During a street interview with an elderly lady, I saw her completely lose focus. I was puzzled until I saw how, in mid-sentence, she began removing the hair net she realized she was still wearing.
The more “proper” someone feels they must look, the less flexible, impulsive, and openly communicative they will be. But care and circumspection were this lady’s stamp, so her action was so wonderfully representative that her friends would have smiled in recognition. Notice that the pressure of the camera’s presence did not make her behave uncharacteristically.
“Doesn’t the camera change people?” people often ask. Yes, it does, but only in aspect or degree. This can go either way—toward self-consciousness or toward self-revelation. Indeed the camera may catalyze an honesty and depth of feeling never before seen by a participant’s closest friends and family. Often when the “history box” fulfills the human craving for recognition, the floodgates open. The implications are most important:
● You don’t need to be unduly protective of participants. People know their boundaries and seldom ever go beyond their capacities.
● Somewhere, lurking in everyone, is the urge to confess, to come clean, to tell all.
● Filming a revelation doesn’t mean you must use it. You and your advisers can thoroughly consider the consequences of using (or not using) the footage later.
Some exceptions:
● Consider erasing anything that would be damaging to a participant if it fell into the wrong hands. To keep it and use it, you need the participant’s informed consent (that is, you fully and carefully explain the likely consequences and ask the participant whether he/she is willing to give you permission to use it).
● If someone else, not you, has editorial control of your material, keep nothing that can potentially do damage. If it’s taken out of your hands, used, and causes your participant harm, you will be held responsible, not the executive who decided to use it.
● Some people even say, if you shoot it, you’ll use it. So, if you don’t trust yourself to abstain, don’t shoot it!
Particular jobs attract particular kinds of personality, and some employment instills mannerisms and self-awarenesses that can be a liability in filmmaking. Lecturers address invisible multitudes instead of talking personably and one-on-one, as they did during research. Officials unused to making public statements suddenly go in dread of crossing their superiors, and become excruciatingly circular and tentative. This is fine if that is what you want to show, but if it’s not, then you must estimate what is deeply ingrained habit, and what is a misperception about filming. A common notion is that one must project the voice. If so, move the camera closer and ask for a more intimate mode of conversation. You can also try saying, “There is only one person, me, listening to you. Talk only to me.”
If the participant cannot respond to direction, a little playback may do the trick. People seeing and hearing themselves for the first time are usually shocked, so only ever expose an unsatisfactory “performance” supportively, in private, and as a last resort.
Sometimes you will get someone whose concept of being in film makes them valiantly project personality If you are making a film about stage mothers, you could hardly ask for anything more revealing.
The skills used to direct actors in fiction, and those in a documentary (whom Bill Nichols calls “social actors”), are not radically different:
● Don’t ask them to be anything (be natural, be normal, etc.). Asking someone to “just be yourself” sets anxious people worrying. What did he really mean? How does she see me? And which self does he want?
● Make sure that anyone on camera has appropriate tasks to occupy them in mind and body.
● Ask people to do only what is organic to their normal life.
● If you plan to cut from location to location, you may need to remind participants where we last saw them, and what they were doing and saying before the new scene.
One cannot choose what to be, only what to do. Once when filming a mother and daughter in the kitchen together at night, I saw they were camera-conscious. In a moment of inspiration, I asked them to resume a recent disagreement. They went straight into a friendly argument, and became visibly at ease. I realized they were enjoying the sensation of re-enacting their habitual roles (Figure 30-1).
When making a “transparent” film (one designed to look as though there is no observing camera or crew) tell participants to,
● Ignore the camera and crew’s presence.
● Not to worry about mistakes or silences since we shoot far more than we use, and edit everything down.
Both requests relieve participants from feeling they must “play to the audience.” The crew helps by avoiding eye contact, concentrating on their jobs, and giving no facial or verbal feedback.
When making a reflexive film, tell participants that,
● You are filming to catch things as they happen.
● They can talk to you or to the camera as they wish.
● They can go wherever they need to go, do whatever they need to do, while filming.
● Nothing is off limits, and no thought or subject of conversation is disallowed.
In Nick Broomfield’s The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (GB, 1991, Figure 30-2) the director uses boyish disingenuousness to draw out the South African white supremacist leader. Eugene Terre’blanche (sic) is such an egomaniac that he falls for Broomfield’s provocation, with hilariously revealing consequences when he acts like a general chastising a mere upstart.
Directorial manipulation must be justified and well judged, or the audience becomes uneasy. There are moments of this discomfort in Ross McElwee’s otherwise very sophisticated and highly influential Sherman’s March (USA, 1989), an autobiographical film about searching for a wife. The director’s self-presentation plays up his innocence, but merely holding a camera confers power, so we sometimes worry on behalf of the young women he courts (Figure 30-3).
Aided by compact digital equipment that needs little lighting, we are back in the intimate shooting conditions of the early twentieth century, which is perhaps why documentaries keep getting more effective. The smaller, more human scale lets us make films in a quirkier, more individual way— surely a major development. Fewer crewmembers, however, means that the qualities of those who remain are vital. Nothing affects your fortunes more than choosing collaborators wisely.
A major anxiety when you start directing is feeling you lack the clout to do so. Authority is not, after all, something you can switch on when you need it, especially if you sense a hostility in those you presume to lead. How you collaborate with differing personalities is always a sensitive matter, but never an insurmountable one among those who love their work. Most who choose to work in documentary are mature and dedicated people, so it is unwise to try to fool them or make claims beyond your knowledge.
Directing in a large organization you may realize, as I once did, that you are the outsider leading resentful insiders. As the leader and parental figure, you may deliberately be made to feel inadequate. Every human situation has its pecking order: a young director should expect veiled hostility from older crewmembers; a woman should be ready for patronizing behavior from male subordinates, as should a foreigner from the locals. This is bound to happen sometime, so know your rights and insist on them whenever you sense your crew is testing you. All tiresomely human, but watch your back!
Counter these threats—real or imagined—by choosing coworkers carefully whenever you can, and consulting them as respected partners. Particularly when you lead a new unit, start coolly and formally. This implies that everyone is professional and knows the boundaries of their responsibilities. Later, you can gradually relax and bring everyone closer during the intense, shared experience of filmmaking.
If instead you start informally, and then discover that someone in the unit is lax or subtly undermining your authority, it will be difficult to tighten up without generating resentment.
To have authority really means being respected; it means behaving as though you felt confident (“fake it until you make it”). You, not your coworkers, are responsible for your confidence issues. It means having the humility to ask for help or advice when you need it, and sometime it will mean standing by tough decisions or warning intuitions. Your crew depends on your judgment, and needs to feel that though you may bend under load, you won’t break. Stay abreast of their concerns and problems, and be sure to make your own organizational work impeccable.
A shared intensity of purpose usually binds everyone together during a shoot. Try to maintain this during meals or rest periods by keeping crew and participants together when everyone is relaxing. This is often the time when ideas, memories, and associations emerge. Conserved and encouraged, this fellowship increases humor and intimate communication, and energizes even a weary crew. Make a point of asking questions of your crew: it helps make them feel connected and respected. They notice things through the camera, or through the sound person’s headphones because they are monitoring different planes of reality from you, and pick up different nuances.
Ideally, the crew attends all major postproduction screenings. This is when the growth and internal complexity of the film emerges, and it is here that the comprehensiveness of your work begins to show. Crewmembers learn not only about the nature of their contributions, but about the larger organism of documentary itself, which is not necessarily taught during a craft education and is not apparent during routine shooting. In a crew that respects each other, everyone supports and learns from everyone else. All for one, and one for all.
When shooting action sequences, you may need to ask people to slow down or control their movements, since tightly framed movement looks 20 percent to 30 percent faster than it really is. Worse, the operator’s fanciest footwork cannot keep a hand framed and in focus if its owner moves too fast. Documentary participants can often modify their actions without a trace of self-consciousness once they begin enjoying their collaboration with the filming. You see this enjoyment radiating from Nanook, who seems nothing if not authentic as he acts the part of an Inuit from an earlier generation.
How willing are you to intrude to get a result that is visually and choreographically accomplished? The ethnographer shuns such intrusion, and most documentarians have some of the ethnographer in them. But, as Jean-Luc Godard observed, “You can either start with fiction, or with documentary. But whichever you start with, you will inevitably find the other.”1
People in public places often defer to anyone holding a camera, especially when it looks professional. Thus, when you shoot in crowds, don’t fear going where you would not normally enter. The camera is your passport: let its needs draw you to the front of a crowd, or make you squeeze between people looking in a shop window, or cross police lines. In most countries, this is part of the freedom of the press. This may not work in all cultures: a colleague went to film in Nigeria and learned (through having stones flung at him) that taking a person’s image without asking is theft. In some political climates, holding a camera is seen as holding a weapon. See this in action in Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s Five Broken Cameras (Palestine/Israel/France, 2011), an extraordinary firsthand record by a brave and sophisticated Palestine farmer who became a crusading journalist. Around the time his son was born, his village founded a nonviolent movement to resist the annexation of their land for settlers’ apartment blocks, and Burnat began documenting the village’s turbulent resistance with a video camera (Figure 30-4). As peasants trying to block the annexation of their land, they face increasingly violent confrontations with the Israeli Army, who sometimes fire live ammunition. Narrated with deadpan factual neutrality, the film is a unique record of humor, persecution, and random death. Angry soldiers react by breaking or shooting at Burnat’s cameras, and one camera saves his life by blocking a bullet aimed at his head. Most remarkable is the restraint in Burnat’s voice-over, which returns often to the awful cost of continuing, and yet the impossibility of giving up.
There are no universal laws for camera positioning since every situation has its inherent limitations and its inherent meanings. Obstacles are usually physical: perhaps the view from a window restricts you to shooting an interior from one direction only, or you must shoot around an incongruity. You use a low framing on a genuine settler’s log cabin in order to avoid seeing, above the ancient trees, an ominous revolving sausage over the neighborhood hot-dog stand. Making documentaries is astonishingly serendipitous; so often you must alter plans to accommodate the unforeseen. Such limitations shape film art to a degree undreamed of by film theorists, who overestimate the director’s control, and underestimate the parts played by chance and improvisation.
Ideas on how to place your camera, and what movements it should make, will come to you naturally if you let it mirror the stages of revelation by which your consciousness registered unfolding events. Much of this comes from inhabiting the POV of others. Your camera can relay,
● A character in the film’s POV.
● Multiple characters’ POVs.
● The director’s POV.
● An omniscient storytelling POV.
If film language mimics perception, why cover an action from multiple angles? Imagine cutting from long to close shot, and then back to long shot again. By so doing, you are suggesting an observer’s concentration intensifying, then relaxing. Now imagine a tense family meal in which the cutting draws on five different camera positions. It’s a familiar enough film convention, and draws on the tradition in literature where the author implies multiple viewpoints through the use of language. The reader understands shifts in psychological viewpoint, not changes of physical point of view, and the same holds true when you cut multiple views together for the screen. Though film seems to give us “real” events, what it really gives us is a “seeming.” We see not the events themselves, but a construct that implies multiple, humanly motivated ways of perceiving them.
Compare this with your experience as a bystander at a major disagreement. You got so absorbed that you forgot all about yourself. Instead, you were sucked into a series of involuntary agreements and disagreements, seeing first one person’s viewpoint, then another’s. So much were you involved that your sense of self vanished, leaving you inside the protagonists’ heated realities, one after another. Screen language mimics this heightened state of subjectivity by relaying events as a series of psychologically privileged views. They lead you to identify with one person after another as the situation unfolds—sympathy and fascination, distaste and anxiety … Each inner state moves you to search for clues to underlying meanings—that is, for the subtexts. Cutting from angle to angle thus mimics this familiar psychic experience, but it will fail unless the tempos in the scene, the shooting, and editing all feel “right.”
That state of heightened and embracing concentration is not one we normally maintain for long. It feels “right” and “works” when the shifts in POV arise from an empathic observing sensibility— either that of a character, or that of the invisible Storyteller. Without this invisible grounding, the different angles won’t feel integrated.
We cannot keep up a probing emotional inquiry (close shots) for long since it is very draining. Often we withdraw into mental stocktaking or even detachment (long shots). In this condition our eyes may zero in on something distractingly neutral (cutaway) or we may move our examination from a part of the scene to the whole, or from the whole to a significant part. When you find yourself observing in similar circumstances, study your own shifts of attention and see how you sometimes escape into a private realm where you can speculate, contemplate, remember, or imagine. Detail that catches your attention often turns out to have symbolic meaning.
As you direct or shoot, keep your eyes open for anything expressive or symbolic. It might be a column of ants suggesting tireless persistence, or a butterfly in an empty lot that suggests renewal. Abstraction can signify inward pondering in search of a recent event’s significance. A pictorial device often used to suggest this state is rack focus (focus moving selectively between planes in a composition). When an object is isolated on the screen, and its foreground and background are thrown out of focus, it strongly suggests abstracted vision, as does abnormal motion (slow or fast) in some contexts.
These are some of the ways to represent how we penetrate, then dismantle reality, and distance ourselves from the psychic overload. We may be searching for meaning, or simply refreshing ourselves through imaginative play, but falling into a state of abstraction fulfills our need for some contemplative time out.
Chance can work in eerie ways. The British miners mentioned in an earlier chapter had sabotaged a coal train manned by strike-breakers. The evening before we came to film them, an express train derailed close to the original site. For me and my crew, this felt like the hand of fate, and it was not the only occasion when something paranormal happened. After some queasy soul-searching about voyeurism, I altered our plans to film the wreckage. It brought home, like nothing else, the destruction the saboteurs had risked by their demonstration, and the depth of alienation that had caused them to take such a risk (Figure 30-5). The next morning I interviewed an aging doctor who had been a student “scab” (strike-breaker) 40 years earlier in the original incident (Figure 30-6). Knowing we were coming to interview him, he thought he was dreaming when called out in the night to attend to casualties in a train crash.
FIGURE 30-6
The doctor, a former strike-breaker in The Cramlington Train-Wreckers.
For some, all this adapting to the unexpected is frustrating, but others take it as a challenge to their inventiveness and insight. In pursuit of spontaneity, you may be tempted to make no plans, but plan you must, since plans quite often work out.
The world we know is full of dualities, oppositions, and ironic contrasts. For instance, you drive your car very fast at night, and then, stopping to look at the stars, experience your own insignificance under those little points of light that took millions of years to reach earth. Patricio Guzman’s masterpiece Nostalgia for the Light (Chile, 2010, Figure 30-7) evokes this wonder by introducing us to astronomers in an Atacama Desert observatory that is capturing light transmitted billions of years ago. They are looking for the origins of the universe, but Guzman uses their dedication as a metaphor for his own as he searches to comprehend the brute cruelty that decimated his generation of young intellectuals. When a CIA-backed coup deposed the elected President Allende, General Pinochet seized the reins of power and took revenge by letting his police and military liquidate thousands of young dissidents. Those we see digging in the desert sands near the Observatory are their parents, siblings, and lovers who are still tragically looking for their remains, hastily scattered by the regime during its dying days (Figure 30-8).
Guzman’s film is a harrowing work of beauty that ponders how a nation can so deliberately discard its own history, how the past and the future can be allowed to coexist so deceptively in a nation’s consciousness.
Screen language exists to frame and juxtapose every aspect of what a keen Observer notices, and to give a purposeful Storyteller materials with which to tell a story. Framing alone can change meanings since isolating people in separate close shots, for instance, and intercutting them, will have a very different feel than cutting between two over-the-shoulder (OS) shots or showing the whole scene in medium long shot (MLS).
In the single shots, the spectator is always alone with one of the contenders, a relationship nurtured by editing. In the OS and MLS shots, however, we always see one person in relation to the other, and our involvement is with them as a pair, not with each separately. This feels different, but there is nothing obscure here. Your guide to how an audience will respond always lies in using the lexicon of cinema to translate aspects of your own emotional experience. By becoming intensely aware of how you experience, you involve yourself in fabricating the cinematic equivalencies.
How do different backgrounds work with a particular foreground action? If a participant is in a wheelchair, and you angle the shot to contain a window with a vista of people in the street, the composition unobtrusively juxtaposes her with the freedom of movement she so poignantly lacks. This is James Stewart’s perspective in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (USA, 1954) as he waits in his wheelchair for his broken leg to repair.
Looking down on the subject, looking up at the subject, or looking at it between the bars of a railing can all suggest ways of seeing and therefore, of experiencing the action that makes the scene. True, you can manufacture this relationship through editing, but it’s labored and open to distrust. You accomplish far more by capturing whatever visual relationships already exist, and by building pithy observation and juxtaposition into each frame.
As you operate the camera, make yourself respond physically to each location’s particularities; make your camera respond to how participants’ movements and actions convey the scene’s subtext. When you need to make a camera movement, try to use the movement of a character or vehicle to motivate shift in the camera’s gaze to a new composition.
It makes a big difference to the audience to be seeing through an intelligence that resonates to an event’s movements and underlying tensions. The audience always prefers to share the consciousness of someone intelligent and intuitive, not that of a mechanical eye swiveling toward whatever moves its body or lips.
Handheld or tripod-mounted camera? Camera handling options can suggest either the steadiness of a settled, historically informed human view, or the unsettled movement associated with quest, uncertainty, excitement, or flight. These two kinds of camera-presence—one studied, composed, and controlled, and the other mobile, spontaneous, and physically reactive to change—alter the film’s storytelling “voice,” and project different perceptual relationships to the action, especially when they are juxtaposed. Usually practical matters will influence your choices:
The tripod-mounted camera can zoom in to hold a steady close shot when the camera is distant, but may not be able to migrate quickly to a new vantage point, should the action call for it. Mount the camera on a quick-release plate, and you can release it and go handheld in the twinkling of an eye.
Spatially a tripod-mounted camera always sees from a fixed point, no matter whether the camera pans, tilts, or zooms. Its perspective (size of foreground in relation to background) remains the same, reiterating to our subconscious that the observation is rooted in an assigned place. This feeling would be appropriate for a courtroom, because the positions of judge, jury, witness box, and audience are all ritually preordained and symbolic. No court would tolerate a wandering audience member, so it is logical that the camera/observer also be fixed.
The handheld camera gives great mobility but with some unsteadiness and a feeling of human impulse and vulnerability. In the right context, these qualities become highly appropriate and expressive. In Five Broken Cameras mentioned earlier, the vantage is repeatedly that of non-violent protesters facing soldiers firing tear-gas and bullets, and the vulnerable and reactive camera handling is perfectly appropriate to the experience.
When used to cover a spontaneous interaction like a conversation, a handheld camera can reframe, reposition itself, and change image size to produce all the shots you would expect in an edited version: long shot, medium two-shots, complementary over-the-shoulder shots, and big close ups. Capturing a well-balanced succession of such shots is a rare skill and calls for the sensibility of editor, director, photographer, and dramatist—all in one camera operator. Luckily human interactions generate much redundancy, so you can usually edit intelligently shot handheld footage to yield an approximation of the feature film’s access to its characters. However, make the cutting too elegant, and your technique may undermine the spontaneity of the scene. When you cannot predict the action or know only that it will take place somewhere in a given area, going handheld may be the only solution. Some cameras are equipped with image stabilizers that compensate (sometimes very successfully) for the kind of handheld unsteadiness that comes from, say, the occasional need to breathe.
Great camerawork is a matter of utter concentration and astute sensitivity to underlying issues. For a recent lexicon of handheld shooting, see the work of Axel Baumann, Ulli Bonnekamp, Mark Brice, Robert Hanna, and Wolfgang Held in any episode of Mitchell Block and Maro Chermayeff’s extraordinary ten-episode miniseries Carrier (USA, 2008). For other classic North American handheld work, see that by,
● John Marshall in Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, USA, 1967)
● William Brayne in Warrendale (Allen King, Canada, 1967)
● Slawomir Grünberg in Omar and Pete (Tod Lending, USA, 2005)
● Mira Chang and Jenna Rosha in Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, USA, 2006) which makes creative use of a Steadicam camera mount.
When filming a scene, you should have clear ideas about what you want it to establish or contribute to your intended film. List your goals so you overlook nothing in the heat of battle. If, for instance, you are shooting in a laboratory, you might make crib notes (reminders) on an index card (Figure 30-9). If your audience needs to see the lab workers’ dedication, you must get shots to establish these things. Then, treating the camera as an observing consciousness, you imagine in detail how you want the scene to be experienced If for instance you were shooting a boozy wedding, you might want the camera to adopt a tipsy guest’s point of view. Going handheld, peering into circles of chattering people, it could legitimately bump into raucous revelers, quiz the principals, and even join in the dancing. If however you were shooting in a ballroom dance studio, with its elaborate ritualized performances, you might use a Steadicam, or use a tripod placing and handling of the camera that is formal and grounded.
So, how to show lab workers as heroic? The answer might lie in studied shots emphasizing the danger and painstaking rigor of the work they do, and thus the human vulnerability of each worker. Perhaps you show a face near a retort of boiling acid. You make us see that each person has his own world, and must coexist with danger in order to investigate on behalf of humanity. You begin to see the calm, concentrated eyes above the masks, the expertly used elaborate equipment, the dedication.
Whatever the shooting situation, ask yourself,
● What factual or physical details must I shoot to imply the whole?
● What will be each essential stage of development that I must cover?
● What signals the start and end of each developmental stage?
● Is elapsed time important, and if so how do I imply it?
● Where does the majority of the telling action lie? (In the courtroom, for example, does it lie with judge, plaintiff, prosecutor, or the jury?)
● Who is the central character and how does he/she act upon the situation?
● When is this likely to change, and what makes the next person become central?
● Who or what develops during this scene? How will I show it?
Frequently someone you are shooting will hold out a picture, refer to an object in the room, or look offscreen at someone or something. In each case, his action and eyeline shift directs our attention to something we want to see. You gratify this need with an insert or cutaway. The corollary is that, in order to use a cut, insert, or cutaway legitimately, an editor must find its motivation (justification) within the scene—whether emanating from a character or from the needs of the narrative.
Sometimes a cutaway or insert conveys a Storyteller attitude. For example, a faucet drips incessantly in the kitchen of a neglected elderly man. You film a close shot of it, including the dusty, yellowing photographs in the background. Neglected faucet and photos speak volumes about long-standing disregard. Such shots, drawing the viewer’s eye to significant detail, arise from (and are motivated by) the Storyteller’s intentions. They express an authorial conviction about this man and his life that the audience does well to notice, since it will surely have consequences in the story later.
After you have covered two or more people in conversation, make your editor happy by asking them to prolong their conversation while your camera gathers safety coverage It now concentrates on close-ups of each individual listening, watching, reacting, and shifting their gaze between the other speakers. These shots can later be intercut with speakers and act as a highly motivated cutaway. Spontaneous eyeline shifts are worth their weight in gold to the editor, but you cannot ask participants to make them, since people usually become very self-conscious.
Try to cover each important issue in more than one way so you have alternative narrative possibilities later. You could for example cover a political demonstration with footage showing how the demonstration begins, shoot close shots of faces and banners, the police lines, the arrests, and so on. But you might also acquire coverage through photographs, a TV news show, participant interviews, or street interviews. This would produce a multiplicity of attitudes about the purpose of the march and a number of faces to intercut (and thus abbreviate) the stages of the demonstration footage. You now have multiple and conflicting viewpoints, and materials that allow you to intensify yet greatly compress the narrative through parallel storytelling.
Good production stills are incredibly important when it comes to publicizing your film. During production, carry a high-resolution digital stills camera so that someone can shoot the high points. Decide beforehand what compositions will best represent the thematic issues in the film. How to reveal the participants’ personalities? And what exotic or alluring situations might help draw an audience? Stills should epitomize the film’s subject and approach, and thematic issues. Compositions should capture the important relationships and personality traits of the participants.
1. Richard Roud, Godard (Martin Secker and Warburg, 1967), p. 55.
