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OT: Interesting lawsuit
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A documentary without a point of view, hardly seems worth watching. If they can sue over this, what could they do to a Michael Moore documentary? Often the best shots come between shots when the subject relax their guard.
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[Claude Lyneis] “If they can sue over this, what could they do to a Michael Moore documentary?”
In the US you can sue over anything so the act of suing is rather meaningless when trying to draw conclusions, it’s the outcome that matters (settled, dismissed, found in favor of the plaintiff, etc.,). And Moore has been sued many times.
[Claude Lyneis] “A documentary without a point of view, hardly seems worth watching… Often the best shots come between shots when the subject relax their guard.”
This isn’t subjects relaxing their guard though. In reality the subjects were asked a question and quickly and knowledgeably answered that question. In the documentary the subjects were asked a question and then crickets. Instead of an answer you see a clip of the subjects sitting silently (it’s really a clip of room tone being recorded from later on). The implication being that the subjects can’t/won’t readily answer the question posed to them which is patently false.
If you are manipulating the footage to adhere to your preconceived notions of what ‘should’ happen as opposed to what really happened then you are making an video editorial and/or a work of fiction, not a documentary. Ex. if you are making a Flat Earth documentary but all of your interviewees say the Earth is round you don’t ‘fix it in post’ and cut their responses up so they all say that the Earth is flat just because it’s your point of view that the Earth is flat. Go out and find people that actually say the Earth is flat.
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I think it’s a very simple issue of ethics. A lot of directors like to “shape” the responses to tell the story they want to tell, rather than the one that’s actually been told. It’s a staple for reality TV, but should be avoided in documentaries. This is separate from whether or not a lawsuit has any merit.
I think it’s the BBC that forbids morph cuts or “Frankenbites” with cutaway shots. The point is to accurately represent the statement or not hide an edit when it’s made. I personally think that’s going a bit too far, because I feel there’s a middle ground. I think it’s OK to “shape” the answers through the editing process, as long as you stay true to the intent of what was said. Obviously others disagree.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I think it’s OK to “shape” the answers through the editing process, as long as you stay true to the intent of what was said. “
Agreed. Cut for time and/or clarity but you have to keep the substance/meaning of the moment/response intact.
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The first thing to note is that this lawsuit isn’t about a documentary. It’s about a newsmagazine TV interview.
Not to defame TV newsmagzines. That’s what I did for the heart of my career in video production, and I loved it with my whole heart.
And while it was documentary-esque in style and intent (science and nature; my model was NOVA in 7-minute segments), I thought of “real” documentarians as novelists, where, at my best, I was an essayist.
This is closer to whatever feeds at the bottom of TV news magazines. Insert your least favorite example here.
The principles of documentaries and news apply of course, but I don’t want to overly elevate the majesty of the enterprise in question.
[Andrew Kimery] “[Claude Lyneis] “A documentary without a point of view, hardly seems worth watching… Often the best shots come between shots when the subject relax their guard.”
This isn’t subjects relaxing their guard though…..Ex. if you are making a Flat Earth documentary but all of your interviewees say the Earth is round you don’t ‘fix it in post'”
re: objectivity, exactly. My feeling that any documentarian who claims that objectivity even exists, much less that it applies to his or her work needs to be branded with a scarlet “C” for “Charlatan” or “I” for “Idiot” as appropriate, which will then also be supered across the center of every frame of their work.
But, specifically, the subjects had not relaxed at all. They were IMMEDIATELY ready with a reply. It’s the whole reason they were there. Footage was ADDED to create the false impression that they were caught off guard.
[Andrew Kimery] “[Claude Lyneis] “If they can sue over this, what could they do to a Michael Moore documentary?”
…And Moore has been sued many times.”
Sort of, but not for this kind manipulation.
A typical example is Iraq war veteran Sgt. Peter Damon, who described the combats events that led to the loss of his arms in a TV news account, 16 seconds of which was included in Fahrenheit 9/11.
He sued Moore for $85 million (yes, $85 million for 16 seconds in a 2-hour+ movie) because he felt that the clip’s inclusion implied that he (Damon) had cooperated with Moore on an anti-war piece, when Damon had not met Moore, and strongly supported the war.
His $85 million suit was dismissed, because, said the judge, the 16-second excerpt Moore used was unedited and verbatim, and accurately characterized the man, his words, and the events. More details here.
So THAT’s the kind of thing Michael tends to get sued for. Not “he misrepresented me” but “he didn’t have my permission” and “I don’t agree with him and my presence in his picture implies that I do”.
I assume that Michael would consider what Katie’s editors did to be offensive. There’s certainly no precedent for it in either his work as a documentarian OR as a TV newsmagazine guy. His MO is to let the people talk. Very 60 Minutes that way.
(Speaking of which, anybody here but me remember Moore’s TV Nation? I loved that thing. Nine episodes and eight episodes in the summers of 1994 and 1995 respectively, offering some genuinely hilarious takes on serious issues way, way ahead of its time. That is, unlike The Daily Show or some such, it was in fact intended primarily as news, with humor simply its style. Both seasons were Emmy-nominated for “Best Informational Series”, with the first season winning the Emmy in a tie with Ken Burns’ Baseball. Yeah, it had THAT sincerity of intent as information, and that excellence of execution.)
[Oliver Peters] “I think it’s OK to “shape” the answers through the editing process, as long as you stay true to the intent of what was said. “
[Andrew Kimery] “Agreed. Cut for time and/or clarity but you have to keep the substance/meaning of the moment/response intact.”
Again, there is no allegation of misrepresentation. The allegation is mockery.
Try this as a thought exercise. Imagine a soundbite that’s otherwise flawless — accurate, compelling, tastefully edited, raises no objection from the subject.
Then add a six second clip of people laughing right after it.
Or circus music playing underneath it.
Or cutting in disturbing or offensive footage on either side of the clip.
The words are 100% accurate in every way. Something else got added for a reason that was not to clarify, support, or even contradict what was SAID.
Plaintiffs allege that the editing was to create the false IMPRESSION of their lack of competence, commitment, and focus as spokespeople.
At what point does out-of-context silence turn into mockery? At what point does mockery turn into slander?
Which is to say, at what point does out-of-context silence become slander?
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Seems like a slippery slope to me. All editing is has judgement to it and once in the camera it is not a real depiction. Real is being there in person. The cinema verite movement in the 1950’s was all about trying to capture “truth”, but that philosophy is still being debated. When I watch documentaries I don’t assume too much about truth. Some of the “documentaries” on 911 are impressive, if not totally bogus.
Anyway, this is a great topic for the Cow forum. Leave it to gun wing nuts to sue.
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[Tim Wilson] ”
re: objectivity, exactly. My feeling that any documentarian who claims that objectivity even exists, much less that it applies to his or her work needs to be branded with a scarlet “C” for “Charlatan” or “I” for “Idiot” as appropriate, which will then also be supered across the center of every frame of their work.”As someone who has worked the fields of cinema verite I take exception to this lazy generalization. Not like Tim to be so lax. He must be getting on to drool so.
To be more precise: there is a objective world that exists beyond our subjective experience. But just as a mentally healthy person’s experience of it is closer to its reality than a severely deluded person’s it’s also true that some documentaries are more objective than others.
Michael Moore’s last film Where Do We Invade Next cherry picked objective facts and assembled them to create a highly skewed perspective that nevertheless made a reasonably objective point: that America does a lot of things badly compared to other countries in the world…a fact that anyone with any experience of the world knows very well. This cherry picking M. O. is how he works. I think it was in Bowling for Columbine that he walked into an unlocked front door in Toronto to demonstrate how Canadians do not fear their neighbours like Americans do. This caused great hilarity among those millions of us who live in Toronto and routinely lock our doors. The consensus was that woman of the house probably forgot. But the greater truth he was getting at is that Torontonians don’t lock up because we fear our neighbours in the same way Americans do. (In fact, we lock up because we are a prudent people founded by Loyalists and counter revolutionaries.) But the point he was speaking to was a more objective truth than the outlier house in the scene. Are his films less objective than Fred Wiseman’s? Doesn’t Wiseman cherry pick what he chooses to film and then shape it in the editing to portray the essential essence of his subject as a similar end result? Don’t both of them get at some kind of truth that has an objective component? Despite two radically different ways of working do they not get closer to objectivity than the subjective, some would say delusional, ramblings of a Werner Hertzog? Probably. And that’s my point: to dismiss all documentary as lacking objectivity is too general a statement. I know you didn’t really mean to be so lax, Tim. It was the whiskey. Or the drool.
David
https://AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Cherniack] ” to dismiss all documentary as lacking objectivity is too general a statement.”
We’ll have to disagree on this one. Rather than lax, I’m wound tight as a drum on this.
I can put it a different way, to say that there’s no such thing as objectivity, anywhere, on any topic.
[David Cherniack] “there is a objective world that exists beyond our subjective experience. “
That’s true, and it isn’t. Once you pick up a camera, it’s not true.
Have you ever seen a picture of Michaelangelo’s David’s butt? Highly unlikely, but I assure you, he does in fact have a butt. I know this because, subjectively speaking, my mother finds David’s penis wholly unimpressive, so on her most recent visit to Florence, she worked her way around to the back to get a picture of his butt, thinking surely it would be more interesting. Having seen the photos she took, I have to agree with her. David’s butt is where it’s at.
But David himself is wall-to-wall non-objectivity! Michaelangelo was at least honest about that — not that he needed to be. Audiences knew that, and frequently objected to the overtly political statements it represented. The statue was physically attacked, and it’s our good fortune that none of the vandalisms were permanent.
You might say, nope, irrelevant. The statue is the statue. And I’d say, the choices you make about what to show and not to show are relevant, as is your decision to say that the meaning of the sculpture to either its creator or the people who he wanted to see it. That tells me about you, and what you think is and isn’t important.
My evaluation of someone who says, “The intent of the artist is irrelevant” is to say, “Ah yes, I understand. The only thing that matters to you about the art is how YOU feel about it. NOW we have a place to start talking in a way that might potentially yield true communication.”
Just as sculptors carve away parts of a stone to leave other parts remaining, people holding cameras make choices about what NOT to show. Whatever objectivity there might have been has been carved away to become a work of the imagination.
Editing is even less objective, because it carves away what has already been carved away. There’s a reason why many directors describe editorial as the last stage in writing, which goes for documentaries too. Stories are SHAPED.
There’s only one reason to make a documentary. One. Because you feel something about something, and you want me to feel something, learn something, do something, or for whatever reason, watch your thing rather than some other thing. There’s an entreaty.
None of this is inherently political, but it’s no less true. Most of my stuff was science and nature. I’ve done some stuff with dance. A lot with music. Local history — and boy howdy, there’s NOTHING less objective than history.
But certainly the closer we get to politics, the less useful it is to talk about objectivity, and the more important it is to talk about what motivates filmmaking choices.
The one and ONLY thing I’ll concede is that there’s a spectrum that documentaries might live along, somewhere between “I want to persuade you” to “I’ll let you draw your own conclusion,” but the latter, to me, is precisely either delusional or fraudulent. No you’re NOT letting my draw my own conclusion from “THE” evidence. You’re giving me YOUR carved-away version of the evidence, and subtracting from THAT even having the courage to be honest about YOUR conclusion.
So, perhaps I was being lax. It’s not either-or, and there are more than two options. So I’ll restate as:
The claims of documentary objectivity can be dismissed as some combination of self-delusion, intentional fraud, cowardice rather than honesty about the conclusions filmmakers have drawn, laziness because they failed to draw one, or general incompetence.
There are probably a few options I’m leaving out, but there may not be anything about filmmaking I believe more strongly. Anyone who hoists the “O” word is to be avoided under every single conceivable circumstance. They’re either bad at filmmaking or bad people in general. No exceptions. Ever.
Feel free to disagree. But I ain’t lax about it.
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[Tim Wilson] “Editing is even less objective, because it carves away what has already been carved away. There’s a reason why many directors describe editorial as the last stage in writing, which goes for documentaries too. Stories are SHAPED.”
It’s not only that they are shaped, but part of the process is WHICH story to tell and what parts to exclude. Having worked on a few documentaries, there’s always the balance of pairing down the options that you get – particularly in the case of interview-driven documentaries. The answers often go off into many interesting tangents, but if you included them all, you’d completely lose the audience. And so the director/writer/producer/editor come to some consensus as to what stays and what gets left on the digital cutting room floor. And not with any preconceived intent (usually), but rather to hold the attention of the audience by telling a good STORY.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Tim Wilson] “re: objectivity, exactly. My feeling that any documentarian who claims that objectivity even exists, much less that it applies to his or her work needs to be branded with a scarlet “C” for “Charlatan” or “I” for “Idiot” as appropriate, which will then also be supered across the center of every frame of their work. “
That’s a straw man in this scenario, IMO. We aren’t talking about the unachievable goal of being totally objective. We are talking about whether it crosses a line to edit a subject’s on camera response in a way that completely alters the way the subject answered the question. Example, say I want to make an NLE documentary and one of the people I interview is ‘Stan’, a well known person in the NLE community:
Me: Do you think Avid has some superior features to FCP X?
Stan: Yes I do. For example, it’s great in a multi-editor environment thank’s to all the editors being about to work in a single project and the integration it has with the ISIS storage. The trim mode is also great and I love the ScriptSync feature even though you have to jump through some hopes using an older version of Avid in order to get it to work with the latest version of Avid”.That’s too long of an answer for my piece (and Stan starts to meander off topic a bit with ScriptSync work arounds towards the end) so I cut it down to the following:
Stan: “Yes I do. For example, it’s great in a multi-editor environment //and// the trim mode is also great “.
It’s shorter and more to the point, but I didn’t change the gist of Stan’s answer. Before my edit Stan said he thought Avid had some superior features to X and he lists them. After my edit Stan still says he thought Avid has some superior features to X and he lists them.
But what if in the edit I cut to Stan just standing there, silently for an extended period of time as if he was struggling to find an answer? That’s not representative of the gist of Stan’s answer at all. And what if when people see the piece they go, “Man, I’d heard of Stan before and thought he knew his stuff, but he was totally clueless in that interview” so fewer people solicit Stan’s advice because they don’t think he knows what he’s talking about? Could that not be seen as injurious to Stan?
I’m not saying I think the lawsuit will win or should win because I don’t know all the facts of the case. What I am saying is that the potential for harm certainly exist and that’s why slander and libel laws exist.
To stick with my NLE doc example, if I didn’t want anyone to say anything nice about Avid I would either edit out those questions and responses entirely and/or I would only interview people that I know wouldn’t say anything nice about Avid. I wouldn’t take a positive response about Avid and edit it so it became a negative or neutral response about Avid.
I guess I look at this not as objective vs subjective (which is a totally different yet related discussion) but as crossing the line from non-fiction into fiction deceptively presented as non-fiction.
Maybe I’m just more unwilling than most when it comes to blurring lines, fudging facts and/or editing people into doing/saying things they did not do/say. Michael Moore was brought up and, to put it politely, I think he takes far too many liberties in order to create his version of reality so I don’t watch his editorials.
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