Should Art Imitate Policy?

Is the duty of the documentary to “change the world” or rather to “show the world”? Increasingly, activists and consumers conflate documentary with activism – and expect that political expression in film should lead to policy change on the ground. But do we lose something when we mandate that art drive change in the real world? How should we think about the relationship between art and policy? We asked a group of filmmakers and photographers to reflect on those questions by drawing from their own work.

Farihah Zaman is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, critic, and programmer whose feature film with Jeff Reichert, Remote Area Medical, is slated for theatrical release in Fall 2014.

If documentary films now happen to be filling a void, does that mean that they are obligated to do so? Many questions from post-screening discussions of our films suggests that audiences often now expect that works dealing with social issues, however tangentially, have the moral responsibility to take a side.

Our latest film, This Time Next Year, is about a barrier island community in the year after hurricane Sandy. A member of the delightfully challenging audience at a recent DC screening asked we didn’t more pointedly ask subjects why they don’t simply evacuate, while another said it “would have been more courageous” to call out conservative politicians and deniers of climate change. Our previous film, Remote Area Medical, is a film about life without health care in Appalachia that does not directly address policy (our motto was “people, not politics”), and we were routinely asked, “Why didn’t you ask how these people vote?” and, “Well, what do you want me to do?”

Although we feel strongly about the issues contained in our films and are happy to follow up with discussion and resources, we don’t want to the movies themselves to tell you to do anything. We hope that the act of seeing with one’s own eyes, rather than being told through a thesis statement, will inspire compassionate thought and action.

I am not an activist, I am a filmmaker, and while the two often successfully coincide, that should be a choice rather than an obligation, or the genre would be reduced to a sea of cinematic sameness. And in fact, sometimes it is a less explicitly activist film that can make for a better political tool because it has the power to engage all sides. Force may be able to blow the doors open on an injustice when done just right, but neutral evidence can sneak in through the window.

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Jeff Reichert is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and co-editor of the popular online journal Reverse Shot.

The idea that a film can “change the world” is now a commonplace in the documentary community, but it hasn’t always been this way. During the initial flourishing of documentary in the United States (the Direct Cinema movement of the late 1950s and early 60s which brought us the early works of Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers), the underlying principle for nonfiction filmmaking was perhaps better stated as “show the world.” The idea of documentary as agent for social change isn’t new, but, over the last decade, the balance between art and activism has become heavily skewed in favor of the latter.

There is nothing inherently wrong with films actively engaged in changing policy or public perception. Our first film, Gerrymandering (2010), was used by a political campaign in California that sent 660,000 copies of the film to voters, for free, in support of a ballot initiative that eventually passed and forced a wholesale change in how the state draws their electoral district lines. But the success of films as activist tools has sparked a wave of features more interested in issues than cinema, and has brought funders to the table similarly less concerned with making good films as opposed to achieving preferred policy outcomes.

A flood of bad art isn’t anything to celebrate, but, again, this in itself doesn’t need be a worrisome development. But, recently, there has been talk about developing metrics to determine _how much change _a given film has created. In a space where the pathway from funding to festival to distribution is often already closely linked with social change potential, the establishment of this benchmark could have a stifling effect. If funders start to see diminishing returns, does the money for documentary films vanish? And what happens to those wonderful nonfiction works which don’t strive for change at all?

Hannah Price is holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art whose work is included in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and can be viewed at hannahcprice.com.

Policy and documentary art both share the relationship of responding to society at large. The list of social issues in America is lengthy, and the issues that pertain to my family’s life and my own have been around for centuries.

In my experience as an American woman of mixed African-Mexican heritage and as a documentarian artist in 21^st Century America, I most recently I used photography to document the men who verbally sexually harassed me on the street of Philadelphia.  I call this work is titled “City of Brotherly Love.” By turning the gaze around at them, I was able to highlight the imbalance of power in these situations. Viewer's responses have been both positive and negative.  Women, mostly strongly feminists, supported my confrontation and asked me to be a part of their advocacy.  Others think that I am trying to pinpoint black men, but forget that I am black too and that I was just portraying a segment of my life.

Alex Fattal is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center and a documentary artist whose work can be viewed at www.alexfattal.org.**

Right now documentary is experiencing a renaissance. There is a growing awareness that by breaking down divisions between documentary and the arts, documentarians can open up new possibilities to mobilize around pressing political, economic, and environmental problems.

Let me give you an example from my own work in Colombia. Historically, going back to the 1950s, re-integrating ex-combatants from the guerrilla into society has gone badly. However, transitioning to peace requires us to move in the other direction and to humanize ex-combatants so they can rejoin communities throughout the country.

A documentary project I am working on, _Dreams from the Concrete Mountain, _sets out to do precisely that. I have transformed a truck into a giant camera obscura by drilling a hole in one side of the payload and draping a white cloth on the other side. As the truck drives through cityscapes and landscapes the world outside of the payload is projected onto the interview subject, upside down, while I interview former members of the FARC, Colombia’s oldest and largest guerrilla group. This effect provokes the audience to re-consider the ex-combatant’s role in society while they listen to their stories. My hope is that this experimental documentary will play a role, however minor, in interrupting the cycles of disarmament and rearmament that have plagued Colombian history.

The key question moving forward is how to give the documentary arts a bigger platform: how to get documentaries in the public sphere beyond the film festival circuit, university campuses, and small-scale distributors. This will enable the documentary arts to have a greater impact on policy. It’s happening already online but sometime, hopefully soon, there will be a bigger breakthrough.