Professor Dr. Ebbo Demant
Professor Helga Reidemeister
Thomas Riedelsheimer
Heidi Specogna
Thorsten Schütte, Program Coordinator
“Seeing, thinking, speaking, filming”
Joris Ivens
A documentary film is the result of relationships which one enters into for a certain time with others, a composition of the kind of mutual inspiration that is generated when people connect both emotionally and intellectually. A good documentary film, like a good fiction film, has to be carried by a story with multifaceted characters and generate a narrative tension. Above all, documentary films tell us about the personal experiences of an author, a director encountering extraordinary people, landscapes, animals, streets or cities – encounters that are existential, affectionate, exciting, angry.
“Truth is a lie! If I look for it in my paintings, in which of the many attempts is it? In the one I select?”
Pablo Picasso
To what extent can the documentary film today keep its promise to be authentic? With what formal and narrative means can we counter the growing uncertainty among viewers regarding the flood of media images of unexplained origin they are confronted with and which might feature faked archival material, computer-generated “found” footage, cast protagonists for docusoaps, or indiscernibly mixed forms of the fictional and the documentary? Where do we draw the boundaries between our own scruples and the artistic freedom and desire to play with forms and approaches?
“People don’t become inured to what they are shown … because of the quantity of images … It is passivity that dulls feeling.”
Susan Sontag
As documentary filmmakers, we try to place ourselves within the lived experience of others and to see the world through their eyes. It is not the superficial, ostensible story that grips us, but the interior experience. Stories must reach beyond actual occurrences, actuate the unconscious inner workings of the mind, and activate unconscious, fundamental existential structures. The art is to find a way of modeling this. Of course, in documentary film we also work with dramaturgical devices such as the three-act schema, the journey of the hero or the conflict-crisis-climax-solution model. However, all this remains a lifeless ordering of events if the stories do not penetrate deeper and emit that special documentary aura. It is like an aroma. However hard chemists try, they will never be able to reproduce the complexity with which real cherries, grapes and berries reflect particular earths, seasons and temperatures in the way they smell and taste. This is something no artificial aroma can imitate. And so it is with the effect exerted by particular moments in documentary film.
We teach our students to put aside their preconceptions, to find their own attitudes to things and to trust in their own feelings, thoughts and emotions. Building trust requires an investment of time. We encourage the students to tolerate contradiction and ambiguity, to bear their own uncertainty and self-doubt and to be open to criticism and self-criticism. We encourage our students to be highly attentive, to maintain, as it were, the gaze in the immediate vicinity longer than is perhaps necessary for an insert. And we urge them to be courageous in looking beyond boundaries and posing questions. Our goal is to cultivate these qualities in our students and to provide them with the practical tools they need for their work.
Documentary works differ from other cinematic forms in the sense that different team constellations are required depending on the nature of the subject and the available budget: on the one hand, the one or two person team, where different professional roles are taken by the same person, and on the other hand the large film team, as in the case of docudrama, which is comparable with the feature film situation. For this reason the Documentary Film program presents a comprehensive range of current and historical forms of documentary projects. This range includes the artistic authorial documentary film, the documentary essay, journalistically oriented reports and features, and mixed forms that use fictional elements such as the docudrama and the docusoap. The theoretical and practical content covers the themes of research, exposé and treatment, interviewing and conversation techniques, script, direction, dramaturgy, cinematography, lighting, sound, editing, music, and postproduction. Regular collaboration between the department and well-known programming departments and funding bodies (e.g. MFG, Junger Dokumentarfilm/SWR, Spiegel TV, Kleines Fernsehspiel/ZDF) also means that students are able to establish direct contact with the documentary market during their studies.
by the instructors of the Documentary Film department
