Posted on 11/30/2004 1:48:12 AM PST by weegee
Q. The Motion Picture Academy has named the 12 finalists for the best documentary category. Two of the titles jumped off the list for me: "The Story of the Weeping Camel" and "Touching the Void." Since both of these films were fictionalized versions of their stories and employed actors to play many of the roles, how do they qualify as documentaries?
Greg Nelson, Chicago
A. Bruce Davis, executive director of the Motion Picture Association, replies: "The questions about the eligibility of 'The Story of the Weeping Camel' and 'Touching the Void' in this year's feature documentary field are fair ones to ask, since both films contain substantial amounts of 're-created' material. 'Camel' was the easier call.
"It's not the kind of documentary usually seen these days, though, where events are captured on film as they actually happen. This is more of an ethnographic study; the filmmakers clearly observed life in a Mongol community in the Gobi Desert and then asked its inhabitants to re-create various aspects of their lives for the camera, imposing a wisp of a story on the material for structure.
"To say that 'Camel' isn't a documentary would be to rule most of Robert Flaherty's body of work (like 'Nanook of the North') outside the documentary pale, and most documentarians would be slow to do that.
"'Void' consists of pure documentary material -- interviews with the participants in the ill-fated climb in the Peruvian Andes -- intermixed with footage in which actors re-create parts of the adventure. At some point in a film of this kind, the ratio of staged to doc material becomes problematic (we wouldn't have accepted 'Reds' as a documentary, for example), but after taking a careful look at 'Void,' our documentarians welcomed it into this year's competition."
Nanook of the North is false. There is a whole documentary that looks back at the filming of it.
Goebbels would be proud of Hollywood and Roger Ebert.
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