My friend, and filmmaking partner, Jemma has set me the task of showing her documentaries she hasn’t seen so that we can look at visuals and filming techniques for a documentary we are currently in the research stage for. Jemma has largely always focused on current affairs TV docs, as that is her main area of interest, and has little knowledge when it comes to feature documentaries. I don’t see this as a bad thing and it means I get a chance to re-watch a lot of films I love, so I’ve begun trying to think of particular films or scenes that could help us with the filming process. Jemma is planning the first filming/recce trip in January and I can’t go so we’re really keen to be on the same page when it comes to the style of the film.

So far I’ve been going through some of the films I think it’s important to have seen in terms of style within documentary and also those that might be of help when it comes to choosing various shots we want for the film.

I re-watched Encounters at the End of the World tonight, which is fairly off-mark in terms of what might help us but it did help me think about the level of involvement a filmmaker should, or could, have within the story. We’re keen to have little presence in our film as it’s not relevant to the story and could actually hinder the importance of the journey the characters take if too much of our filmmaking process is evident. But Encounters really made me think and there is a particular scene within the film that is probably one of my favourite scenes in documentary full stop. It’s when we are introduced to the linguist in the green house and Herzog’s voiceover comes in and speaks over the stop of his story with “to cut a long story short…” Its something very few filmmakers would do and the voiceover is entirely his perspective, whilst preventing the character from getting his point across. Herzog then allows him to finish and then cuts away to give his own summary which shows nothing but respect for what the linguist has said.

“It occured to me that during the time we spent in the greenhouse at least 3 or 4 languages had possibly died, in our efforts to preserve endangered species we seem to overlook something equally important. To me it is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilisation where tree huggers and whale huggers in their weirdness are acceptable while no-one embraces the last speakers of a language.”

If you’re interested it’s at about 4 mins in of the clip after the jump.

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