The "Creative" Documentary
One of the hardest parts of making a documentary about post 9/11 politics has been the creative process. There are so many films out there detailing the corrupt, racist, and just plain illegal actions of the U.S. government since 9/11. Most of them are incredibly informative but few are really beautiful. I'm torn between my desire to make an aesthetically pleasing "arty" documentary and the ideology that the message is most important. I mean, is it disrespectful to make art out of ones struggle, a struggle which is not my own? Do I need to follow the belief that documentary and journalism are/should be the same thing and therefore bastardized by artistic license? Don't most people simply want to be entertained and therefore wouldn't it be easiest to get peoples attention by using cinematic devices?
I struggle with all of this as I edit and can't help but wonder if I'm not distracting myself from the most important part of this documentary; a cohesive message/story. Certainly this is not one of the hardest parts of creation but the hardest part. So I have to question my motives even further. The desire to create art for arts sake can at times be an avoidance of difficult issues i.e. the political.
O.k., perhaps I've gone too far. I have a right to make something beautiful, I also need to focus on content. It's a difficult line to walk, especially when I have a stack of transcripts to cull only to realize that I never transcribed newer footage, that I have horrible organizational skills and that I didn't log my b-roll/observational footage in an effective way. This makes me wonder if there could ever be a way to learn this process without trial and error? Does it have to be so messy? I'm already a mess.