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.

It’s one of the things that makes me a fan of Werner Herzog’s style. I know a few people that really can’t cope with his films and on the surface you could possibly see him as too much of a presence, but for me it does nothing but add to the films. I really am not a fan of filmmaker’s doing their own voiceovers on the whole. I find that it can be really distracting if they aren’t part of the story and their voice just doesn’t work well. There are obviously exceptions to this and Werner Herzog, for me, is one because his filmmaking process, and fundamentally his personality, is always integral to the story and his experience of the subject matter tends to make the films far more accessible.

I’ve been a fan of his work for a long time but really struggled with him while I was doing my Masters. Early on in the course we had been told we were getting a list of mandatory films to watch and I was really excited to see what was on it and really delve into films that would help me in terms of learning about documentary. When we got the list it might as well have just said ‘ just watch every Herzog film’ and while that is great advice I had hoped for a greater range of styles, ages and approaches. I think it didn’t help that I was marked out of our class as ‘the Errol Morris fan’ which seemed to be seen as something that was a disadvantage to me. Every time a piece of my work was evaluated it was under the pretense that ‘well, you’re an Errol Morris fan’, which at the time seemed incredibly bizarre. We were very much taught that voiceover, talking heads and even music should be avoided wherever possible and that observational filmmaking was ‘proper’ documentary. I have always thought that the story, to a large extent, should determine the style and I found it very confusing that Herzog’s body of work was being rammed down my throat while also representing everything they were advising us against. But that’s education I guess.

I’m really keen to not do the same to Jemma and felt a pang of guilt when I remembered that the first thing I’d lent her was the Errol Morris boxset. But she told me this evening that she’d just watched Gates of Heaven for the first time and loved it. I can’t help but stand by that being the best possible starting point in terms of feature documentary, after all I’m ‘the Errol Morris fan’. But over the next few weeks I will definitely make sure we sit down and go through as many different styles and approaches as possible so she can begin filming with a clear idea of where we’re hoping to go with the film.