Rich Hill, a documentary by Tracy Droz Tragos & Andrew Droz Palermo, played at the 2014 Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto.
Once upon a time, documentary filmmakers went to impoverished places in America and around the world, and did so because they wanted to change the world, bring attention to the disadvantaged and to ultimately help them. They made what we’d called social issue films.
This breed still exists and their documentaries keep coming at a rapid clip. At the Hot Docs Film Festival, which ends this weekend, I saw a particularly good one, Homestretch, about the homeless youth in Chicago.
But nowadays there’s a new breed of filmmaker who goes to similar impoverished peoples or down-and-dirty places to make art. These filmmakers are storytellers first. There’s a spectrum in terms of the quality of these films—I’ve questioned some of them, like last year’s Oxyana, and I like to champion others: I just saw a particularly good one, Rich Hill, at Hot Docs.
Rich Hill tells the story of several young boys who are living in deep poverty in Missouri. The film itself doesn’t pose any solutions to their plight, but the filmmakers have set up a page that allows audiences to support similar kids in need. It’s a beautifully shot documentary, and the characters are quite engaging. There’s a lot of buzz around the movie in doc circles, and it’s warranted. But it doesn’t feel like a social cause film. I wasn’t even aware of the web page until I’d looked it up.
Also at Hot Docs is the film Pine Ridge, for which Swedish director Anna Eborn went to the bleak Lakota Indian reservation to depict the desolate youth there. I liked it very much. It doesn’t have a website as Rich Hill does. It is impressionistic. You get a vivid sense of what life is like for these kids. But it is apolitical.
Both films bring to mind the notion of “poverty porn” that has been bandied about for years. This pejorative term is used to describe any sort of representation of the poor that takes on an almost fetishistic quality, wherein the audience savors how miserable people can get. This can happen even with the best intentions, like those extended commercials for charities in which barefoot children from a third world country stare into the camera.
Does this apply to films like Rich Hill and Pine Ridge? I don’t think so. But it’s a question that I’ve heard others raise about these two films. Which brings me to that old saying about pornography, “You know it when you see it.” But if that is true, then the label only applies relative to the person doing the seeing. To my eyes, Rich Hill and Pine Ridge are ultimately respectful and compassionate depictions of their subjects, but other audience members can (and have indicated to me that they do) see them differently.
There’s an inescapable potential for exploitation whenever a documentary is made — the filmmakers are using their subjects to tell a story, after all — and all the more so when people of a privileged position enter a needy community, with or without the promise of something in return to those people. But if the film is just for the audience’s aesthetic appreciation, or entertainment, then it raises the issue even more.
There’s a new strain of filmmaker-without-a-cause. They’re out there in droves, and their films will be coming down the film festival circuit pike for years to come. They are filmmakers first, storytellers second, maybe artists third, and then only somewhere under those layers are they willing take on the role of socially concerned citizens.
I’ve heard directors say that making a film based on doing good doesn’t lead to good filmmaking. To them I’d suggest watching The Great Invisible, Margaret Brown’s documentary about the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. Brown goes into the poor communities around the Gulf and represents their plight. And even though it’s a cause film, it’s also beautifully shot, well edited and artful.
But to be fair, this new strain of filmmaker might not want to make that sort of film. And these films — Tchoupitoulas, by the Ross brothers, is another one — are often pushing new boundaries of what an artful documentary can be. There’s plenty of interesting stuff there, and they’re not going away. Nor should they. Rich Hill is very engaging cinematically. So is Pine Ridge. But is Rich Hill the more ethical film because the directors are planning a social impact campaign? Should we draw a line, as a filmmaker recently suggested to me, with films presenting subjects fairly and completely on one side and subjects presented unfairly or incompletely on the other? The conundrum remains.
So here’s my proposition: Some foundation or non-profit should create a fund that supports communities in parallel with the creation of documentary art. The fund shouldn’t help the actual subjects of the film, because that would encourage performance on their part and people might fall over themselves to make it into the documentary with the promise of financial reward – that’s reality TV – but this would take filmmakers off the ethical hook and allow them to maintain their artistic standards.
You could call this a “poverty porn clean-up crew.” That was how one foundation representative described my idea after laughing darkly at the prospect of filmmakers heightened their representations of bleakness in order to win funding.
The rep had a point — it could become an escalating Cold War of ever-starker representations of the poor — but that’s a very cynical view, one that I don’t share.
The Good Pitch already covers a lot of this ground. It matches up NGOs and non-profits with documentary filmmakers to help mutually interested causes. But what I’m suggesting here is different because it’s for the filmmakers without a cause. Good Pitch films are generally social-issue films. What I’m proposing would support films to be recognized first for aesthetic quality and creative integrity.
We know audiences appreciate the beautiful depictions, however compassionate, of people less privileged than they are. So maybe this is a silly and impractical proposition. But it’s one, I think, that helps illuminate the sticky situation we’re in.
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