Online Response 1

From the dawn of documentary filmmaking, the morality of balancing intervention and observation to display truth was hotly debated.  In Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, Flaherty seeks to document the traditional ways of the Inuit people before they are destroyed or altered by colonial expansion.  Flaherty both documents the lives of the Inuit, but his presence–and possibly encouragement–led to the Inuit people doing things they no longer/rarely did.  Flaherty sought to capture these people, but struck a balance of observation and intervention in order to tell the story.  There are moments of observation, like Inuit people enjoying colonial food.  However, there are scenes that are more orchestrated, like when Nanook, for the sake of capturing life before colonial interaction, takes a group seal hunting using techniques that had largely gone extinct.  Later, Flaherty would be criticized for the dangerous situations he filmed the Inuit people in.  If he had not been there, they would not have put themselves in such a dangerous position.  Though Flaherty claims it was a collaborative effort, had they been hurt, would Flaherty have been at fault?  What is worth risking to have one's story told?

96 years later, Jimmy Chin faced this question while filming Alex Honnold in Free Solo.  In the film, his camera team discusses the morality of intervention.  Honnold had climbed many mountains without ropes before.  If Honnold falls, are they at fault for changing the circumstances Honnold climbed in?

A similar issue is faced in the film The Act of Killing. However, this was an emotional decision.  Joshua Oppenheimer follows Anwar Congo as he retells, copes with, and directs and stars in a movie about his part in murdering accused communists during a violent transition of power in Indonesia in the 1960’s.  Throughout the film, Congo and his comrades confess to thousands of brutal murders they made without sufficient evidence or trial.  However, the film decides to focus on Congo’s coping with his own guilt.  Rather than create a piece intended to convict, Oppenheimer depicts the murders as they are: human and complicated. For as horrific his deeds, Congo is depicted as much a terrorist as he is a human.  The filmmakers largely stay behind the camera.  At the very end, however, Oppenheimer offers a contradictory idea to something Congo says, causing him to reflect and defend.  By choosing to intervene, we see a truth in Congo.

Complicated, the choice to intervene or observe is key to finding and displaying truth in documentary film.