25/01/2019
Documentary: Virtual or Real?
by Tom Inglesby, Editor
I come at filmmaking from the documentary tradition, specifically educational films. I worked with some of the best documentary film directors in that genre while working for Encyclopedia Britannica Films (EBF) in the late 1960s-early 1970s.
Because of that experience, I was looking forward to reading, and reviewing here, a new book titled: How to Film Truth. The author, Justin Wells, has a background in both film and theology so when he talks of “Truth” it has a slight religious flavor.
First, I recommend the book to those thinking about doing documentary work or those just interested in what constitutes documentaries. It doesn’t get into the how, the what, or even the why so much as it looks at the philosophy behind the approaches to the genre. As an example, here is one of the opening paragraphs:
This search for healing truth in documentary film takes on four aspects. We might think of these aspects as four ways of revealing the truth to each other. First, we look for the truth about events or things that happen in the world. We might call this testimony. Then there is the truth about ourselves, or the truth about who we are deep down. We might call this confession. Additionally, there is the truth about how we feel on this journey through life, the truth about our emotions. We might think of this in terms of celebration (in a positive sense) and mourning or lament (in a negative sense). Finally, there is the poetic or philosophical truth about the world itself, the creation in which we all find ourselves living. We might call this investigation, the search for wisdom or illumination.
If those words catch your interest, check out the rest of the review at www.markee-magazine.com/cutting-room/
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