22: How to go from good to GREAT - 10 tips to fine-tune your documentary with others' ideas

Friends talking - Paris, November 2021 - by Jeanne

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This image of AGNES VARDA was published by Martin Kraft under the free licence CC BY-SA 4.0

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Each documentary filmmaker has their own way, own thoughts and own methods from realism to poetry, from being in the film to refraining from being visible. As there are stars in the sky, there are ways we innovate.  Learning from others inspires.  Here are some ideas from the masters which will help you reflect on fine-tuning your film.

Let's start with Michael Moore who has 13 rules for making a documentary.
I chose the two I really GET.

• 1: ​Don’t make a documentary — make a MOVIE. He believes we should not use the word 'documentarian'. "From today this word is dead!" he declares. He tells us to make movies, tell stories, find a narrative. "Call yourself a filmmaker, that's what you are. You make films!"
• 2: I think it’s important to make your films personal, people like to hear the voice of the person. Most films that have had the most success are the personal ones". I agree with Moore - think of Searching for Sugarman by Malik Bendjelloul,  Camera Person by Kirsten Johnson, Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley, and On the Way to the Sea  by Tao Gu. All are films where the filmmaker is largely present, like Sarah Polley, or in the background where we are aware of their presence.

Second on my list is the gracious Agnes Varda, the French artist/ documentarian/storyteller of both fiction and documentary. She discusses her creations for the Hollywood Reporter where she says:​

• 3: "I never wanted to say anything, I just wanted to look at people and share. It’s what I call cine-writing . . . cine-writing is all the elements we have to choose, or use, to make something that can be shared."
• 4: "I stayed faithful to the ideal of sharing emotion, impressions, and mostly because I have so much empathy for other people that I approach people who are not really spoken about. I have 65 years of work in my bag, and when I put the bag down, what comes out? It’s really the desire of finding links and relationships with different kinds of people."

 Varda Filmography

Third on my list is Werner Herzog. This German filmmaker of both documentary and fiction films is complex, complicated, radical, and I guess, love him or loathe him. I go with he first.

• 5: “Read, read, read, read, read, read, read — if you do not read, you’ll never be a filmmaker,”
• 6: "Just because something is factually true, it does not constitute truth per se.” Herzog believes that one can bend the truth. Like Moore, he calls documentaries films - ”they’re all movies for me.”
• 7: He wants to “film into the abyss”, go beyond, deep into the complexity of the human soul and human nature. (Excerpt from "Encounters at the End of the World" by Werner Herzog, 2007, at the end.)

Herzog Filmography 

The fourth on my list is Lindsay Anderson the British filmmaker of both fiction and documentary, whose goal was to  understand and respect “ordinary people”. Considered an anarchist, he broke away from the conventions of the BBC, making documentaries with sensitivity and beautiful camera work. Behind his lens was always a critic or observation on society. My favourite is his first short: O Dreamland  ​which you can view for free at the BFI

• 8: ‘What is required is a cinema in which people can make films with as much freedom as if they were writing poems, painting pictures or composing string quartets’ 
• 9: "Fighting means commitment, means believing what you say, and saying what you believe."

Anderson Filmography
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The last is the Iranian poetess Forough Farrokhzad, who made only one ethnographic documentary, The House is Black, about a leper colony in Iran where she treats the subject matter through poetry and grace. For Farrokhzad, poetry was a way of seeing and feeling the world. She used symbolisms and metaphors visually where the written word was not quite enough. The Shah of Iran broke down in tears after watching the first screening of the documentary. 

The first words of her film open with these words of poetry which slide slowly and rhythmically  throughout the work. There is only one piece of actual dialogue.

• On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain no caring human being should ignore, to wipe out this ugliness and to relieve the victims is the motive of this film and the hope of its makers’.​

Michael Moore: This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Carlos Latuff.

Forough Farrokhzad: Unknown author. Before 1967. This work is now in the public domain.

Werner Herzog: By Gorup de Besanez. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence,

Enjoy the next week where ever you are. Christmas greetings to you all. 

With all my love and thanks and gratitude for one year lived strong, another one to go

Jeanne