Story Telling, Entertainment and Truth in Documentary
The desire to hear and tell stories has been a feature of all societies from time in memorial. Indeed, the right to tell stories in an unhindered, uncensored manner is considered by many as a fundamental human right. The question is why do we need stories and which ones endure? Richard Francis Kuhns reminds us that ' story telling is not only entertainment, it is also thinking through human conflicts and contradictions.
The term entertainment, in film, has become synonymous with light amusement thanks to the dominance of Hollywood and has even entered into the dictionary as such. When writing, the acclaimed author Graham Greene divided his output into two categories, Novels, and Entertainments. The latter went far beyond amusement but sought out a form that was akin to thrillers, fast-moving plots containing moral and political complexity that challenged the reader to think through a myriad of ambiguities.
This is where documentary film is often best situated. It sits somewhere between classical film narrative, journalism and TV entertainment. Many so-called intellectuals are unable to wrap their heads around a form that is not easily categorized and documentary, therefore, remains something that has not been commodified, perhaps for the best, and therefore sits outside the art world. On the downside this leaves serious documentarians, in constant difficult economic circumstances.
We then should be concerned about entertaining people. Keeping our audiences engaged is the very art of storytelling and should be our primary concern. We must reclaim the term entertainment from Hollywood, not in order to dull people's senses but rather to sharpen them. This is the rationale of progressive art. Consequently, the space for such work is gradually being eroded on TV channels both at home in South Africa and generally across the world.
Despite this fact, it is now increasingly recognised that most ordinary people learn more from their interaction with story than they do from a lecture that sees people's heads as empty vessels to be filled, and learning as providing the answers. We cannot give ground to the do-gooder liberals who believe context must be given primacy over story, as knowledge can only owned by the individual when people arrive at their own conclusions, when people discover the truth for themselves.
Rational argument is best suited for journalists and academics. The problem arises when people becomes so taken with western enlightenment that they believe meaningful truth can only be garnered if the wider picture, context, is constantly kept in the frame. This is a recipe for boredom, the antithesis of entertainment. This is the limitation of film and its core element drama. It can only provide a slice of life, or a segment of actual life experience.
Film's strength is being able to evoke an emotional reaction and in doing so, opening people to thinking differently so they ask themselves: what can I do? I would contend that the vast majority of people can only be moved to action through being sufficiently emotionally moved to do so. Film is not primarily about information or facts but rather about their marshaling in a manner that is able to create an emotional mood that opens audiences to the message/truth the filmmaker seeks to relay. In this sense, it remains one of the highest art forms of the modern age.
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Story Telling, Entertainment and Truth in Documentary
