Roses Are Red...

A friend reminded me of a joke limerick I once told a few months ago.  Roses are red, violets are blue, which makes violets a really stupid name for them.  Considering that ‘blue’ and ‘them’ don’t even rhyme, it’s a pretty pathetic limerick, which I readily admit.  I think the idea behind it deserves some attention though. 

                I’d be the first one to tell you that I’m a novice to documentary.  I’m completely untrained in the watching of the films we’re viewing here and I feel like I’m at about the level of your average documentary viewer.  I think they’re wildly interesting but if a film presents itself as a documentary, I’m signing up for one thing by watching it and am kind of disappointed when I get something else.  In essence, I’m reacting to this week’s explanation of what documentary is.  Nichols said “with documentary, we expect to engage with films that engage the world.” (23)  He then talks about how documentary is edited different than fiction and that “documentary is therefore much less reliant on continuity editing to establish the credibility of the world it refers to than is fiction.”   I feel that the general consensus of documentary is that it is supposed to document things, which implies an inherent fidelity to reality.  This reading, however, was interesting in that I agreed with a lot of the ideas presented, but also felt that too much creative liberty can result in something like propaganda donning the façade of what most people consider to be documentary, which is in essence, truth. 

                Documentary seems to have a sort of charisma or charm built into the medium that makes the lay man trust what he’s seeing.  This trust should be taken very seriously, especially when we decide to make a doc ourselves.  The desire to heighten drama can be strong and I totally get that, but straight up lying seems like it’s an easy pit to fall into when you’re creating a documentary.  I have a personal vendetta against such documentaries because I saw a film in high school that supposedly “exposed” something that I believed in.  I had a really hard time trusting it again because of how inaccurately portrayed it was in the documentary.  There was plenty of truth in it, but the tone in which it was portrayed mixed with the blatant falsehoods made it anything but a documentation of the truth.

Above, I’ve listen one piece of documentary I’ve always found fascinating.  I think a part of the reason I enjoy it is simply because it’s real life and it’s impossible to debate that anything in here is contrived or that any sort of misrepresentation.  It’s just real life documented for all to see.  Nothing sketchy about it.