The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 133
fine, or not so well. One of the things that seemed to occur with
most of these typically “fictionalist” students was something I came
to think about as the “field research angst syndrome.”
It was hard to get these students to go out and do research in the
field. They seemed scared to start and often came back from field
research trips feeling depressed and de-motivated. In contrast, the
typical “documentarist” students enjoyed doing field research and
came back from research trips refreshed and refilled with creative
energy. So the “field research angst syndrome” became for me a
characteristic of “fictionalist” students. Puzzling about this I came to
certain provisional conclusions connected with the methods I had
chosen for teaching documentary project development.
Working with the students, researching other filmmakers' and
other documentary teachers' experiences and reflecting about my
own, largely fiction film making experience, I began to see certain
general characteristics of typical film project development processes.
I tried to use these apparent general characteristics in my teaching
methods.
Part of this resulted in a generalized model for how to teach the
writing of documentary film proposals when applying for production
financing. 2
As another part of this, I found myself encouraging the students
throughout the development process to imagine possible documentary
film scenes. I realized that this was like the process of
fiction film script writing, but nevertheless believed it was applicable
to documentary.
2 See articles in DOX magazine for June and September 2001 about the Sources 2
documentary workshops.