One of the major issues in documentary film today, as I see it, is the idea perpetuated by many that the films are somehow “objective” and free from any lens or judgmental point of view. I don’t mean to insinuate that filmmakers make films under this paradigm, merely that they are received as such, and often used as “proof” of fact - when in fact it’s entirely possible a film may be used effectively to distort the fact and the medium itself then becomes a powerful weapon of persuasion.

During the 2008 political season, we’ve just started to see the first of these “documentaries” used by one party to deride another or to further incite their constituents. Citizens United is one such group that is poaching the power of the documentary medium as a vehicle to win votes and to confuse viewers by presenting their agenda within a “documentary” that is both a) factual and b) objective.

Objectivity in the medium is impossible, as even news documentaries are produced with a particular point of view, and are (as most producers would readily admit) totally subjective to the research team, directorial, executive, and producer opinion on the subject.

The BBC4 came under heavy criticism when it aired an anti global warming documentary that refuted Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Airing in March 2007, The Great Global Warming Swindle intentionally set out to prove that man had nothing to do with global warming. What wasn’t revealed, and hence the criticism, was the illegitimate and widely discredited “experts” it used to tell its story. And of those experts who were legitimate, many wrote in editorials and letters of complaint to distance themselves from the piece because their views had been “distorted” and “twisted” or “taken out of context.”

The latest of these films to make headlines is Citizens United, a conservative interest group, has produced a “documentary” on Barack Obama. From a recent New York Times article on the subject:

The ad is a prelude to the film, “Hype: The Obama Effect,” which Citizens United plans to release in early September. According to the film’s Web site it will ask — and answer — a few questions about Mr. Obama, including whether he is “the uniter the country begs for, or a liberal divider.”

Will Holley, a spokesman for the group, said the film will be released in theaters in select markets across the country and offered for sale on DVD.

The Obama campaign declined to comment on the film.

Independent groups like Citizens United are increasingly inserting themselves into the contest between Mr. Obama and the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain. Another advocacy organization, Let Freedom Ring, plans to begin broadcasting a commercial accusing Mr. Obama of being a flip-flopper on Tuesday. The group, Vets for Freedom, is spending $1.5 million on an advertising and grassroots effort trumpeting what they say is the success of the troop buildup in Iraq.

The use of this powerful medium as a way to persuade - what it was intended to do even back in John Grierson’s day - has become the weapon of choice as of late for many individuals and organizations who want to tell a certain version of events for strictly political or personal gain - not necessarily for the good of the community or nation at large.

One of the other culprits who I feel sometimes (not all of his films do this) uses the medium to berate an audience or lead them in a certain direction with blinders on, is the successful documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. Conservatives like to pan his use of the documentary as propaganda, but his presentation of fact is no more salacious than political advertisements dressed as documentaries that run during a campaign (remember swiftboat?) season. I hope Moore (as he said he would) does a documentary on a subject about the next president, or about environmentalism, etc.

I happen to like some of Moore’s films, and I think he’s done a lot of good for the medium. Thanks to Moore, major theaters are now showing documentary films and funding has become (albeit somewhat limited and difficult to access for independent types) more readily available. What Flaherty did for doc films in the 20’s and 30’s and even again in the late 50’s with his Louisiana Story, Michael Moore has done in the last 20 years.

No political party or cause is immune from the temptation to produce a documentary as a way to sell their message, or product even. What needs to change is our teaching of the medium as a medium of truth/fact/black/white. This is simply not the case, nor will it ever be. Documentaries tell a certain story, from a specific point of view, regardless of breadth and regardless of how benign the topic might seem. Ken Burns’ documentaries are not objective, and should not be sold as such. It’s sort of the same issue with wikipedia - it’s not an objective source. Peer review, film responses, awards, criticisms, box office success, all play and should continue to play a role in how we enjoy and receive, and process the medium we love.

He used a 450 pound cable to do so and also a custom made 26 foot long, 55 pound balancing pole. Tight-rope walker, unicyclist, magician and pantomime artist, Philippe Petit was also one of the earliest modern day street jugglers in Paris in 1968. He juggled and worked on a slack rope with regularity in Washington Square Park in New York City in the early 1970s. Petit is one of the Artists-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Other famous structures he has used for tightrope walks include that Cathedral, The Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, and between the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower. Petit currently lives in Woodstock, New York. A documentary film named “Man on Wire” by UK director James Marsh dealing with Petit’s WTC performance won both the World Cinema Jury and Audience awards at the Sundance Filmfestival 2008. The film also won awards at the 2008 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C.

Thousands of feature-length documentary films are produced every year, but almost nobody gets a chance to see them. A few dozen are shown to small audiences at major film festivals, and a handful make it into theaters. For every blockbuster like “An Inconvenient Truth,” there are hundreds of documentaries that never find an audience.

Starting Thursday, however, there will be a new online service that aims to change all that. The service, called SnagFilms, allows anyone with a blog, a Web site, or even a page on a social-networking site, to open a virtual movie theater and show these documentaries, free. The virtual theater is a small widget that contains the film, and that can be embedded easily and quickly in a wide variety of popular social-networking services and blog platforms. No technical knowledge is needed.

Once a site or page owner “snags” a film in this way, visitors to the site can view it in a larger window that pops out from the widget. This window plays the film, displays some ads and provides links to charities or organizations related to the topic of the movie. The films can even be played in full-screen mode. Many also include links for buying a DVD of the film. All that’s missing is the popcorn.

These aren’t homemade, three-minute YouTube clips. Nearly all are feature-length, professionally produced documentaries, from both small independent filmmakers and well-known sources such as PBS and National Geographic.

The owner of the site or blog gets no direct revenue from posting the films. He or she is, in effect, donating space to support the film or the cause it highlights, a decision SnagFilms calls “filmanthropy.” But the filmmaker and SnagFilms do make money — splitting advertising revenue equally. And the charity or organization can make money, too, if viewers opt to donate. The filmmaker also can make money from DVD sales, paying SnagFilms an 8.5% commission.

I have been testing a prerelease version of the SnagFilms service and have posted SnagFilms widgets with no problems to Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Netvibes, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces and Vox. Many more Web sites can house these widgets, including the vast number of blogs built on the popular WordPress and TypePad platforms.

Here’s how it works. You just go to the SnagFilms Web site at snagfilms.com, select one or more of the 250 or so films available at launch and click the snag button. A menu pops up that lists numerous popular networking services and platforms. Clicking one will automatically post the SnagFilms widget of your choice on your page or site at one of these services. You can also simply view the films at the SnagFilms site.

Each widget includes an “info” button that takes you to a page on the SnagFilms site giving the details and background on the film. You can also leave comments here, rate the film, order the DVD and see recommendations for related films.

The system is viral, so you don’t have to start at the SnagFilms site. A Web surfer who sees a SnagFilms movie anywhere on the Web can spread it around just by clicking the snag button on every widget. The snag button allows the viewer to either host the film or to email a link to the film that will bring friends to the SnagFilms site to view or snag it.

SnagFilms is the brainchild of Ted Leonsis, a former top executive at America Online, who in recent years has become a documentary-film producer. He became frustrated with the distribution bottleneck for such films and arranged to take over AOL’s documentary site, TrueStories, and turn it into SnagFilms. He also is chairman of the board of a company, Clearspring, which created the film widgets.

At launch, the SnagFilms catalog includes well-known documentaries like “Super Size Me,” but also lesser-known films on a wide variety of topics, including college football, AIDS in Africa, politics, profiles of average people and tales of the New York Fire Department. One of my favorites was “Paper Clips,” the story of how a school in Tennessee learned about the Holocaust.

Filmmakers can submit movies to the site by sending an email to: submissions@snagfilms.com. SnagFilms says it doesn’t censor or edit the films, but won’t accept pornography or films deemed to encourage hate. It does have a selection process, so not all films submitted will make it onto the site. The company hopes to add more films soon.

I had only two gripes about SnagFilms. First, the films should be able to play inside the widget itself, with an option inside to play at larger sizes. Having to open a separate browser window is a pain. The company says it’s working on this.

Second, the initial catalog is light on documentaries from a conservative or probusiness perspective. But the company says it is “actively seeking to offer differing viewpoints” and will soon add “a number of films that are quite conservative in philosophy.”

SnagFilms is a great idea for getting documentary films in front of more people. It’s another example of how the Web is changing media distribution for the better.

An interview by the Santa Barbara Independent, with documentary director Laura Dunn:

Documentaries take a lot of work to complete. How was it making this one?
The film took a year longer to make than I expected, in part because my child, who is three years old now, was born in the middle of the editing. I was very pregnant at the end of filming, and if you look at the footage of the interview with Robert Redford, which was done on my actual due date, you can see he’s maybe reacting to it a little bit. He’s also thinking about when he was very young, just learning to swim, so maybe that’s in there, too.

What made you choose water as something to make a film about?
The subject of water was really Terrence Malick’s idea. It was like a philosophical premise for a documentary, which was a great gift to me. There is Barton Springs as the natural resource that God gave us, and then there’s what we’re doing with it. Barton Springs is a remarkable thing to study, because it reveals a lot to look at an ecosystem over time. And even before all of this got started, Malick was already my favorite filmmaker.

Your film makes great use of archival footage. How did you get that part of it together? It was an incremental process.
I got hold of 150 hours of 1970s newscast footage, and I had some great finds through archival research, but a lot of that research was tedious. The ratio of usable stuff to total material was pretty bad—there was a lot of junk. But the archival footage allowed me to portray the “growth wars,” which I felt were an important part of the story.

The Unforeseen has a noticeable style to it. Was that something you intended?
Part of the credit for the film’s visual style should go to Lee Daniel, the cinematographer. From my perspective, the style was an outgrowth of working for Terrence Malick, who inspired me to create a meditative space with it, rather than a traditional narrative film. I always thought of myself as making this film for him. That the idea for this wasn’t mine and that the film was for Malick—those things were both liberating stylistically.

You don’t have voice-over narration, and the film is full of visual surprises.
That’s because I wanted to make a film that wasn’t documentary-based. I had a great teacher at Yale named Michael Roemer who helped me to understand early on that it’s necessary to see the art in reality, and that for all films, there has to be integrity in the telling of the story. These are the aesthetic perceptions of reality that underpin all art, not just documentary. I have been frustrated at times with the position of documentary even as it has gained some success. When I started making this movie, one thing that was on my mind was the question, “Why has documentary film become restricted in its nature?” This film allowed me the opportunity to connect with the larger issues about documentary that I had become concerned with.

You show both sides of the development debate very effectively. How did you manage to do that?
Development is a universal problem and it should transcend any single point of view or imagined solution. If I’m preaching in this film, what I am preaching is “Love thy neighbor.” I wasn’t striving for “balance,” necessarily, because I find the whole idea of balance to be kind of small-minded. The issues and how people feel about them go deeper than balance, and to get at them you have to dive into them.

When I first wrote about the film on our Web site, I got a long comment from someone identifying themselves as “Austinite” who said that two things were wrong about the film. One was that the water supply in Austin is actually great, and has not been compromised. The second is that aerial photography makes all subdivisions look awful, so the use of that was unfair. How would you answer these criticisms?
As far as the water supply question is concerned, Austinite may not have a comprehensive view. Austin’s drinking water is drawn from Lake Travis. It’s the dried up wells to the southwest of Austin, and the water situation in Hays County—that’s tragic. Barton Creek wells are mostly dry now. And beyond that, there’s a big difference between drinking water and environmental water, which has been even more affected. So, yes, there is plenty of potable drinking water in Austin, and yes, the city is cutting water off from other places that need it. In the words of another film on this subject, “It’s Chinatown.”

And the idea that all aerial views make development look ugly or even cancerous?
The aerial views are very compelling precisely because this is the type of thing that you can’t see from your backyard. The scale of it just doesn’t appear in that way. That’s part of why I made the film, so that this phenomenon could be seen and perceived on the scale it inhabits, which is larger than that of the individual.

What do you see as the biggest issue that has been raised by your work?
At the heart of the growth wars is the question “Does the land have inherent value?” That’s why these childhood memories that the various characters in the film share with us are so important and so powerful. From Redford learning to swim to the small town farm life that the developer Gary Bradley knew, these are what we have left of our initial connection to that inherent value of the land.

How would you advise those who are facing development questions to think about them?
The approach is everything. Are you looking at the land as something with a history that’s embedded in an ecosystem that extends beyond our area and lifespan, or are you looking at it as a “blank canvas” on which you can draw something that will make a profit? That’s going to make a big difference.

The AEJMC will show the film in a continuous loop at its conference at the Chicago Marriott Downtown Aug. 6 to 9.

“We are pleased that journalism educators from across the nation will be able to share this wonderful film with their students — the next generation of journalists,” said Sylvia Smith, president of the National Press Club, the world’s leading professional organization for journalists.

The hour-long film documents the effect of the Press Club on the history and future of journalism.
“Distribution of this film at the AEJMC Conference is just one of the many ways we are finding to use the film to spark discussion of the First Amendment, freedom of speech and the future of journalism,” Smith said.

During its centennial year, the NPC is airing the film and coordinating discussions in communities around the country. One such event was held at Chicago’s Columbia College last month and featured Chicago Sun-Times Publisher Cyrus Freidman, Bill Adee of the Chicago Tribune, Renee Ferguson of NBC5 and Vivian Vahlberg of the Medill School of Journalism.

Funding for the educational outreach campaign, including production and distribution of more than 12,000 DVDs was provided by Aviva USA, one of the fastest-growing life insurers in the U.S. Aviva has recently moved its North American headquarters to Chicago.

“At Aviva, our goal is to help people achieve prosperity and peace of mind for themselves and their families,” said Tom Godlasky, North American CEO of the global insurance company. “We know that one of the key requirements for achieving peace of mind is the ability to speak freely and to be heard. It is a privilege, therefore for Aviva to support the work of the National Press Club and help educators across the country instill the values of professional journalism that underpin the freedom of the press.”

About The National Press Club
Founded in 1908, the National Press Club has more than 3,700 members worldwide including journalists representing all major news organizations in print, broadcast and online media. The Press Club hosts more than 2,000 events each year including speeches, news conferences, meeting and dinners that are attended by more than 250,000 guests.
About The Association for Education in Journalism
Founded in Chicago in 1912, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level. Today the Association has some 3,600 members worldwide.

About Aviva-USA
Aviva is one of the fastest-growing life insurers in the U.S. and is dedicated to building more financially secure tomorrows in American communities and nationwide.
SOURCE National Press Club

Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Coming Soon!

Synopsis

Over the course of three months, the film’s creative team follows the three youngsters, Rose, a 13-year-old choir singer; Nancy, a 14-year-old dancer; and Dominic, a 14-year-old xylophone player, as they prepare for Uganda’s annual National Music Competition in Kampala, a world a way from their war ravished displacement camp of Patongo.

Proud members of the Acholi tribe, the children (in addition to 65,000 other children and adults) living in the remote northern Uganda refugee camp of Patongo, which is under military protection from the Lord’s Resistance Army, a terrorist group that has been rebelling against the government for the past two decades.

Critique

Documentary power couple Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine’s poignant piece about three children from a northern Ugandan displacement camp is a moving look at the uplifting power of music in the most unlikely of places.

Academy Award nominated War Dance follows three children and their primary school class as they prepare to compete in their country’s prestigious national music and dance festival. What that description doesn’t reveal, is the multi-layered and richly textured narratives that weave the backdrop to the story itself.

The ever-present danger of a rebel forces attack creates a tense and complicated back story for this documentary narrative. The exceptional (and often striking) cinematography with its poetic and beautiful juxtaposition of images, creates a bold contrast to the otherwise horrific circumstances found in Northern Uganda.

At first the interviews with the three main children felt manipulative, creating a feeling of discomfort begging the viewer to ask if some of the interviews had been rehearsed. While this may read as a pointed criticism of the filmmakers’ interviewing approach, the Errol Morris “direct to the camera interview” method contributed to the film and would have been much less personal and far less intense had they taken a PBS “staring off camera at an imaginary interviewer” approach.

During one scene, in which Nancy visits the grave of her father for the first time, I felt like I had invaded an intensely personal and intimate moment. The camera rolled as Nancy, who heads her house of three other children, breaks down in a cathartic mourning tantrum. While turned off at the filmmakers’ choice to keep rolling, it forced me to come to terms with what these children have had to go through, making the stories all the more personal. Again, a bold choice that works.