Frontline's Guide To Journalistic Practices

Here is a link to Frontline's guides to journalistic practices. This is pertinent to our current discussions about documentaries and ethics, and is pretty extensive about different stages of the production process.

FOR YOUR JOURNAL:

These guidelines deal with concrete practices in documentary representation. Look closely at how the guidelines apply to preproduction/production/postproduction practices.

Describe some of the ways in which the guidelines offer specific instructions on how to balance credibility and accuracy with creativity and persuasiveness.  (For example, use of music, manipulation of images, dramatization.)

A distinction is made in the guidelines between “public affairs” and non-public affairs programs. What practices are acceptable in one and not the other? (For example, in dramatization and interviewing practices.) Would The Thin Blue Line or Roger & Me have passed Frontline guidelines for public affairs?

What different functions are evident in the guidelines for the “executive producer” vs “producer” vs. “co-producer”? What about interviewee vs. “expert/consultant”?

Week 3 journal prompts

I gave you guys this on the handout the first day of the week, but here it is again:

The personal subject matter of Nobody’s Business does not have the obvious social relevance of The Thin Blue Line. But consider Nichols’ comments on how documentary is “more than evidence”, that it is a particular way of seeing the world and offering perspectives on it. That is, a documentary offers an interpretation of the world.

How do you think the filmmaker “interprets” his father?

Do you think the doc gets to any truths about human experience beyond the filmmaker’s family? What do you think it has to say, for example, about mourning, memory, romance, family, or dealing with the past?

What formal strategies (or “elements of documentary”) seem significant to you in Nobody’s Business? What role do they play in the creative treatment of the filmmaker’s father and own history? How do they work in the film’s “organizing logic”?