Advanced Documentary Storytelling

1 Course Unit

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 texts on narrative and documentary theory which will help us define both nonfiction and narration - concepts that will be at the foundation of our discourse moving forward. Once the foundations for exploring narration in the context of nonfiction will have been laid, we will move into to the second and third parts of the course, in which the class will study masterful documentaries, and explore the way their narration systems work, identifying elements that emerge as common narrating “tools”. Then, we will reverse our approach. In the last unit of the course, we will “zoom in” on the specific story-telling elements we identified in our exploration and see how they are used by different filmmakers to achieve different objectives. By the end of the course students should have a grasp of the way characters and events are constructed in documentaries, as well as how filmmakers create storytelling systems and find narrative solutions for challenging and original nonfiction stories. Also Offered As: CIMS 3667 Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6667 1 Course Unit