10 · 09 · 08

Documental masters class

Clara Sánchez/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

[imagen]Todd Haynes, Christian Mungiu, Mike Hodges, Barbet Schroeder and Nicolas Philibert headlined the festival’s masters conference in the Morelia Library yesterday. The conference concentrated primarily on documentary films and was moderated by Jeff Andrew.

Philibert, whose films are based on documentary cinema, explained that for him objectivity does not exist “from the moment that one places a camera somewhere and decides to tell a story, a point of view has already been established. I consider myself a documentary filmmaker, but I don’t think that they show the truth the way it is, but they approach it from the perspectives that I’m interested in showing.”

Barbet Schroeder, who directed El abogado del terror in 2007, said, “I don’t have any qualms about having to recreate a reality within a documentary or in using stock footage of a different moment from what is being shown. The important thing is the material gives a sense of my story. For example in a film you can insert images of corpses from another time. I needed to see corpses, but didn’t have images from that very moment, so I used other images. Everyone has to be guided by their own ethics, and with respect to the story decide what to include, or not include, in its construction.”

Todd Haynes who is known for creating biographies of people such as Karen Carpenter or Bob Dylan added: “in particular when I made these biographies, what interests me is rescuing the essence of the person and their life. That’s why it seemed to me to be more Todd’s way of doing things to use Barbies, as in the case of the story of Karen.”

Mike Hodges said “I would like to tell a story about Vietnam, but I realize that there are certain subjects that need to be told from fiction In order to bring me closer to a human side of this moment I needed to do this in fiction.”

Christian Mungiu, winner of last year’s Palm d’Or at Cannes, said that in order to make a film the important thing is to create a specific atmosphere.” Sometimes you think that in order to make a documentary, you need to do a lot of research, but really what you need to do is create a dramatic reality; I remember how they used to say, especially in television that when an event was based on real life it gave it even more drama.  In my film 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which is certainly based on real events, I included many other things that I knew about, that I had been told, and with this I was able to create a more dramatic mood.

The conference lasted for an hour and a half and was extremely well received by the audience, which was mostly composed of filmmakers and film students.