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
