The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

138 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
So I think, in conclusion, it was less painful for the “fictionalists”
to make illustrative, rhetorical and lecture-like films confirming the
beliefs they already had about reality. And that narrative, observational
documentary, the chosen bias for the course, was not really
their métier.
Let me make a final observation.
On that Norwegian course the typical “documentarist” student
personality, particularly of those who were best at gathering observational
film material, was usually not particularly structuralist.
It was as if in order to be open to what was spontaneously happening
in front of the observational documentary camera, the film
maker should not be too consciously occupied with how the scene
being filmed should fit into the whole film, otherwise they would
miss the scene. They have to be very concretely present in the now
of the filming process.
It was my impression that the students I worked with who were
best at filming observationally, were often not so good as editors. It
was as if their “documentarist” abilities, vitally necessary in the
observational filming process, were different from the more
structuralist and perhaps “fictionalist” requirements of the editing.
Conversely, the best editors were often found among the students I
thought of as being more “fictionalists.”
I felt that this probably meant that the editing of narrative structured,
observational documentary is actually rather fiction-like and
therefore liable to suit “fictionalist” students.
Skärkäll, 4 January 2002