This document outlines the structure and goals for a documentary filmmaking course. It will introduce students to various documentary styles, the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity in documentary form and content, and encourage students to find their creative voice by reflecting on their own experiences and interests. Students will learn about documentary techniques like researching, planning, filming and editing as they complete a personal inventory, watch example films, and discuss the art of truth, intuition, fear and failure in documentary storytelling.

1.  As you enter please pick up the syllabus
 Tell me your name on the roster (and the name you
go by, if different)
 Start the PERSONAL INVENTORY activity found on
Connect or online here:
https://goo.gl/forms/777yjy4jBbyz17X93

2.  Introduce ourselves
 Review the syllabus
 Complete Interest Inventory
 Documentary Form & Content
 Watch a Doc

3. The Art of Truth, Intuition, Fear & failure
Week 1
SHANNON WALSH // FIPR 436A / 536 A
DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE & FILM, UBC

6. https://goo.gl/CpfK6W

7.  What do you bring?
 What would you like to learn?
 Trust yourself!
 Don’t be afraid to try!
 All learning comes from failures
 Look at the world around you everyday

8. COURSE
STRUCTURE
 THINKING: Researching, planning & writing
 DOING: Filming, interviewing, editing, organizing
 WATCHING: Analyzing, absorbing, critiquing

10. “Modern documentary avoids telling us what to
feel or think. Instead it exposes us to
contradictory, provocative evidence that moves us
to inner debate and realization.”

11.  What do you need? Engaging characters; narrative tension;
something to say about the world around us.
• Who does it? Artists; Filmmakers; Professional Journalists;
Activists; Ethnographers
Documentary is the “creative treatment of actuality” – John Greison

12. Doing “Self-Inventory” or finding creative voice, from “Directing Documentary” Michael Rabiger
 Start looking by looking
around you.
 What stories move you?
 What excites you?
 What do you want to tell?
 What do you want to
preserve?
 What is close to you?
HOW HAS LIFE MARKED YOU?

13. FORM
The way in which the story is presented …

14. STYLES OF DOCUMENTARIES
Observational Documentary [1960s]
 No commentary or reenactment; observe things as they happen
Participatory Documentary [1960s]
 Interview or interact with subjects; archival film to retrieve
history
Reflexive documentary [1980s]
 Question documentary form, defamilarize the other modes
Performative documentary [1980s]
 Stress subjective aspect of a classically objective discourse;
‘excessive’ use of style
Poetic
Expository

15.  LANDSCAPING
 URBAN SELF PORTRAITS
 METAL FILM
 Subjectivity: “how someone's judgment
is shaped by personal opinions and
feelings instead of outside influences.
Subjectivity is partially responsible for
why one person loves an abstract
painting while another person hates it.”

16. “Since you must subjectively choose everything you show, your documentary can never
be objective truth. Instead, it is a construct by which you convey the spirit of truth.”

17. THE OBJECTIVITY
CRISIS

18. SUBJECTIVITY
 Minority cinemas rise – Majority World, women, LGBTI, people of colour, etc
 Subjectivity became ‘the filter through which the real enters discourse (Renov
2004:176)

19. “Fog of War” Errol Morris
DIVERSITY IS THE RULE,
NOT THE EXCEPTION!

20. “Act of Killing” Josh Oppenheimer

21. Michael Moore (1986)
ROGER &
ME

22. RETURN TO HOMS
Talal Derki (2013)

23. MY WINNIPEG
Guy Maddin (2008)

24. “Maddin imitates, copies, & quotes a range of
styles, from German expressionism, Soviet
montage, French surrealism, film noir,
excessive melodrama, classic horror, trash
cinema and even early musicals.”
• Ivan Villarmea Alvarez, Documenting Cityscapes

25. “Los Angeles Plays itself” Thom Anderson

26. ARCHIVAL

27. “Capturing the Friedmans”
Andrew Jarecki

28. CINEMA DIRECT | OBSERVATIONAL

29. Petition (2009) Zhao Liang

30. “March of the Penguins”, Luc Jacquet

31. “Century of the Self” Adam Curtis
ESSAY
*
EXPOSITO
RY

32. “An Inconvenient Truth” 2006

33. SANS SOLEIL
CHRIS MARKER (1983)
"Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place”…
(And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place.)”

34. WE LIVE IN
PUBLIC ONDI
TIMONER (2009)

35. “The Thin Blue Line” Errol Morris
TRUTH?