Saturday, May 3, 2008

International Documentary Challenge

I was challenged the other day by a reader who felt that Doc-a-Day didn't have a strong enough voice or personality. And it's true - it's one thing to express strongly held opinions, but that doesn't mean one has anything new or valuable to add to the myriad reviews already out there. The intent of this blog is to analyze why films work or don't work, paying special attention to craft and structure, not for any kind of pedantic or didactic purpose, but to force myself to think about films in a more systematic way. I didn't start this blog because I wanted a soapbox, but I think that in the course of seeing and blogging about 15+ films at Hot Docs, I started using it as such.

Now that all that excitement is over, I'd like to get back to the original purpose. That's my documentary challenge.

The real one - the International Documentary Challenge - is a timed filmmaking competition in which teams have five days to make a short doc. It takes me back to where I started - I spent years making short pieces for magazine shows, usually with the same kind of restrictions: one day to shoot, one day to edit. This has given me a special affinity for this kind of competition, and a pretty good idea of what's reasonable to expect from such an exercise. So today's post is really more for the benefit of IDC participants.

This year's 14 Doc Challenge finalists ranged from the
pedestrian to the near-magical. The ones that worked best, not surprisingly, had both a strong character and visuals that supported the story.

"Ars Magna," about a master anagramist, found a way to make the letters dance on screen, externalizing the anagramist's thought process. "Ghost Bike," where the central character was an idea - a white bicycle placed near spots where a cyclist had been killed - had a meditative feel and sense of mystery that perfectly fit the subject. "Click Whoosh," about the demise of the Polaroid instant camera, had not just great characters but a distinctive visual style: it used split screens framed in white, like a Polaroid photo, and showed how the photos are different and why they are loved.

The films that didn't work for me tended to be the ones that were poorly designed, or not designed at all. A film from Quebec about ice fishing was simply "a day on the lake," with no strong characters and no theme. "Let's go to the ice-fishing camp and see what we find" is a very risky way to make a film. If you find a strong character and stick to them, you might get something great. But if such a person isn't there, or you spread yourself too thin and just shoot everything that's going on, you end up with not much at all. "All the Eights, 88" had a very engaging character - an 88-year-old widow with a twinkle in her eye, reflecting on the long life already behind her and what lay ahead. But the supporting visuals just didn't cut it: the film kept cutting back to a bingo hall, where she liked to go and where presumably the filmmakers had met her, but this did nothing to deepen or advance the story.

All this makes me think about a one-line lesson that a wise and cranky (why do these two attributes so often go together?) screenwriter gave me years ago: character drives story, story proves theme. If you can't identify these three elements and how they work together, you don't have a good film.

It also reminds me of the lessons I learned in doing short, quick-turnaround pieces: 1) To make an impact in six minutes, it's important to be visually stylish, as with the Polaroid split screens, and the dancing letters. 2) Take the time to shoot as well as you possibly can - in a short piece, boring visuals kill you every time. 3) Hit 'em over the head - with emotion, comedy, a surprise, anything. You have very little time to make an impact.

And yet... really good filmmaking rarely fits any kind of formula. My favourite of this year's Doc Challenge films was an experimental first-person piece by New York filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar, which could hold its own at any Images-type experimental-video festival. "Beholder" is a meditative first-person piece about living in New York and seeing the city through a video camera. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between beholder and subject, Metzgar doesn't just cover the character-story-theme bases, he takes us on a ride. And that feeling of being on a ride is what good documentary filmmaking is really about for me.


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