Peter Esmonde Lecture

I really liked what Esmonde had to say about the "reality" of documentaries. I agree with him in that saying documentaries are completely true portrayals of reality is "horse shit." No matter how observational and objective we aim to be in our filmmaking, our documentaries are still a construct of reality. Even if our cameras were hidden, like the lipstick cams used in Taxicab Confessions, we still have to edit the footage into something concise enough not to bore the shit out of our audience.
For an example, the other day I was watching Taxicab Confessions with a friend of mine, who like most is relatively media-illiterate. She made some remark about how short the cab rides seemed to be and I began to tell her about how the producers had to edit the rides into episode format and were likely to only include the most sensational or compelling footage. "If they included everything the person said we'd be bored to death," I told her. Reality television and documentaries might be closer to "reality" than narrative, but by virtue of the editing process, we essentially "edit" reality into a different version of itself. We take out the parts that we don't think are important or interesting, but that other people might have included. All of us are familiar with how easy it is to portray our subjects in a particular light. In my documentary from last semester about study drugs, I interviewed people and used only a couple minutes in the final cut. Some people definitely thought that Justine, one of my subjects, came off as kind of crazy. I found it funny because I know her personally and I don't think that's the reality of it or what I really wanted to do. But I didn't even take her out of context, I simply included the footage I thought was most interesting. So, even though our work might help to expose the greater truths of society (like how the phenomenon of using non-prescribed study drugs is certainly real) we can also easily come off as misrepresenting the truth (like how Justine is really a pretty sane individual). The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that you cannot know both the exact velocity and the exact position of a subatomic particle at the same time because the very act of measuring changes the momentum of the particle by a degree that cannot be determined. Think of our cameras as the photons of light that bounce of the particles in order to measure them.