Stranger With a Camera: Responsibility and Reality in Documentary Film

“What are the responsibilities of any of us who take the images of other people and put them to our own uses?”

I do think one has a moral responsibility when they are a filmmaker- especially when making documentary film. Documentary filmmakers, like journalists, are in an undeclared social contract with their audience. It is their duty to depict reality as best they can. Many of the documentary filmmakers that went to the Appalachian mountains during the war on poverty, did a terrible job at depicting the true situation of the people there. I was particularly disgusted with how one filmmaker decided to film children eating dirt-- making it seem like they were starving, when they were simply playing. Such appropriations of images are insulting and exploitive.

I can understand how the people of Kentucky would be frustrated by the dozens of crews that floundered in throughout the 1960s/70s 'war on poverty', media frenzy. These crews only focused on the negative and never even attempted to depict the originality of traditional Appalachian culture. A lot of ethnographic filmmakers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_anthropology) run into the same sorts of issues- they expect to present the reality of a situation by living in it for just a few weeks.

The frustration that many Appalachian people must have felt for their felt misrepresentation, however, is no excuse for what happened to Hugh O'Connor. Violence is deconstructive. The answer is to instead take director Elizabeth Barrett's approach. Use the camera as a defense against misrepresentation. Filmmaking helped her work out her frustration in a positive, productive way.

Fun Somewhat Related Story: The tools of media are powerful and possibly very dangerous. As an example, I was recently shown the following YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU. Apparently this young kid had filmed himself doing this, and some friends got hold of the video and uploaded it to the Internet. As a result, this kid's life has been turned into a total embarrassment. I think his “friends” are morally at fault for having uploaded it without his permission and making something so private into something so public.