Collaborative Filmmaking: An Open Space for Making Meaning, A Moral Ground for Ethnographic Film

Abstract

I will discuss here the collaborative space between image maker and media subject, the space where I believe good documentary filmmaking happens. All documentary exists as a record of the relationship between filmmaker and subject. When I speak about collaboration here, I speak about the ground of that relationship. I am not discussing traditional collaboration between co-filmmakers, as between David and Judith MacDougall or Tim Asch, Patsy Asch and Linda Connor, nor am I speaking about media, often indigenous media, where co-subjects are the full makers. I am speaking about the most common form of documentary where maker and subject are different—different in cultural background or gender, social power, economics, language, filmmaking knowledge, etc. With little regard for differing levels of control, the term collaboration has long served as a politically acceptable catch-all description of most joint efforts. In documentary the term is tossed around to mean anything from the subject as informant to the sharing of differing skills to the subject introducing the crew into a community to the subject as co-producer. The type of lateral collaboration I'm proposing creates an open space for dialogue: a space for filmmakers to learn to pose the questions they do not originally know to ask, a place where film subjects select the fragments of their reality they deem significant to document, and a moral place where subjects and image makers can mediate their own representation. I will briefly describe the community collaborative filmmaking that my colleague Leonard Kamerling and I developed over the past twenty-three years at the Alaska Native Heritage Film Center (ANHFC), University of Alaska, working with Inupiaq and Yup'ik Eskimo communities Our collaborative approach has served us well as ethnographic filmmakers, and I also believe it has served the indigenous communities well in creating film documents they value and cherishWe first present our methods, our previous work and our goals to village residents and tribal leaders. If they grant us formal permission to make a film with them, we move into the village for two to four months. Every individual can refuse to be filmed at any time. Community members select who and what events will be filmed, and decide what will not be filmedThey make all translations and review edited versions of the films. Often we use a double or triple blind translation process to insure accuracy. Kamerling and I serve as co-directors, photographer, sound recordist and editor. We do claim authorship. We make aesthetic, technical, contextual and structural choices which we feel make the film accessible to western ethnographic and documentary audiences—limiting the running time (20-90 minutes), subtitling in English, identifying the environment, explicating identitiesWe also very consciously mediate the editing for the village audience—including all clans, images of deceased elders, special jokes, etc. We follow a verite/direct cinema style using western narrative dramatic devices such as pacing, formalist composition and elliptical editingWe try to maintain the temporal integrity of interviews, stories, and action sequences, and we show edited scenes to residents to make sure we haven't sacrificed vital elements or stylistic tonalities to the demands of compressing timeMost residents prefer longer versions of the material