Documentary Blogging #1

August 3, 2007

Today was one of those dreaded car days.. a full day of navigating the freeway system. But here I am at the destination: Detroit. My goal is to do something I have never done before. I hope to make a short documentary on Islam and Arab-American identity in the US. To that end I will be conducting interviews with people at several different organizations and trying to film scenes of the cultural landscape (i.e. scenes that are layered with cultural information; scenes that can be interpreted).

In the car today, when not zoned out, I was thinking about what it is I want to accomplish in this documentary. I want it to be an educational tool for my class on Islam, of course.. but what are my formal goals? My primary aim is to develop a style that allows for the viewer to see the process of exploring a place.. and thereby gain tools for reading a place.

Such an exploratory style is quite different than the documentaries I commonly watch, which fall into three broad categories: 1) sketch of colorful and challenged character (Werner Herzog), 2) omniscient historical presentation (Ken Burns), and 3) political advocacy (Michael Moore and now many others). I admire Herzog tremendously, but his concentration on characters is just not my bent. The advocacy model is a keen interest of mine, but it is not a model that would be useful in an educational context. So that leaves the Ken Burns model.. and it is easy to imagine a documentary of this style devoted to the Arab-American population in Dearborn. It is, after all, a classic American story.

How would I make a Ken Burns-style documentary of Dearborn? That is easy. I would collect my first hand footage and conduct interviews. Then I would research the hell out of the topic and contact some experts to interview on the topic. Oh, and get as many old photographs as possible with which to illustrate the history. To me this approach devolves into a journalistic endeavor. Ken Burns is there to add style and paste together expert opinions.. but he is hardly a voice in the documentary. Also, the process of putting together the documentary is edited out—and thus arises the illusion of an omniscient text.

My work will be to document the process by which my understanding of place and identity is coming about.. not to let those details disappear. I also happen to think that this is a more honest approach to historical and interpretive material.. to let the audience see the space for interpretation. And forget about experts.. in the sense of college professors sitting in a chair and explaining what we are to think about this or that fact. My open approach will work best when rich visual material is present, as it allows opportunity for viewers to see evidence that is richer than could ever be summarized.

My ideal documentary would be more a personal essay than a journalistic article complete with multiple sources. One result of such an approach will be a more critical and interpretive view of the material. Ken Burns runs his material (so far as I have seen) through a pretty evident "Americana" filter. The goal is to tell a nice story that would fit in on a PBS half-hour. I don't want a PBS special for use in a classroom.. how boring! give me something that speaks its mind and allows students to come up against a genuine point of view.

This approach that I am sketching requires some performative talent.. and how that will work out I don't know. If I am going to capture the exploration of a site then I have to be genuinely filming my own exploration of a site.. and those scenes must be marked by the personal context in which I take the shots. I must constantly think about how to organize my experiences. Are scenes falling into a thematic or chronological framework? But that is what I enjoy about this exploratory process of working on a documentary.. it allows me to think on the fly and actively work to find and construct meaning.. and often I find myself scrapping earlier views in favor of some better framework.

Check back each day this week to get more reflection on making this documentary. (I won't give away much of the material.)