Mar 30, 2011

Documentary Production as Education

When I am presenting the Brown Ledge Gap Year program to parents and students, they are often surprised.  They think of gap-year programs as opportunities for exotic travel and adventure, not as traveling around the United States making documentaries.  The question often arises, “Why documentary?”

The answer is that documentary production captures the essence of learning.  True education is neither the assimilation of external facts nor the expression of personal understanding.  It is a dialogue between the individual and the world, a constantly shifting dialectic of observing the world through our own understanding and then articulating our observations and, through that articulation, transforming our initial understanding.  Learning is a dynamic interaction between a person and his or her environment.

This is the essence of the documentary process.  We make documentary work that expresses our own understandings, but we do it with the words of the people we interview.  We cannot merely present what we already believe, we must weave together other people’s beliefs in order to present our own.  Documentary can never be objective; the documentarian displays his or her understanding with every decision about what to keep in and what to omit, how to juxtapose two shots.  At the same time, documentary can never be purely subjective, our interview subjects do not always say what we want them to say.  They aren’t characters in our screenplay who express our preconceptions.  They have their own reality.  It is at the juncture of the documentarian’s personal expression and the stubborn reality of a complicated, external world that the dialogue of learning takes place.

The learning inherent in documentary production takes place in the sphere of human relations, and so it remains a very social kind of education.  Indeed, making documentaries not only exemplifies learning, it exemplifies citizenship.  To develop as a citizen is to continuously hone our understanding of how the world works, how it should work, and what our role is in that working.  But we live in a complex, diverse world, and to understand it fully, we have to step out of our own partial viewpoints and try to see it through the eyes of other citizens with very different backgrounds, experiences and values.  Documentaries are attempts to express the understandings of others, to listen to what other people have to say and make sense of it.  Traveling America and making documentaries in different regions is part of widening our understanding of this big, complicated country.  As individuals, we must each still come to our own vision of what the nation should be and how we should act in it.  But we will come to that vision having wrestled with the perspectives of people very different from us.
So, that is the outline of the answer to the question, “Why Documentary?”  Through making documentaries we get out of our own heads and learn from the world around us, forcing our own understanding of the world to increasingly expand to take in the lives of the people around us.  In doing so, we become wiser people and educated, cosmopolitan citizens.  Plus, making documentaries is fun.  And cool.

Timothy Shuker-Haines
Director, Brown Ledge Gap Year

Jan 27, 2011

Projects

I've just posted a few of the projects from this year on youtube.   There is Taylor's video portrait of a neighborhood barbershop (Parental warning: the humor and language is pretty raunchy and is not appropriate for younger children), Alexis' audio slideshow about the animals in the Salt Lake City animal shelter, Teak's audio slideshow about John Brickels, a Burlington clay artist, and Clare's portrait of Doreen Ketchens, who plays clarinet on the streets of New Orleans.  This last one is actually a radio piece, but to import it with the other projects, I made it into a video by putting the audio over a still photo of Doreen.

To get to the videos, you can click on them in the preview screens on the right or you can go to our youtube channel, brownledgegapyear.  Hope you enjoy them.  --Timothy