Preface to the Second Edition
Let me tell you, that’s about as good as it gets for an
author. The occasion was a reception for
filmmakers at Silverdocs, the documentary festival created by the American Film
Institute and Discovery Channel. The
person talking to me was Victoria Bruce, a journalist and author who had never
made a film until she and Karin Hayes made the award-winning documentary, The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt. CLICK FOR THE REST OF THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION...
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Chapter 14: The Growing Problem of Credibility
In the twenty-first century we can no longer trust that “seeing is believing” or “the camera never lies”; we know otherwise. And
the willingness of highly partisan filmmakers to subordinate honesty to
ideology has shown that even when the form of a documentary is factual,
the content may not be. When truth matters, credibility
counts, and the next big event in the evolution of documentary
filmmaking may well be about dealing with an erosion of confidence in
the truth of documentaries. CLICK FOR THE REST OF CHAPTER 14...
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Chapter 1: It Looks So Easy
From
the outside, making a documentary seems like the easiest thing in the
world. You just go where something interesting is happening, turn on
the camera, and record it.
Looked
at that way, the most successful American documentarian would be
Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas garment manufacturer whose home-movie
camera was pointed at President John Kennedy as he was being shot. His
three-hundred-plus frames of Super-8 film have probably been the most
talked about and widely shown bit of footage in the history of
nonfiction film. CLICK FOR THE REST OF CHAPTER 1...
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Chapter 33: Getting There
This final chapter is a response to many e-mails from
readers, which in one way or another have asked how to get started in
documentary and, by implication, how to do well in the field.
This is a great time to make documentaries. All of the barriers that kept people out of
the field have been removed, except for talent and hard work. CLICK FOR THE REST OF CHAPTER 33...
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