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Silverdocs 2009: The Art of Social-Issue Media

Published on July 15, 2009

By Enrico Cullen

“Without that scene the film is more dangerous… in a way,” said Renzo Martens when I asked him about an editing choice for a particular scene in his fascinating film Enjoy Poverty, a selection by this year’s Silverdocs Documentary Festival. In the scene Martens points the camera to himself and talks about his ego. “This guy Renzo,” said Martens, “realizes he is a character in a film and that vanity scene frames him as a character.”

As someone who has made films, painted paintings and written stories, I’ve been kicking around ideas about the art of making social-issue media with exactly these kinds of concerns in mind. How are filmmakers tackling questions of art, politics, identity and reality during what is arguably a kind of renaissance of social-issue media?

Sky Sitney, the artistic director for Silverdocs, was at the top of my list because of her avid interest in film as art and her purview of the field. There is an assumption that Silverdocs is a political festival because it’s in DC. But Sitney’s focus on the art of cinema as a central element for Silverdocs raises the stakes for a filmmaker with an urgent message. “We presume the language of cinema… that a mastery of that language is at a high level [in the films we select],” said Sitney. From her point of view “cultivating an emotional response in the audience is part of creating great social-issue documentaries,” by which she seemed to suggest that cultivation of emotion was different from and perhaps more involved than the entertaining emotions films traditionally solicit. (“I laughed, I cried…”)

Keeping an eye on the fact that the medium is alive with color, sound and movement—and not a text article or some other form—goes a long way in the creation of a great film. Social-issue media adds to that list. From a filmmaker’s first impulses all the way through to an outreach campaign about a particular issue, a keen awareness of cinema as a culmination of story, technology and relationships can help a film reach for the sublime.

This idea of using a cinematic vernacular to connect with the audience can sometimes get lost when a social issue is urgent or potentially catastrophic. There may even be a seduction at play when the subject matter is very strong. One could argue that An Inconvenient Truth is an example of this kind of seduction where the message, or the messenger, becomes more important than creating a great film and a cult-like feeling emerges. Admiring his subject, the filmmaker rests too heavily on something that is not likely to be cinematic. That something for An Inconvenient Truth is PowerPoint.

Enjoy Poverty

And yet Martens is a central figure in his film. He is the messenger and becomes involved in the film every bit as much as Al Gore did. And yet the choice to implicate himself in the world of exploitation in Africa, to reveal himself as a vain character maneuvering his personal interests, humbles the film and enhances the story’s complexity, something I suspect Gore could never do. The way Martens put it was that he needed to “close the lid on the character of Renzo.” Martens mirror image simultaneously removes an easy dismissal of Enjoy Poverty as a self-serving vanity project done for Martens own enjoyment and gives the audience an opening to explore their own relationship to exploitation. By choosing to admit the vanity inherent in his project, Martens creates a more powerful critique of the exploitation he explores.

In discussing her excellent short film Recycle, one of my favorites, Ondi Timoner told me she pays close attention to the content in order to make artistic decisions. The story is told from Miguel Diaz’s point of view and had the feel of a poetic and musical interlude. Diaz is homeless and tells us about his life as he collects valuable items from garbage cans and creates a garden on a median in the middle of a Los Angeles street. “With every piece form follows the content,” said Timoner. “With Recycle, I ran out and got my DAT recorder and just started recording because Miguel Diaz is an incredibly poetic guy.” This sensitivity is evident in the poetic power Recycle conveys.

For Thomas Allen Harris, putting photographers in front of the camera to talk about their creativity was an important artistic decision. “Aesthetically I am interested in foregrounding the faces of African-American photographers and their activism in creating images of black people,” said Harris of Through a Lens Darkly, his current work-in-progress. “So much of African-American culture and activism is defined by the visual and photographers have an awareness of that.” With the photographers themselves being the photo-portrait subjects of his art, Harris has the makings of a reflective and interesting film dedicated to the visual history of the civil rights movement and the role that seeing African-American faces in media has played in our culture.

Timoner’s latest film, We Live In Public, which also played at Silverdocs, has become famous for being an epic production. One tenacious creative problem was narration, which took several attempts to get right. She imagined a number of different narrators, but none of them seemed to fit. “I was the last person I wanted to be the narrator, but it didn’t make sense to do it any other way. My team basically said, ‘What about you, Ondi?’ And it became clear that I should do it.” In the end, making the artistic choice for self-narration worked for Timoner, but that result wasn’t a foregone conclusion and took a significant amount of time to uncover.

We Live in Public

We Live In Public and Timoner’s film about American cults, titled Join Us (Sundance Channel, August 31), represent, in Timoner’s words, “our willingness to cede our independence. They are films about being believers and the need to connect.” In some strange way, then, is watching a film like An Inconvenient Truth similar to joining a cult and less like witnessing, or engaging with, a piece of art?

In broad strokes, it’s no great surprise that the impulse to create a social-issue documentary, or any social-issue media, involves a desire to individual and community engagement. What is surprising, perhaps, is that this desire to connect, or even incite, is so strongly part of the art.

The risks of making those artistic choices within or even over the top of real life are often subtle and loaded with ambiguity. The truth, as it were, becomes elusive upon examination. In very dangerous waters, politically or otherwise, such choices may even make the film impossible to make. One filmmaker, who spoke with me on a condition of anonymity because he feared that public knowledge of his subject’s work might place the subject in harm’s way, said, “Part of telling this story puts my subject in terrible jeopardy. I’m not sure I’m even going to make this film, but it’s worth exploring and making the connections. We’ll see.” Drawing on the courage to depict what cannot be told directly, it seems possible that some version of this film could be made, but his filmmaker’s eye is wary and he treads with caution.

The culmination of relationships and conversations, of color, sound, and movement, that eventually ends up on screen is where the traditional art of cinema happens. This is true for social-issue media as well. And yet there seems to be a desire to acknowledge the art that comes before and goes beyond the screen on both sides. The art of this kind of cinema seems to happen across a spectrum of activities from production through to outreach. In a phrase that refers ambiguously to the artistic process and community engagement, Sitney said, “It’s a desire to connect that moves us forward.”

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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