I believe in the impor­tance of art as a social good, and in the val­ue of its acces­si­bil­i­ty to all people.

Like most of our world, the film indus­try was built on a foun­da­tion of dis­crim­i­na­tion, and that sys­temic bias con­tin­ues today. Film sets and pro­duc­tion offices can be par­tic­u­lar­ly unfriend­ly places for women, peo­ple of col­or, and mem­bers of the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty; I’ve lost count, for instance, of my female friends who have aban­doned careers in tech­ni­cal film pro­duc­tion because they felt so exclud­ed on set. Their departure—and the depar­tures of those who have had sim­i­lar experiences—is a dev­as­tat­ing loss to an indus­try that is infu­ri­at­ing­ly slow to change. Fem­i­nism is not only for women; race jus­tice is not only for peo­ple of col­or; equal­i­ty is not only for the oppressed. Mak­ing art and build­ing class­rooms that embrace and cel­e­brate diver­si­ty ben­e­fits us all by invit­ing us to par­tic­i­pate in a world that is larg­er and more com­plex than our­selves and our own experiences.

This isn’t just a ques­tion of encour­ag­ing diver­si­ty in the pro­duc­tion process, either: issues of rep­re­sen­ta­tion spill over into course design. Although I do my best to screen work by artists out­side of the insti­tu­tion­al­ly select­ed cin­e­mat­ic canon, the fact remains that most film­mak­ers who have seen sig­nif­i­cant mate­r­i­al suc­cess (in Hol­ly­wood, but also in inde­pen­dent and avant-garde film) are a dis­tinct­ly homoge­nous bunch. This is some­thing stu­dents can and should be dis­cussing with their peers in class, and those dis­cus­sions intro­duce a host of questions:

• How should we appre­ci­ate the gen­uine­ly valu­able works of these film­mak­ers, know­ing that their suc­cess came at the expense of oth­er artists who were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly silenced by insti­tu­tion­al discrimination?
• What do our aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences tell us about our­selves? Are the aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences of the con­tem­po­rary film indus­try and audi­ence inher­ent­ly prej­u­diced against cer­tain identities?
• How do these con­cerns illu­mi­nate greater issues in our soci­ety at large?
• What is our respon­si­bil­i­ty as artists mak­ing work today?

I don’t often explic­it­ly intro­duce such dis­cus­sion top­ics because I find my stu­dents are more will­ing to engage with them if they arise organ­i­cal­ly, from oth­er conversations—which they fre­quent­ly do. In those sit­u­a­tions, my respon­si­bil­i­ty is to step back, make some room in the sched­ule to accom­mo­date what usu­al­ly becomes a much longer dis­cus­sion, and occa­sion­al­ly ask a guid­ing or clar­i­fy­ing ques­tion. This con­tent can be dif­fi­cult to cov­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly for stu­dents of priv­i­lege who haven’t yet had to con­front the ways in which their advan­tages might come at a cost to oth­ers, but engag­ing with these prob­lems as ear­ly as pos­si­ble in their aca­d­e­m­ic careers has the poten­tial to make them more mind­ful citizens—not only in the con­text of their art prac­tice and edu­ca­tion, but also in their lives more broadly.

Of course, there are more direct ways I try to make my class­es more wel­com­ing to stu­dents who may have felt exclud­ed in the past. My expe­ri­ences teach­ing at a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege and an access uni­ver­si­ty have giv­en me ample oppor­tu­ni­ties to work with a diverse pop­u­la­tion of stu­dents who often need addi­tion­al sup­port to suc­ceed in class: some­thing as sim­ple as allow­ing some flex­i­bil­i­ty in assign­ment due dates and build­ing in-process cri­tiques and con­fer­ences into long-term assign­ment sched­ules can make a world of dif­fer­ence in the aca­d­e­m­ic tra­jec­to­ries of non­tra­di­tion­al stu­dents who work or have fam­i­lies to care for, and for incom­ing first-gen­er­a­tion stu­dents who don’t have a frame of ref­er­ence for exact­ly what is expect­ed of them in college.

As should be the case, this work is nev­er done. In addi­tion to mak­ing my cours­es more acces­si­ble to non­tra­di­tion­al and first-gen­er­a­tion stu­dents, I hope to find ways to fur­ther decol­o­nize my approach to teach­ing, rely less on lec­ture, and encour­age adven­tur­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion between students.

There’s an argu­ment amongst film­mak­ers that a film degree isn’t “worth it:” a stu­dent could use the mon­ey they would oth­er­wise spend on tuition to rent film equip­ment and teach them­selves how to use it. This argu­ment makes some sense but pre­sup­pos­es that a film education’s worth lies in equip­ment access and tech­ni­cal training.

I entered film school in pur­suit of tech­ni­cal skills, but my sev­en years of study and five years of teach­ing have shown me the greater val­ue of expo­sure to a group of peers and col­lab­o­ra­tors, immer­sion in crit­i­cal dis­cus­sions about film and art, and the expec­ta­tion of a con­tin­u­ous cre­ative prac­tice. I couldn’t have sought those things out on my own because I didn’t know I need­ed them.

It’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to teach some­one how to make a movie, but a filmmaker’s under­stand­ing of why they make their art is much more mean­ing­ful. In my class­es, I strive to bal­ance the tech­ni­cal instruc­tion stu­dents expect and the crit­i­cal con­text they may not know they need. Often that con­text is found by peel­ing apart lay­ers of sub­text and meta­text that define a film’s artis­tic and social sig­nif­i­cance. I urge my stu­dents to con­sid­er what films are about: what they’re try­ing to say, and what they might acci­den­tal­ly be say­ing with­out mean­ing to. We can learn a lot by ask­ing these ques­tions of our work, and by apply­ing the same crit­i­cal­i­ty to the films we screen in class, we can under­stand them in entire­ly new ways.

Cin­e­ma is steeped in the same bias­es that shape our soci­ety. I’m uncom­fort­able with the over­whelm­ing­ly white‑, straight‑, male-ness of the cin­e­mat­ic canon and I do my best to screen work by con­stituents of var­i­ous minori­ties, but the fact remains that most suc­cess­ful film­mak­ers (in Hol­ly­wood, but also in inde­pen­dent and avant-garde film) are a dis­tinct­ly homoge­nous bunch. This is some­thing stu­dents can and should con­tend with in class, and it intro­duces a host of ques­tions. How should we appre­ci­ate impor­tant and inno­v­a­tive art­work made at the expense of artists who were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly silenced by insti­tu­tion­al dis­crim­i­na­tion? Are the aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences of the con­tem­po­rary film indus­try and audi­ence inher­ent­ly prej­u­diced against cer­tain identities?

Finding value in structured critique

Cri­tiques are an imper­fect prac­tice, but also an essen­tial step in the cre­ative process. Offer­ing and receiv­ing con­struc­tive cri­tique is per­haps the most impor­tant foun­da­tion­al ele­ment of any cre­ative edu­ca­tion. Most incom­ing stu­dents are uncom­fort­able par­tic­i­pat­ing in open-end­ed cri­tique ses­sions, so I encour­age the use of a framework—a sim­ple pro­ce­dure to facil­i­tate dis­cus­sion that doesn’t rely on a com­plex set of rules.

With few excep­tions, a work of art must stand on its own with­out the artist inter­ven­ing to explain their inten­tions or their process. To this end, the Crit­i­cal Friends Group mod­el is a use­ful start­ing point. In my sim­pli­fied imple­men­ta­tion, stu­dents present their work to the class with­out pro­logue, apol­o­gy, or expla­na­tion, then lis­ten while the class dis­cuss­es the work as they encoun­tered it—things they liked, ques­tions they had, ways the piece could be improved—and only at the end of the cri­tique does the pre­sen­ter direct­ly engage with the group, usu­al­ly to ask and answer clar­i­fy­ing ques­tions. This approach ensures that nobody feels the cri­tique is a ref­er­en­dum on the pre­sent­ing stu­dent, and it encour­ages tac­i­turn (or sleepy) cri­tique groups to grap­ple direct­ly with the work in greater detail.

The possibilities of radical collaboration

Much of my research relates to what I call “rad­i­cal col­lab­o­ra­tion,” an abject ded­i­ca­tion to the process of mak­ing work joint­ly with oth­er artists, and an exu­ber­ant rejec­tion of any claim to indi­vid­ual author­ship of that work. My own for­ays into rad­i­cal col­lab­o­ra­tion allow me to escape my cus­tom­ary prac­tice and con­tribute to work dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from the work I usu­al­ly make. Such oppor­tu­ni­ties can be par­tic­u­lar­ly ben­e­fi­cial in encour­ag­ing more adven­tur­ous work from stu­dents who are still estab­lish­ing their own cre­ative iden­ti­ties but may also feel con­strained by work they’ve made in the past. I’ve done some col­lab­o­ra­tive exer­cis­es in recent cours­es (they tend to make for amus­ing writ­ing games), but I hope to fur­ther expand on these prin­ci­ples and intro­duce more ambi­tious col­lab­o­ra­tive process­es into my courses.

In Notes on One-Per­son Shoot­ing, Joel DeMott dis­cuss­es the pit­falls of mak­ing doc­u­men­tary films with mul­ti-per­son crews and cum­ber­some, high­ly-vis­i­ble equip­ment. The “machine-rid­den” film­mak­er, sur­round­ed by “extra­ne­ous materiel—lights, booms, radio mics, cables, cas­es of back-up gear” is inevitably dis­tract­ed by the tech­ni­cal minu­ti­ae of film­mak­ing, and forgets—or is fun­da­men­tal­ly unable—to forge a gen­uine rela­tion­ship with their sub­ject. She dubs this cyborg-like, over­laden film­mak­er the “Tech­ni­cal Mon­ster.” Such a pres­ence is under­stand­ably intim­i­dat­ing to any doc­u­men­tary sub­ject because the machines, lights, and tech­ni­cal crew invade and alter the space. They make the subject’s home feel less their home, and they present an insur­mount­able bar­ri­er between the mak­er and the subject.

DeMott’s pro­posed solu­tion to this prob­lem is, per­haps iron­i­cal­ly, a tech­ni­cal one: recent advance­ments in film stocks and cam­era tech­nol­o­gy allowed film­mak­ers of the ear­ly ’80s the free­dom to shoot with­out the assis­tance of a sup­port crew, oper­at­ing the sound and cam­era them­selves. This method of pro­duc­tion allowed film­mak­ers to be more agile and, most impor­tant to DeMott, to give pri­ma­cy to their rela­tion­ship with their sub­ject, rather than the rela­tion­ship with their crew. This is sure­ly a noble goal, but I remain skep­ti­cal that a reduc­tion in the scale of the pro­duc­tion and the vis­i­ble com­plex­i­ty of the equip­ment actu­al­ly solves the prob­lem of an alien­at­ing, anx­i­ety-induc­ing Tech­ni­cal Mon­ster, or that this prob­lem should be solved.

16mm cam­eras of the type used by DeMott and Jeff Kreines in pro­duc­tion of their film Sev­en­teen weigh in excess of ten pounds and are paint­ed com­plete­ly black. They perch, gar­goyle-like, pro­trud­ing for­ward from the operator’s shoul­der, who then press­es their eye to the eye­piece and (tra­di­tion­al­ly) squeezes their oth­er eye shut while mak­ing a sort of invol­un­tary gri­mace that sug­gests either deep con­cen­tra­tion or extreme pain. The lens of the cam­era reflects and dis­torts who­ev­er it points at, a mechan­i­cal cyclo­pean eye. The dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion has fur­ther shrunk the doc­u­men­tary filmmaker’s tools, but the form fac­tor remains rough­ly the same: the tech­ni­cal mon­ster may be get­ting small­er and lighter, but it is alive and well.

The fact of the cam­era is hard to ignore, but sub­jects seem to do it almost instinc­tu­al­ly. DeMott observes that “if a movie crew begins fol­low­ing peo­ple who are not actors, they will try to act as if they’re uncon­scious of the fact.” She’s refer­ring to the type of large-scale pro­duc­tions that make use of mul­ti-per­son crews, but the same crit­i­cism could just as eas­i­ly be lev­eled against sin­gle-shoot­er films in which sub­jects self-con­scious­ly ignore the cam­era and speak to the film­mak­er, in their best imi­ta­tion of what a con­ver­sa­tion between the two of them would be like if there wasn’t a giant black box point­ing its unblink­ing eye at them from a dis­tance of “a foot-and-a-half to three feet” (DeMott 6). In a sense, as DeMott argues, this close posi­tion­ing of the cam­era is a ges­ture at hon­esty: “The film­mak­er is there. And play­ing unaware is incon­ceiv­able when you can reach out and slap some­one.” On the oth­er hand, the brazen pres­ence of a cam­era makes self-con­scious­ness an imme­di­ate and ever-present concern.

It isn’t just that the cam­era cuts an impos­ing sil­hou­ette; the aware­ness of a cam­era of any size, posi­tion, or prox­im­i­ty is a pow­er­ful cat­a­lyst. We are cog­nizant of the pow­er cam­eras pos­sess, and in an era of ubiq­ui­tous imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy, we under­stand that the impli­ca­tions of a small cam­era are the same as the impli­ca­tions of a large cam­era: this is being record­ed.

Errol Mor­ris has attempt­ed to side­step this issue by devel­op­ing the “Inter­ro­tron,” a mod­i­fied teleprompter that dis­plays the interviewer’s face in line with the camera’s lens. The result of con­duct­ing inter­views with this par­tic­u­lar Tech­ni­cal Mon­ster is that the sub­ject main­tains direct eye con­tact with the camera/​viewer, but more impor­tant­ly, the edi­fice of a giant device that demands the subject’s undi­vid­ed atten­tion push­es every oth­er con­di­tion of the set­ting to the periph­ery: “For the first time, I could be talk­ing to some­one, and they could be talk­ing to me and at the same time look­ing direct­ly into the lens of the cam­era. Now, there was no look­ing off slight­ly to the side. No more faux first per­son. This was the true first per­son” (Mor­ris). In this way, sub­jects are encour­aged to for­get every­thing except their rela­tion­ship to the inter­view­er. And yet, this comes at the cost of forc­ing an even more aggres­sive con­fronta­tion with the machin­ery of filmmaking. 

Beyond pos­ing sim­ple pro­ce­dur­al ques­tions (“How am I expect­ed to behave?”) the fact of a cam­era rais­es the stakes of the inter­ac­tion because it implies the scruti­ny and judg­ment of an unknow­able audi­ence. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly prob­lem­at­ic for the sub­ject, who is denied vital infor­ma­tion about the expec­ta­tions their audi­ence has for them. As Erv­ing Goff­man explains, the per­for­mances we all craft in every­day life rely on our under­stand­ing of our audience:

We can appre­ci­ate the cru­cial impor­tance of the infor­ma­tion that the indi­vid­ual ini­tial­ly pos­sess­es or acquires con­cern­ing his fel­low par­tic­i­pants, for it is on the basis of the ini­tial infor­ma­tion that the indi­vid­ual starts to define the sit­u­a­tion and starts to build up lines of respon­sive action. The individual’s ini­tial pro­jec­tion com­mits him to what he is propos­ing to be and requires him to drop all pre­tense of being oth­er things.

(Goff­man 11)

If this is true, the prob­lem posed by stand­ing in front of a cam­era is an inter­est­ing one. We per­form in dif­fer­ent ways for dif­fer­ent peo­ple in dif­fer­ent set­tings: we are, in effect, dif­fer­ent peo­ple to our boss, our fam­i­ly, and to strangers in the air­port; but how do we per­form when the audi­ence of our per­for­mance is poten­tial­ly every­one? Sub­jects still seek to dra­ma­tize and ide­al­ize them­selves through the meth­ods Goff­man describes, but they are denied the oppor­tu­ni­ty to “accept minor cues as a sign of some­thing impor­tant” about their per­for­mance, which serve as checks on their behav­ior (Goff­man 51). This can some­times have the effect of increased self-con­scious­ness, as the sub­ject sub­sti­tutes cues from their real audi­ence with the imag­ined reac­tions of an audi­ence of their own con­struc­tion; rather than adapt­ing the per­for­mance based on feed­back from an actu­al audi­ence, they reg­u­late their pre­sen­ta­tion of self based on their lim­it­ed infer­ences about the film’s even­tu­al viewers.

It might be this anx­i­ety that is the cause of some of the more per­for­ma­tive and self-con­scious moments in Sev­en­teen. When Buck insists that he can’t hear any­thing more about Church Mouse’s injury, and yet seems unable to speak about any­thing else, it may be because he rec­og­nizes that his dis­tress is dra­mat­i­cal­ly important—thus appeas­ing the Tech­ni­cal Mon­ster stand­ing three feet away from him—and that it presents him as being a loy­al and car­ing friend, a qual­i­ty that the film’s audi­ence will sure­ly find admirable.

As is the case with much social per­for­mance, these per­for­mances are fre­quent­ly trans­par­ent to an audi­ence: “The arts of pierc­ing an individual’s efforts at cal­cu­lat­ed unin­ten­tion­al­i­ty seem bet­ter devel­oped than our capac­i­ty to manip­u­late our own behav­ior, so that … the wit­ness is like­ly to have the advan­tage over the actor” (Goff­man 8–9). Still, Goff­man cau­tions that “an hon­est, sin­cere, seri­ous per­for­mance is less firm­ly con­nect­ed with the sol­id world than one might at first assume,” and that a skill­ful, con­vinc­ing per­for­mance is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a more accu­rate one, only a more prac­ticed one (71). These unprac­ticed per­for­ma­tive moments are sig­nif­i­cant because they allow us insight into the subject’s process of craft­ing a uni­ver­sal front that they feel com­fort­able pre­sent­ing not with­in the con­fines of a spe­cif­ic set­ting, but to the entire world.

In this way, the Tech­ni­cal Mon­ster pro­vides a com­plete­ly nov­el space for sub­jects to work through their iden­ti­ty on a grand scale. Con­fronting the Tech­ni­cal Mon­ster, com­ing into con­flict with the incon­sis­ten­cies between per­for­mances craft­ed for oth­er sit­u­a­tions, and work­ing inte­grate those per­for­mances into an unprob­lem­at­ic self fit for a glob­al audi­ence is an act of courage—and pos­si­bly hubris. It is not uncom­mon for doc­u­men­tary sub­jects to mis­judge their audi­ence and come off as unin­ten­tion­al­ly unsym­pa­thet­ic or trans­par­ent. These mis­judg­ments can be inten­tion­al­ly exploit­ed by film­mak­ers, such as in Errol Morris’s Gates of Heav­en, in which Phillip Har­berts is depict­ed as delud­ed, self-impor­tant, and pre­oc­cu­pied with what appear to be mean­ing­less acco­lades. This sure­ly would not have been the intent of his per­for­mance, but it could be argued that his inex­pe­ri­ence with per­form­ing in this set­ting has revealed some­thing about his moti­va­tions than he would have pre­ferred to keep hid­den from pub­lic view.

This dynam­ic can also alert audi­ences to their own posi­tion in rela­tion to the work. In Can­ni­bal Tours, the con­de­scend­ing tone of the Ger­man tourists as they dis­cuss the lifestyle of the Iat­mul peo­ple is not mere­ly an indict­ment of their colo­nial arro­gance; it impli­cates the view­er as well, because the tourists, assum­ing West­ern audi­ences share the same atti­tudes and will not judge them harsh­ly, feel com­plete­ly com­fort­able hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion while a cam­era is point­ed at them.

Short of using hid­den cam­eras and film­ing sub­jects with­out their pri­or con­sent, it seems unlike­ly that a solu­tion can be found to the prob­lems of self-con­scious­ness and “uncon­vinc­ing” per­for­mances, and that it is like­ly impos­si­ble to stop a cam­era from alter­ing what it sees. Instead, I would sug­gest that these per­for­mances, though often unprac­ticed, are no less gen­uine than any oth­er social per­for­mance, and may even offer greater insight. If we are defined by the col­lec­tion of diverse and some­times con­tra­dic­to­ry per­for­mances we prac­tice, watch­ing some­one face down the Tech­ni­cal Mon­ster and attempt to rec­on­cile those con­flicts to per­form as a ful­ly-inte­grat­ed self allows us to glimpse the hid­den machin­ery that con­structs these fronts.

Works Cited

• DeMott, Joel. Notes on One-Per­son Shoot­ing. N.d. TS.
• DeMott, Joel. Still frame of Joel DeMott from Demon Lover Diary. 1980. Laser Blast Film Soci­ety – Demon Lover Diary. https://​do416​.to/​e​v​e​n​t​s​/​2​0​1​7​/​4​/​1​2​/​l​a​s​e​r​-​b​l​a​s​t​-​f​i​l​m​-​s​o​c​i​e​t​y​-​d​e​m​o​n​-​l​o​v​e​r​-​d​i​ary Accessed 7 Decem­ber 2019.
• Black, Kris­ten. Por­trait of Ross McEl­wee with cam­era. 2009. Vice. https://​www​.vice​.com/​e​n​_​u​s​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​5​g​5​b​q​k​/​r​o​s​s​-​m​c​e​l​w​e​e​-​1​2​6​-​v​1​6n9. Accessed 15 May 2018.
• Mor­ris, Errol. “The Fog of War: 13 Ques­tions and Answers on the Film­mak­ing of Errol Mor­ris.” FLM Mag­a­zine, Win­ter 2004; avail­able at http://​www​.errol​mor​ris​.com/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​e​y​e​c​o​n​t​a​c​t​/​i​n​t​e​r​r​o​t​r​o​n​.​h​tml. Accessed 17 May 2018.
• Goff­man, Erv­ing. The Pre­sen­ta­tion of Self in Every­day Life. Anchor Books, 1959.
• Sev­en­teen. Direct­ed, Pho­tographed, Record­ed, Edit­ed by Joel DeMott & Jeff Kreines, DeMott/​Kreines Films. 1983.
• Gates of Heav­en. Direct­ed by Errol Mor­ris, MGM Home Enter­tain­ment. 1978.
• Can­ni­bal Tours. Direct­ed by Den­nis O’Rourke, Direct Cin­e­ma Lim­it­ed. 1989.