When I met Sarah Wolozin for an interview last Sunday, she couldn't help but give me advice on where to point the camera. "Aim it a little to the left and sit in that chair" she instructed. While Wolozin currently works as an academic administrator for CMS, she admits it’s still hard for her to shake off her 10 plus years of documentary production experience. As a child, she had always been keenly aware of the fact that it was the winners who ended up telling their stories, and that the stories of the masses were usually left untold. This initial awareness turned into an interest in print journalism and eventually a stint in Italian television where Wolozin started making documentaries. She was hooked. Wolozin eventually returned to her hometown of Boston, where started working for the documentary company, Blackside. With them, she worked on many documentaries including the acclaimed “I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts.” Throughout the years, Wolozin has continued to produce documentaries for PBS, the History Channel, and the Learning Channel.
While I had casually discussed Sarah’s professional history with her throughout the semester and had even attended her workshop (with the New Media Literacies group at MIT) on documentary filmmaking, I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to discover her thoughts behind the process. Her class had been illuminating in a practical way, but it had also given me a glimpse of the working principles behind her work. I wanted to explore this further through a private interview.
One of the most noticeable things about Wolozin’s interview was her reluctance to pin down one single method or theory of documentary filmmaking. As she states:
“I just think when you say documentary filmmaking…it’s a huge field that encompasses so many different styles and approaches and philosophies and theories and…types of people and methods. The one tie-in is just that it happened…it’s nonfiction…and you’re capturing that.”
Though there are many different approaches to making documentaries, Sarah states that most filmmakers are motivated by the desire to tell a story. However, whereas most fictional narrative filmmakers start their process with a story in mind, documentary filmmakers more often start with an idea or a concept. Some documentaries rely on the straight re-telling of facts (as with some of the pieces Wolozin has worked on for the History Channel), but more often than not, filmmakers incorporate the language of fictional narrative film in their work. She stresses that you must always “look for that drama” when crafting a documentary, and that the process often involves continuously negotiating between sharing the intellectual ideas and telling an engaging story.
This idea of negotiation and balance became a constant theme throughout the interview. As a television documentary filmmaker, Wolozin occasionally worked in contexts where her personal interests came in conflict with the interests of the employer. Wolozin discusses one particular instance when she was pushed by her employer in documenting the story of one artist over another against her better instincts. She states:
“Some stories you’re more proud of and others you have to let go [of]…you have the financial and professional constraints that you’re always measuring, but I think for me, the most important thing [is that] you try to balance that, you try to get on projects that match your own values and that allow you to feel that you are really giving good creative input and creating something that is of value. And ultimately if you don’t think it is of value it’s very unsatisfying.”
Balance is also a key element when looking at the techniques of documentary filmmaking, something that I noticed during Wolozin’s workshop on documentary filmmaking techniques a few weeks ago. While Wolozin advocates creating detailed shooting plans and being organized during the process, she also states that filmmaking often involves following one’s intuition of about “what feels right.” She states that, since childhood, most filmmakers have already acquired an intuitive sense about what looks good and what is compelling through their own experiences consuming visual media like film and television. Because “television is an emotional medium” (a statement that Wolozin credits to documentary filmmaker Rick Burns), instinct plays a large role in creating content for this medium, particularly in creating engrossing narratives. This is not to say that Wolozin shuns professional training (she actually advocates going to film school, because it gives you freedom from professional constraints and allows you an opportunity to experiment), but rather she states: “[there are] a lot of different ways to learn, and I don’t think any one way is better than the other, I just think you go for what works for you, what works better for you.”
Instinct is also an important element in interviewing, which Wolozin calls a “key element in documentary film.” While a documentary filmmaker’s main motivation may be to tell a story, they usually must tell this story through characters in the film, and through interviews with these characters. Wolozin says that documentaries are often “a balance [between]… intellectual grit and charisma of the characters.” Instinct comes into play in multiple levels during the interview process. First, a filmmaker must rely on his or her instincts when choosing the people to interview. This is more important in documentary because as Wolozin states:
“The…thing is, you don’t really know how your people are going to act or what they’re going to do and you can’t control them because they’re not actors. And so you gotta pick them in the beginning and pick them right, or your story flops because ultimately it is about a character.”
Of course, this is only the beginning- instinct must also carry a filmmaker into the interview itself. Wolozin speaks about some of the qualities that make a good interviewer (and thus a good documentary filmmaker): “Everyone has access to the principals of what makes a good character, it’s that sort of deeper understanding or ability that allows some people to hit it on the nail, while others don’t.” While some documentary filmmakers like to distance themselves and rely on their position as an authority during an interview, Wolozin likes interviewers who are more subtle in their approach. She highlights characteristics such as being “non-threatening,” and being able to carefully listen and observe in order to establish a relationship with a subject. By making them more comfortable during the interview (“like a good therapist” she says), the filmmaker may find it easier for subjects to open up during the interview. This technique, while successful in terms of getting to the heart of the story, may also lead to compromising situations. Wolozin discusses her personal experience with interviews, when people may occasionally veer off into emotional territory that might have nothing to do with the documentary. She says:
“You have this ethical moment, well do I go for the gold and get them to cry more and use that, or do I protect them, and say, you know, that’s not really something you probably want out on national television… or it’s something I’m just not going to use.”
A feeling of exploitation and manipulation comes up often during the documentary process, and it becomes important for a documentary filmmaker to maintain a sense of balance, as Wolozin states:
“I am thinking of …their own best interests and what they might really want or not want on television so I will protect them… although if it’s something I need, I’ll take it too… .so I try to balance what I need with what they need too.”
This continual negotiation is something that Wolozin dealt with constantly while working on a documentary called “Untold Stories of the ER” for the Learning Channel. Wolozin struggled ethically with this series, constantly questioning whether or not “people’s most horrendous moments” should be documented on television as “entertainment for the masses.” While personally questioning the morality of the documentary, Wolozin encountered a number of doctors who justified their participation on the show (they claimed that they might inspire some young people to become doctors). In terms of her own involvement she says: “you find your ways too, as your going along, to justify some of the exploitation that happens.” One particularly potent experience involved an asthmatic girl who was being profiled for the show. Wolozin describes this experience with the girl and her family:
“On the one hand, I am feeling it, but on the other hand, I’m a producer and that’s my job and so the boundaries get kind of blended and a little awkward because I followed this girl for a good six months and she’s 8 years old, and …by the end, they thought, you know, this is our friend, and I was a friend, but I also was doing my job, and I had this sort of painful last day… and the mom….said to me, ‘So if she has another asthma attack, do we call you?’ And the truth was, no, the filmmaking was done… and it was this heartbreaking moment…a human moment…and okay, well my job’s over. And it’s moment I never forgot and after, I just like oh God, it’s hard…to balance the ethics of what you’re doing because you’re using live people as your talent… but they are also real people. And you hope that most of the time what you need is what they need.”
In these cases, Wolozin stresses the importance of keeping your eye on the larger goal of a project. While the success of that particular segment of the documentary hinged on the girl’s pain (her continual asthma attacks), in the end, one hopes that it brings more visibility to the issue.
Documentaries are, of course, not always so one-sided. While documentaries can highlight people’s most painful moments, they also often celebrate their successes. Wolozin highlights the rewards of the profession: “It’s a wonderful gift, really, to be… in that position, of telling someone’s story.” She discusses the power of “helping a person’s story get visibility [and the] respect and attention it deserves.” Generally, this desire for social justice is something that is prevalent among many producers in the field. What you find in documentary filmmaking, Wolozin half-jokingly states, is “a lot of really serious people who work really hard” and who “don’t go into it to be famous or rich.” The overwhelming desire to get stories out to the public, “making history, telling stories that [haven’t] been written about” and getting them “seen and heard” by many is something which differentiates documentary filmmaking from some other more isolated arts. While there is an inward journey and process of self-discovery during the filmmaking process, it is usually moving in tandem to another happening or person in the world. The documentary filmmaker is therefore not like the lone painter sitting alone in his studio, rather she is constantly reacting to and reaching toward the outside world.
(written for a class - 3/14/07)
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