On documentaries, subjectivity, and filmmaking

A bit of a departure from my usual website style, which is otherwise fairly visual, here I am taking a deep dive into something more similar to a “blog post” than a “creative portfolio”. This is in part due to the fact that I simply don’t have much in this portfolio… yet. In its place, for now, I wish instead to expand a little on what is to come (as if anybody is even reading this). The above shows a sneak preview into a docuseries I hopefully intend on making, though they are far from the only documentaries brewing. I have one under my belt now, and that’s only been a warm up rep. But before getting into what else I plan on making in the future, what is perhaps more pressing is why I wish to make more documentaries despite the rest of my work indicating a totally different set of skills and interests. It’s all connected, too, which we’ll get to soon enough. 

It all began where my overall interest in filmmaking began. Growing up, I wanted to be a million things, so many things, in fact, that I had no idea what one thing to settle on. So much fascinated me (and still does), and I wanted to do a little bit of everything, but I realized that’s not how the world works. What does work, though, is instead of being everything I want to be, I can be the guy who gives exposure to all those things I enjoy. In essence, I could create videos about the things I love. And indeed, this is kinda where it all began, watching biking, snowboarding, motorsport, cooking, and even educational videos. I thought, if I can’t be a skateboarder, I can at least make kickass skate videos! But how? Answering that is what sent me down the rabbit hole of filmmaking, which peaked with me falling in love with cinema itself and wanting to dedicate my life to it. 

Filmmaking, I realized, is truly a team sport, so I figured I had to find out what position I’m best suited towards. I’ve long been infatuated with visuals, and given how much I can get caught up in nerdy technical shit, I thought cinematography was fascinating (of course, I still do). And so, I’ve ended up spending years of my life trying to be a good cinematographer, learning everything I can and just going out there and doing it, yet this whole time I’ve felt something lacking. I had departed too much from my initial vision, from that which brought me to this position in the first place. I had lost track of what I really wanted to do with all this work, and only recently have I stumbled upon a path that can reconnect me with my original goals while satisfying my evolved views and objectives.

Here’s the thing. I don’t really even like documentaries. I know, I know, but hold on. I don’t like most documentaries because I find them often to be painfully banal without rousing much within me. And this, to me, seems a dangerous part of their very DNA, save for some uniquely mutated ones. And it’s these documentaries that I think hold the key to, honestly, what the world may need right now. Documentaries contain some kind of element that narratives can obviously never have. What that is, exactly, is up for debate, but I’ll call this elusive aspect an authenticity of sorts. I say “of sorts” because film is, by definition, a medium outside of tangible reality and necessarily has an abstracted quality. And narratives can be authentic, no doubt, but I feel that pound-for-pound, the best documentaries can comment on life and all of its beautiful folds in a way that narratives never can. 

I’m no creative writer. Coming up with a powerful story is not my strong suit. I’m instead much better at doing research, coming up with questions, and going on an investigation regarding those questions while being satisfied with the fact that I will probably leave with more questions than answers. I’d like to think I write pretty good academic papers because of this, and to me, documentaries are a kind of extension of this logic. They are my way of expressing my voice in the realm of film, and yes, I do mean voice. I think there’s this notion that documentaries are “boring” because they are “objective”, whereas narratives are more exciting because of their subjectivity. Well, while that may be true in part, I want to totally dismantle this false dichotomy of “subjective” versus “objective”. There is no such thing as “objective” reality. Each of our realities is lived individually, which isn’t to say that it’s entirely subjective. No, clearly there are definite outside laws and objects and rules according to which things follow, but the notion of objectivity itself is grounded in a set of (uniquely human) assumptions about reality. In truth, meaning is derived from experience, experience grounded in our bodily existence subject to our limited abilities and psychic actuality. (For more on experientialism, read Metaphors We Live By and Woman, Fire, and Dangerous Things). How this relates to my filmmaking is this: I don’t care to be “objective” in my documentaries because it’s not possible, and so by leaning into the fact that my own voice will bleed through in a film, I breathe a life into it and tie the knots of seemingly disparate views into one more absolutely truthful whole. 

A quick detour before I go on, as I feel the need to defend my view that objectivity is not possible with film. What would that look like? I’ll tell you one thing, editing, the cut, the very backbone of modern cinema would have to go. Life is not a “blink and boom! here’s something new”. Deciding to cut to a new shot or angle is a deliberate admittance to the fact that there is information the filmmaker does not want to show or values less than another because of their own views. So if we do away with the cut, we’re forced to have a kind of observatory cinema, presumably with a fixed camera far away from the subject so as to not interfere with authentic existence. We run into another trap, that being that one fixed angle is also a necessarily limited perspective of events, whereas to be “objective” implies that we ought to grasp something from every angle and get the full picture of everything all at once, whatever that means. My best guess, then, for what a truly objective film would look like would be a huge cinema screen filled with hundreds of angles side-by-side depicting the same event in real time. Isn’t that perfect?

I don’t think so. Documentaries may be nonfiction, but that doesn’t mean they have to shy away from being art. Art has an innately ethereal quality that narratives understand but documentaries often seem to lack. And yet, when done right, I think documentaries have the potential to speak to a truth way more powerful than a film based on a script ever could. There’s a wonderful poetry that arises from the voices of real people talking about things that actually mean something to them. Guided by the hand of the filmmaker, the multitude of interwoven voices adds weight and a greater depth of veracity to the inherently singular perspective of the film. This is how I think documentaries can be more authentic than even the best and most truthful, in all senses of the word, narratives. They use what already exists in the real world to uncover deeper meanings rather than manufacturing a story for a particular purpose.

Documentaries also get at the heart of matters much better than do narratives. Whereas there’s only so many universal stories to be told, there are countless topics with which to make a documentary. Even if there too is a limited number of grand themes, as I believe there are, each subject allows for its own set of practical applications and specific key takeaways. And I’m not knocking narrative films, as art for art’s sake is great, and there are some stories I can experience a thousand times in different clothes and never get tired of. It’s just that I think narratives are stories at the end of the day, just with lots of bells and whistles, and there’s already such great storytelling in the world between books, plays, graphic novels, and even just chatting with friends. As a person concerned that meaningful content gets put out into the world, I couldn’t just stand around and be a technician for other people’s visions, I had to share what I see too.

Now, we arrive in the end at what it is that I actually see. In short, I see beauty, everywhere I go. To me, beauty is synonymous with life, and there’s no shortage of that around, though I am aware we’ve created a society that manufactures blinders, making life difficult to spot. I’m of the opinion that we are in desperate need of a reawakening—a reigniting of the human spirit, if you will. Environmental decay, inequality, mass shootings, fearmongering, mental health crisis      Only a radical failure of culture could have brought us to this point.