I have been thinking a lot about Breesa's question: "What is the deep deep motivating force for someone to agree to make their private moments so public?"
It has honestly resurfaced in me what I think has been a barrier to completing my thesis that I haven't really acknowledged – the fact that by choosing to tell someone else's story, you are asking them to trust you, and when you ask someone to trust you and that is a huge thing that you have to deliver on and I think the politics of representation are so complicated and messy that you rarely can sincerely make a promise of trust. A lot of the time (certainly including Weiner, but man I loved that documentary), agreeing to be in a documentary is a terrible idea or at least a very conflicted one. And those are the documentaries that I, as a viewer, like watching – the ones that get really dang messy, but I don't feel comfortable implicating someone else in that. I think that's why, in my previous attempts to launch this project, I've stumbled in "getting access" to people and communities – because it feels like such a strange and intense and unbalanced request.
One of the things that I've been thinking about, though, is that my primary medium is audio and that medium feels much less ethically complicated in some (but certainly not all) way – primarily because it can offer anonymity. Even though I have been envisioning this piece as a video documentary, I am reconsidering approaching the story with the nuns using audio.
These are obviously huge ethical questions that will not be resolved any time soon, but it is nice to be able to put a finger on some of the lingering ambivalence around diving into this project.
It has honestly resurfaced in me what I think has been a barrier to completing my thesis that I haven't really acknowledged – the fact that by choosing to tell someone else's story, you are asking them to trust you, and when you ask someone to trust you and that is a huge thing that you have to deliver on and I think the politics of representation are so complicated and messy that you rarely can sincerely make a promise of trust. A lot of the time (certainly including Weiner, but man I loved that documentary), agreeing to be in a documentary is a terrible idea or at least a very conflicted one. And those are the documentaries that I, as a viewer, like watching – the ones that get really dang messy, but I don't feel comfortable implicating someone else in that. I think that's why, in my previous attempts to launch this project, I've stumbled in "getting access" to people and communities – because it feels like such a strange and intense and unbalanced request.
One of the things that I've been thinking about, though, is that my primary medium is audio and that medium feels much less ethically complicated in some (but certainly not all) way – primarily because it can offer anonymity. Even though I have been envisioning this piece as a video documentary, I am reconsidering approaching the story with the nuns using audio.
These are obviously huge ethical questions that will not be resolved any time soon, but it is nice to be able to put a finger on some of the lingering ambivalence around diving into this project.
What a thoughtful RS.
ReplyDeleteYes, this is the essence of the prompt! How does telling their story to you move your interviewee to who they want to be? How can your interview of them be in service to them?
Reframed in this way, I think the ethical implications are lessened?