Engagement and the Documentary- Anne Fischel

'Documentary films are problematic. They purport to provide information about events, institutions and cultures. They organize that information, integrating and synthesising it into coherent picture of the world.'

'I believe that documentary films provide one of the most powerful means we have to represent communities to one another and to address social issues and problems. Precisely for this reason, film makers continually need to interrogate their own practices, evaluating the appropriateness and integrity of their methods, and the effectiveness and the fidelity of the films those methods produce.'

'But scientific papers and documentary films serve a constitutive, as well as a descriptive, function. They help to construct the social reality of inquiry which, in turn, sets the guidelines for further work. When filmmakers do not integrate their intense subjective involvement in some formal way into the film, then the process of discovery is misrepresented and routinized. Such films communicate a distorted view of what knowledge is and how it is attained.'

'It is more than forty years since John Grierson sought some identifying concepts for the documentary film. Grierson wrote of the importance of using natural material, and filmic situations based on actual environments and events. But he also noted that the array of films which could be labeled "documentary" with such minimal criteria was so large as to make the category almost meaningless. For Grierson the distinction between the documentary and its precursor, the film travelogue, lies in the depth of understanding which is achieved by the filmmaker and revealed in the film. The documentary, in Grierson's words, "must master its material on the spot, and come in intimacy to ordering it."'

'In making documentaries, filmmakers must observe events and make sense out of them. They move from observation — gathering information or data — to description, formulating a coherent narrative structure to convey what they have observed. Different strategies can be used to get from one stage of the process to the other. How these strategies are chosen and implemented depends upon the filmmaker's priorities and point of view.'