This chapter covers
• Questions to ask yourself as you seek to define your goals
• A project to take inventory of the marks you carry, the themes they suggest, and the kind of people with whom you empathize
• Your closest issues, finding their equivalencies, and displacing them outward into the world
• A project to locate your other selves
• A project to make use of your dreams and dream imagery
• A project to take stock of your artistic goals
• Sketching out your future path
• Losing and recovering your way, progress, and the artistic process
• Privacy, competition, and hostile environments
By nature, human beings are seekers. For those attracted to the world of the arts, the quest is to find meanings in life—a fundamental and noble human drive if ever there was one. Documentaries are a superb vehicle for this work, and making them will make you feel fully alive, not least because of all the good people you encounter on the road. First, some important questions for you to ponder:
• How should you use your developing skills in the world?
• What kind of subjects should you tackle?
• What are you avid to learn about?
• Do you already have an artistic identity, and can you articulate it aloud?
Do the work in this chapter, and even if you’ve never done anything you con-sider artistic before, you will find you have an artistic identity. By this, I mean a drive to create a sense of order and emotional meaning, for yourself and for an audience, in connection with particular issues in life. You probably know intu-itively that you have this, but you cannot put yours into words. The temptation is to put this off until a better time because your beginning work will only be exercise projects. Most people handle these by taking a worthy subject and putting their effort into capturing it with the camera. This may not seem unrea-sonable, but something will be missing. You. You will be missing.
Every project, no matter how short or simple, is an opportunity to say some-thing from the heart. “The only work really worth doing—the only work you can do convincingly—is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.”2 Marketa Kimbrell, the much-respected film directing teacher at New York University, says,
“If you want to put up a tall building you must first dig a very deep hole.” She means that a fine acting performance or a superb documentary is always rooted in a strong foundation of self-knowledge. In documentary your job, after all, is to get inside other people’s realities and to see the world as they see it. You must become familiar with your own first.
If documentary is indeed “a corner of nature seen through a temperament,”
it is risky to look outward at “nature” and take no account of the temperament at the controls. If you are to have strong, positive ideas about the heart and mind making the choices, you cannot delay digging until faced with an important chal-lenge. Such life-changing steps are not made at the throw of a switch when you need them: you have to take them incrementally as a series of small decisions, step by step—beginning now.
You will need to look non-judgmentally at whatever tensions, passions, and compulsions you carry, without labeling them “positive” or “negative,” because that would be self-censorship. As an hors d’oeuvre to this process, here is a small quiz of mine for you to take in private. With complete honesty, rate how true the following statements are for you, with 2 points for “very true,” 1 point for
“fairly true,” and zero for “not true.”
Not True Fairly True Very True (0 Points) (1 Point) (2 Points) I avoid imposing my values on
other people’s lives
I never pass judgment on friends and family
I have taken more knocks than I have delivered
I seldom see any need for confrontation
I need people to think well of me
Total . . . ________
2 Ibid., 116.
If you
• Scored above 5, read what follows carefully
• Scored up near 10, read what follows very carefully
• Scored below 5, read what follows anyway, in case you are just good at passing tests
The quiz tests self-knowledge as it affects directing. Most people feel they know themselves intimately, but anyone who teaches screenwriting will tell you other-wise, for if this were true there would never be the universal problem of the passive central character. How can this happen? It seems that we are very sensi-tive to how people act on us but blind to how we act on others. As the hero of our own story, we see ourselves as acted upon, not ourselves acting on others.
This could either be a psychological survival mechanism or a mindset left over from childhood when we felt very vulnerable.
Whatever the cause, a passive self-image is a huge disability in a storymaker.
Trying to animate fictional stories with an inert central character is almost impos-sible. In documentary, it makes us blind to how our participants are actively making their own destiny. Instead, we see people as victims, which may be how the documentary came to have the “tradition of the victim.”3
The quiz was meant to reveal how active and intrusive you are able to feel in relation to your surroundings. To begin seeing yourself (and those with whom you identify) as assertive may require changing the ingrown habits of a lifetime.
This is some of the work it takes to dig that hole I mentioned earlier.
Creativity in the arts is fueled by active, sustained inquiry, both inward and outward. Acquiring better self-knowledge will always be a work in progress, and each film will be a stage (in both senses of the word) of your development. Select-ing subjects, and approaches to subjects, seems easy for those marked by dra-matic experience (say, of being an immigrant, of living in the streets, or of family turmoil) for they seldom doubt where their work must go. But for the rest of us, whose lives are less obviously dramatic, comprehending what motivates our sense of mission can be baffling. It’s a conundrum; you can’t make art without a sense of identity, yet identity is what you seek through making art.
Some choose the arts in order to express themselves, but what they proba-bly want is the therapy of self-affirmation. Therapy is self-directed and aimed at acquiring a sense of normality and well-being. Nothing wrong with that. But making art is other-directed. It’s about wanting to do useful work in the world and for the world. To prosper in documentary means contending for what you believe is true and valuable, and for this you need a definite sense of mission.
Documentary is a branch of drama, and for your drama to be original and authentic you will need to develop a dialogue—with yourself, and between yourself and your audience—through the conduit of the stories you choose to tell.
You will do this best once you know your hot issues. Once you know them, they will offer endless variations. The work you are going to do and the work you have already done form significant patterns, and these are part of the dialogue too.
3 See Brian Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,” in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988) 269.
Right now you need to establish what matters to you most, so you can do your best work. Actually, the key to this is already inside you and close at hand.
It will reveal itself if—candidly and in private—you make the provisional self-profiles in the projects that follow. Some people will find confirmation of what they expected; others will be surprised (as I was) to discover that for years they have been overlooking the obvious.