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For my project, I wanted to distance my own location from the subject of the documentary, so that the audience could have a clearer understanding of him without my presence intruding. However, this was a somewhat difficult balance, as I still wanted to address our familial connection. I hoped that my addressing would be clear within the opening portion of the film, as my grandfather addresses me as his grandson. I included the shot of me holding the camera as he introduces me as a way of addressing my relationship with him, as well as my role as the storyteller.

However, this is the only time my presence is made known within the film itself. I wanted to only include the voiceover of my grandfather, as I felt that it was his story to tell. That was a particular choice I made in regards to the use of voice within the film, as I wanted only to guide the story along as opposed to place myself within it.

Another idea I wanted to illustrate in the film was that of the past versus present. To do this, I captured a combination of still images and historical documents, such as newspaper clippings, from the past and video footage of my family gathered in the present. I wanted to juxtapose how we view the history of the family with how they exist now. This is particularly significant as my grandfather describes the overarching idea of “home,” and this idea holds meaning to him as the place where his family is. Thus, by capturing the family in my grandparents’ physical home as it exists today, I hope that I successfully communicated this meaning to the audience.

Over the past few years, I have realized that my goal in life is to be a documentary filmmaker. I want to be able to capture and communicate the real, lesser-known stories that make up our world. Over the past semester, via the Documentary Research course, I have learned a few essential ideas and tools that can help to make my work truly meaningful. While I have found value in ideas like “voice” and “style” from Bill Nichols, and “location” from Robert Coles, the idea that I have found to be the most valuable is the idea of “particular vs. general” discussed by Professor Nathanson in class.

This idea of “particular vs. general” speaks to the goal of documentary storytelling to connect the minutia of the story being told to the broad idea or issue that the story seeks to speak to. Thus, in a sense, the “particular vs. general” duality speaks to the “why” of documentary storytelling, as the connection between the particular vs. general serves to answer that question of “why” in the case of the story we are telling.

I find the “particular vs. general” dichotomy to be particular useful to me, as I hope to emphasize smaller-scale stories that may seem insignificant in the face of larger issues within our world. By recalling this dichotomy, I can bring meaning to the stories I tell within my own documentary filmmaking, and by communicating the connection within this dichotomy, I can communicate the purpose within the stories I tell by showing how microscopic stories hold meaning against a larger scope.

This connection is one I hoped to emphasize in my own documentary for this class, which tells the story of my grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S from Poland as a political refugee. Though this is the story of an individual man and his family, I hope that this story is able to speak to the large scale issue of the immigrant experience in the United States, especially at a time where xenophobic rhetoric rampant.

The choice to interview my grandfather was made pretty soon after understanding that the theme of the project would be “home,” as I’ve always been fascinated by his experience as an immigrant. A secondary reason for wanting to interview him is the fact that he primarily left his home country of Poland with my mother and the rest of the family due to political persecution and the repression of speech that was occurring at the time in Poland. Thus, I felt that that context made the story a rather resonant one for our current times. The other important choice I made had a more significant impact on my own location within this narrative, which was the decision to only use the voice of my grandfather to accompany the images. I could have used my own narration, or a combination of both my input and my grandfather’s, but I did this out of a desire to distance myself from the narrative, and allow my grandfather to be the sole teller of his own story. My voice as a documentarian would still be able to show through my selection of the family photos, but the narrative itself would be more in the hands of the subject, my grandfather. However, while my grandfather’s specific words were under his control, I still had to decide which portion of the interview would best display the narrative of “home” that I hoped to communicate. The entirety of our discussion was twenty minutes, of which I had to find a portion that would appropriately fit my narrative. Thus, this is a decision that brought my own location as a storyteller closer to the narrative, as this decision granted me greater control. I think my location is addressed well within my grandfather’s introductory lines, in which he identifies himself as my grandfather. Thus, he unintentionally addresses my location relative to the narrative by showing his own connection to myself, the documentarian telling the story.

Despite the fact that she often depicted Americans in desperate situations and of humble conditions, Dorothea Lange sought to portray an optimistic view of American life. Lange wanted to show that despite the struggles marginalized facets of American society faced, their humanity always shined through. As Linda Gordon, the author of “Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits” asserts, there is a sort of contradiction within Lange’s body of work. Within the reality created by Lange’s photography, American democracy is “incomplete,” while simultaneously being something that is achievable by her work’s modest subjects (p. 2). Thus, Lange’s work is democratic in both its ideals as well as its representation, as those of all walks of life are captured throughout.

A facet of Lange’s work that embodies these democratic ideals is her work capturing the wide range of Japanese Americans held in internment camps during the second world war. One particular photo, titled “Three generations of the Uchida family at Manzanar War Relocation Center,” is able to capture the humanity of individuals who are arguably victims of the aforementioned “incompleteness” of American democracy. The photo, shown above, is framed as a simple family portrait, showing several rows of Uchida family members. By framing the image in this way, a conventional family portrait, Lange seeks to counteract much of the “othering” that was done to Japanese Americans during the time via discriminatory wartime propaganda. Here, Lange shows these individuals as equals, embodying the idea of democracy visible in her work. Thus, Lange’s skills as a photographer, specifically through a deliberate use of framing and composition, help to bring dignity and humanity to subjects that were otherwise looked down upon by the rest of American society. 

At 31 minutes and 45 seconds into her documentary film “Stranger with a Camera,” filmmaker Elizabeth Barrett asks the audience, “Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people we portray?” She then goes on to establish a complex relationship between what she deems “social embarrassment” and “social action,” proposing the idea that social action can easily cause embarrassment for those that filmmakers are intending to help.

Thus, an ethical tension is created by Barrett. This tension is one in which a filmmaker has both the desire to help a particular group of people, while having the moral responsibility to not disparage those they aim to help.

This is a particularly striking moment, as this issue is twofold. This tension applies firstly to the primary subject of her documentary, the relationship between filmmaker Hugh O’Connor and the Kentucky residents who he documented, but secondly to the relationship between Barrett herself and the issue that she is documenting. Both of these filmmakers are essentially covering the same people, the rural Kentucky residents, and thus both face the same ethical tension. However, it appears that Barrett is the only filmmaker of the two to outright acknowledge this tension.

This tension between embarrassment and action is somewhat addressed by Robert Coles in his text “Doing Documentary Work,” in which he ruminates the ethical questions that are created by documentary work. Coles specifically asks, “…what kind of moral and psychological accountability should we demand of ourselves, we who lay claim to social idealism or to a documentary tradition that will somehow (we hope) work toward a social good…?”(p. 74) These questions mirror those posed by Barrett, who asserts that it is up to the documentarian to be mindful of how documentarians portray their subjects, particularly in relation to how they portray those in poverty. A documentarian should address these questions by striving for a closer relationship with those they are portraying. By better understanding how their subjects want to be portrayed, in the case of those struggling as a result of these social issues, documentarians can take a more ethical approach in response to these tensions.

By posing these questions, Barrett is engaging in a sort of self-scrutiny regarding her own location. Is it possible that, by covering this topic, she is doomed to repeat the same mistakes made by her predecessors? Perhaps by retreading the same ground regarding the rural residents of Kentucky, she is also risking the social embarrassment she sought to address.

In the context of documentary storytelling, writer Robert Coles defines location as “…how a particular writer or researcher decides to commit himself or herself with respect to those others being studied, watched, heard, made the subject of a writing initiative.”(p. 32) Thus, the issue of location is not one of physical space, but rather of a documentary storyteller’s intentional proximity to the story that they are telling. The more that a storyteller decides to place or involve themselves within the narrative, the more they rely on the subjective rather than the objective. Furthermore, the closer the proximity or “location,” greater impact, or even harm, can be caused to the storyteller themself.

The idea of location as described by Coles, and its significance as an idea within documentary storytelling, is illustrated well within the opening pages of the introductory chapter of his book “Doing Documentary Work.” In this passage, Coles recounts the work of James Agee, specifically in the creation of his work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Coles discusses the introduction to Agee’s text, in which the author describes the great distress that he underwent as a result of engrossing himself within the lives of such underprivileged and damaged families. Though Agee was able to physically place himself alongside the Alabaman tenant-farmer families that he sought to share the stories of, simply observing their lives brought unto him a great sense of helplessness and futility, as he could not directly correct the inequities and struggles that he was tasked with merely documenting.

The previous recounting of Agee’s work embodies Coles’ ideas regarding location in that it shows an example of a documentarian intensely immersing themselves within the subject of their work. In this case, it was done by living alongside tenant-farmer families in attempts to accurately communicate the struggles they faced. Arguably, this could be described as “intense” location, as the proximity is so close between storyteller and subject. In this case, Agee creates a great example of the harm that can be brought about by great proximity. Furthermore, the fact that the opening portions of Agee’s text go into such great detail regarding his own experience and personal impact of how he told this story shows the extent to which he uses subjectivity. Thus, this is a secondary use of the idea of location, as Agee leans into a subjective narrative.

In “A Move,” a New York Times Op-Doc, filmmaker Elahe Esmaili documents her attendance of a family birthday party, during which she refuses to wear a hijab. This act of defiance is done against the backdrop of the Women, Life, Freedom, movement, a movement that arose after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police.

The film uses the events of the gathering, and the various responses to Esmaili’s act, to paint a picture regarding the larger issue of gender within the nation of Iran. Thus, the filmmaker is using the documentation of a rather small story, in both time and scope, to inform on what is actually a much larger conflict. It is also important to note the rather minimalist approach to the documentary’s filmmaking. To start, the film uses no background narration. The only context provided to the audience in regards to the ongoing women’s rights movement the film is inspired by is through a few title cards at the beginning and ends of the film. Almost the entirety of the film is made up of footage from the single-day period over which we see Esmaili interact with her family and discuss the connotations of her refusing to wear the hijab. Thus, she wants the audience to have an unfiltered view into the dynamics of her family, and allow viewers to make our own interpretations of these interactions and conflicts. Thus, while this story seems small and almost insignificant within the context of a national gender rights’ issue, the range of behaviors displayed by this family, with some opposing Esmaili’s refusing to wear a hijab and others being indifferent, capture the spectrum of perspectives within the larger issue. Thus, Esmaili utilizes the power of documentary filmmaking to show the minute, real-world ramifications of overwhelming issues.