Advanced Documentary Storytelling

Catalog description

The course is intended for students who have already taken an earlier documentary course and have an interest in film work or research in the nonfiction realm. The course will isolate, highlight, and explore the aspect of narration (storytelling) in documentary cinema. The objective is to enhance students’ understanding of the relation between content and form in documentary films; provide them with critical and aesthetic tools to think about nonfiction cinema and inspire them to find original and expressive ways to deliver their own non-fiction material to audiences. The very definition of a film as “nonfiction” implies (perhaps wrongly) that it is not written and directed in the way that a fiction film is. We must ask ourselves, then, where in craft of nonfiction filmmaking lies the storytelling? Over the trajectory of the course, we will be analyzing the narrative system of several documentary films. We will learn how story-telling tools are employed in nonfiction cinema and examine the aesthetical and ethical dilemmas unique to nonfiction storytelling. Rather than classifying films by their themes such as “war”, “family” or “race relations” - or categorizing them by accepted taxonomies in documentary theory (“observational”, “classical” or “performative”) - our method we will suggest that an effective way to study a documentary film is to start by identifying its primary documentary material, and to observe how the tools of cinema (diegetic and non-diegetic elements) are applied to this material - creating the storytelling system of the film. The primary material, the element that instigates the making of a documentary, is often a character, a strong human story or an event, but it may also be something much more abstract: An experience, a memory; a place; a painting; an essay or theory, or many other possibilities. The course will begin with the exploration of…