🚀 go-pugleaf

"Billzz" <billzzstring@starband.net> wrote:

>My only contribution to this is to note that they are *real* words, spoken 
>by *real* people, as opposed to actors reading lines.  It is a documentary. 
>They are not actors reading someone's lines.  They are expressing themselves 
>(maybe as best they know how) and it is the duty of the documentary camera 
>to record exactly what was said.  When a lion kills a zebra on National 
>Geographic we do not expect the camera to turn away at the (obscene to some) 
>final moment. 

That is a salient point.  Certainly the best documentaries minimize
the effect of the director in favor of the events and people involved.
However, I'm cynical enough and have been around enough ENG
(electronic news gathering) to know that the full story is rarely
related, properly or not.  I've watched talent seek out water filled
ditches to stand in to indicate life-threatening flooding, and have
seen them "enhance" reality while still staying within the bounds of
journalism. I'm also old enough to remember controversy about a
predecessor to the NGC, "Wild Kingdom," which allegedly forced some
"natural death" scenes between animals, and although I'm not quite
that old, I'm aware of the early precedent of Matthew Brady's
photographers moving the bodies of civil war soldiers into better
positions before taking stereographs of them.

The image, the screen, whether it is big or small, is used by any
accomplished film maker or photojournalist to subtly tweak responses
in the audience.  The moment you start to tell a story, provide links
between events, or use anything but an impersonal camera angle, you
begin to play with both the events and the audience.  Those are
largely what make a show interesting.  That dichotomy between art and
reality inevitably leads to conflicts.

On a small scale, I can provide a classic example of this.  A story
was just related today in a group that I subscribe to.  The writer of
a post in that group proudly described how he put together slide
images from a diving expedition and presented them in a brief but
entertaining and beautiful presentation.  One of the audience members
at that show was a person who had been on the same diving expedition
and had watched the shots being taken.  He came up to the presenter
after the show, with the immediate comment "Those slides weren't in
chronological order."  The two of them then stared uncomprehendingly
at each other, the expedition member wondering why the true story
wasn't told, and the presenter wondering why the expedition member
didn't understand the importance of the flow and art of the
presentation.

The curse words are part of the director's personal mental image of a
proper presentation.  To him, it is an important "slide" in his show
that adds color.  To others, it may or may not.  In any event, I
seriously doubt that his documentary will come anywhere close to
matching Frank Capra's admittedly biased "Why We Fight," which FWIW,
was shot on location during the war and shown without resorting to
cursing.