Idiot Box Love

I had a thought today regarding our documentary which harked back to one of our earlier readings (Paul Arthur - Feel the Pain). The implications of which stemmed back to including myself - the filmmaker - in the documenary itself.

Strictly speaking, in the history of documentary, directors have not played any on-camera role within the fil, and if this was the case it was either inadvertent or there was no way to work around it. More recently pioneered documentaries such as Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, however, offer a much more integrated relationship between the director and the content on screen.

Technological advances, which have entailed the “availability of inexpensive mini-cams and readily accessible video-editing equipment” have enabled emerging filmmakers of the next generation to tell their “literary memoirs”, as it were.

Such documentaries commonly include subjective voiceover narration, a mixture of interviews as well as found material. Whilst ours does not contain the former, there definitely is a marked use of the latter two, and my inolvement is pretty well apparent throughout the piece. And I would definitely class this as an almost 'unavoidable' inclusion because there is probably less chance that Amazon would have been as open and honest had it been anyone else asking the questions.

I have tried to minimalise my involvement on the screen as much as possible, but there are just some points where it cannot be helped. I guess the reality here is is that I wanted my viewers to fall in love with Amazon the way I did, and in order for that to happen I had to have quite an intense level of personal involvement. So far it seems that this has been a success - and it will be interesting to see whether any other groups in the other tutes utilise this mode of reprsentation, too.