When I first moved to New York about six months ago, I ended up one night in the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital with a guy named Matt O'Neill. Matt and I ended up there because we had been at an event when a mutual friend started to feel sick. During the course of a long night, as we waited for our friend to get treated, we got to know each other and I found out that Matt's a documentary filmmaker.
This was exciting to me because documentary films is one of the top things on my list of the things that I really wanted to dig my teeth into when I fled left DC. And so a few weeks after our night in the ER, Matt and I got together for a Chinese food lunch, and he very generously took a couple of hours to talk to me about doc making. After lunch, he walked me through his production studio and introduced me his editors. I came in particularly interested in the actual process by which you go from an idea -- a mere glimmer in the eye -- to a finished film, but we ended up talking about what's the point of non-fiction films, and what they can accomplish.
We agreed (and I'm hoping that I'm not putting words in Matt's mouth) that what docs are so great at is telling rich, compelling stories. And there's much power in that because, of course, it's through stories that we learn much of what we know about the world.
I think one reason that non-fiction filmmaking is so appealing to me so much because of my background in and frustrations with academic anthropology. Anthro tells amazing stories. It's a way of looking at the world holistically that, I think, is uniquely powerful. But let's be honest -- nobody reads what anthropologists write except other anthropologists. Film can't teach theory in the way that written texts can, but it can go very far to share the interesting stuff that the field knows about the ways of the world.
When we talked, Matt had been in the final stages of editing a project about the time he and another filmmaker, Jon Alpert, had spent in another ER -- an American military ER in Baghdad. I asked if the film was, for lack of a better way of putting it, political. A polemic against the Iraq war, if you will. Matt said no, that the point of the film was to show the physical costs of war, any war, and if it should make people question whether this war is worth it, so be it. Yesterday, Bob Herbert (Times Select) said that they succeeded:
In the first few moments of the documentary film "Baghdad ER," we see a man dressed in hospital scrubs carrying a bloodied arm that has been amputated above the elbow. He deposits it in a large red plastic bag.
This HBO production is reality television with a vengeance -- war-fare as it really is. And while it is frightening, harrowing and deeply painful to watch, it should be required viewing for all but the youngest Americans.
Matt's movie will premiere on May 21 on HBO. I will be watching with popcorn. I mention it both to congratulate him and to give me a chance to harp on the enormous potential of non-fiction filmmaking. I'm especially intrigued by the idea of smart progressives (Matt, for one, is also a co-founder of Drinking Liberally) using the medium to show, not tell, why liberal ideas are the way to go.
I fell even more deeply in love with the medium after watching "When We Were Kings" this weekend. That's the phenomenal film on the "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (angry George Foreman, not happy grill-shilling George Foreman) in Kinshasa, Zaire. It was so good and so rich, I sat staring at the screen with my mouth open for five minutes -- for real -- after the credits played. I highly recommend it and here's a link so you can put it in your Netflix queue. (Why is that word so long? Wouldn't "que" be sufficient? I say it in my head, "que-yoo." And fear that may prove embarrassing, like the time when I was a kid and said "libs" when I meant to say pounds.)
But "When We Were Kings" is also good example of what's tough about making documentaries. It took Leon Gast more than 20 years to get all the rights and financing together so that he could finally release the movie in '96. There's a real problem now with non-fiction filmmakers having to license the pop-culture that shows up while they're shooting. For example, go here for what "Mad Hot Ballroom" had to go through to clear the music in the film, including the "Rocky" ring tone that plays on a woman's cell phone for six seconds. And then there's the Smithsonian's new deal with Showtime that's making some filmmakers think that it's going to get trickier to use footage from their archives.
Still, documentary filmmaking is set to take off. There's the relative inexpensiveness of the equipment. A decent camera and the microphones, batteries, cables, that you need to film a basic documentary costs about $3500. The Final Cut Express software that you can use to edit your movies on your Mac goes for three hundred bucks. There's the new distribution and promotional possibilities opened up by the Internet. Those will (if all goes well) only get wider and more reliable as time goes by. And I think we're all primed to take in, process, and even expect rich media now. Witness the fact that even the big news guys like the New York Times and Washington Post have taken to pulling together text, audio, video, and photos in getting their jobs done.
Given all that, given the general public's seemingly renewed hunger for facts over spin, for experiencing reality (even a reality as mediated by the filmmaker) rather than just being told what truth is, I'm not sure there's a better medium today than the documentary film through which to tell a story.
