Panel Recap: Future of What: Staring at the Horizon of Nonfiction ...

Zachary Heinzerling, director of Cutie and the Boxer, was in attendance at the panel. Photo: Cine Mosaic.

Post written by Mike Pottebaum.

In the current media landscape, it is hard to project the future of documentary film. Reality television and public relations videos replicate the documentary aesthetic and threaten to undermine the genre?s authenticity and integrity. New methods of distribution and the increasingly short attention spans of audiences might suggest the disappearance of feature-length documentaries.

On Sunday, three filmmakers sat down in the Odd Fellows Lounge and held a discussion, moderated by Camden International Film Festival founder and director Ben Fowlie, on these hurdles as well as the necessity of documentary film in contemporary society and the future. As Fowlie says in his introduction, ?I think this might be the broadest panel ever.?

The panelists consisted of director Zachary Heinzerling (Cutie and the Boxer), director Josh Fox (Gasland) and producer Signe Byrge Sorensen (The Act of Killing). These particular filmmakers were chosen for their varied approaches to documentary filmmaking and their experimentation with the genre.

All three appeared to be hopeful about the future of filmmaking. Each spoke at length about the change in audience mindset toward documentary film. Sorensen, the eldest of the three, described the public?s attitude toward the genre when she first started as ?puritanical.? Experimentation was taboo.

?Now,? says Heinzerling, ?people are more forgiving of the form.? Instead of eschewing the genre for generalized ethical issues, people discuss those issues as they arise from experimentation and innovation and grow more comfortable with them.

Documentary filmmakers are now able to push the boundaries without fear of being ostracized from the genre. This does not mean filmmakers should always push ? sometimes they shouldn?t push at all. ?The role of the documentary filmmaker is to combine subject and form in the most powerful way,? Sorensen says.

She cited her experience working on The Act of Killing, a portrait of a group of Indonesian men who brag about their genocidal behavior, as an example. For this film, Sorensen says, she wasn?t interested in what the subjects did but how they saw themselves. She calls it a ?documentary of the imagination.? In order to achieve this, the filmmakers actually allowed the subjects to direct and film some scenes.

But this comfort has its downside. As the ethics of documentary filmmaking enter the realm of acceptability, it becomes easier to hijack the medium for public relations and advertising. Fox spoke passionately about the current ?media war? he has been thrown into since the release of Gasland, Fox?s investigation into the real effects of fracking. Energy companies have released ?attack films? that masquerade as documentaries to combat the bad press Fox has brought them.

Sorensen offered a solution: media literacy. ?We need to teach people how to be critical of media,? she says. Heinzerling contends that people are learning this already due to the ?devolution of reality in reality TV.?

The common consensus among the panelists seemed to be that documentary film is not going anywhere. It might not look the same in ten years, but the basic concept will still exist. As Fox says, the future of documentary is not how to make a great film, it?s ?how do we get this message to people who need it.? This will take a certain amount of adaptation to the changing media environment and innovation within the genre itself, but there will always be stories to tell.

Source: http://www.voxmagazine.com/blog/2013/03/panel-recap-future-of-what-staring-at-the-horizon-of-nonfiction-filmmaking/

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