The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 131
So a certain maturity and sophistication with regard to the paradoxes
and dilemmas of documentary realism seemed to me to be a
necessary pre-condition for recruiting students for the course and
probably an important quality in people who wanted to become
documentary makers. The little still photo task was an attempt to
measure some of all this.
Obviously I wanted to find those students who, among all the
applicants, were genuinely interested in documentary, who had a
talent for documentary, and who were strongly motivated to learn
more about it. More importantly, it seemed to me, I needed to avoid
those who actually were more suited to do fictional films, but who
had applied for this documentary course because they needed to get
into film making.
So I began to imagine that I had to find ways of distinguishing
between applicants who were “documentarists” as opposed to those
who were “fictionalists.”
Obviously it was silly to propose that there are only two kinds of
applicants – and obviously there are some examples in film history
of film makers who can do both. Nevertheless, this simple dualistic
model seemed to be useful in this particular student selection
process.
But how to distinguish between the two? What might be the
qualities of a typical “doumentarist” student as opposed to a typical
“fictionalist” student?
Another of the written tasks sent to the short-listed applicants was
to describe a documentary they wanted to make, one that might
possibly be their diploma film at the end of the course. It seemed to
me that some of these written presentations clearly wanted to gather
documentary material and use it in an illustrative way to support