The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 137
and they tended to become more attached to these imagined scenes
than the “documentarists.”
They found it more difficult to regard their imagined scenes as
provisional, just detailed, exploratory sketches that were going to be
rejected later. In spite of my instructions, the “fictionalists” tended
to build their imagined scenes together, linking them with elegant
transitions, and they tended to become fond of these imagined links.
So it was harder for them to keep the imagined parts of the film as
free-floating building blocks. To a greater extent that the “documentarists,”
they seemed to need to refer to the whole film in order
to be able to pre-imagine its parts. So in their early films for the
course, the “fictionalists” tended to spend too much time and
energy too early in the development process pre-scripting too much
of the film. This contrasted clearly with the “documentarists,” who,
in their early films for the course, tended to wait until too late before
beginning to pre-imagine scenes.
When it came to field research, the typical “fictionalists” did not
want to do it. I had the feeling that they had built fiction-like
“castles in the air.” They had become too attached to their castles
and did want to go out into the real world because they knew they
would find out that their castles could not be filmed. Some of them
reported that it felt as though the documentary process was destroying
their illusions. Field research forced them to revise their
imagined films and they found this process painful.
In contrast, some of the “documentarists” – particularly the ones
with a powerful curiosity about the how the world worked –
seemed to actually enjoy pulling down their own castles in the air,
feeling that the world had thus taught them something important.