Crafting An Essay Documentary Part 1
I’m running an informative 3-part series on how to structure an elegant essay-style documentary. The essay (or topic-based) documentary is the second most popular art form dominating today’s independent documentary landscape.
Although it shares in the festival accolades and box office commercial success of the reigning character-driven documentary, structurally the essay doc is a different beast entirely, usually organized around a central idea rather than a protagonist on a quest.
It looks different too, often employing talking heads, text, statistics, man-on-the-street interviews, educational graphics and slide shows to make its points. Popular examples include An Inconvenient Truth, Religulous, Bowling for Columbine, and The Corporation. Other essay films, such as Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World are more introspective tomes or poetic profiles than quantitative or data-heavy docs.
All of these skillfully crafted essays belie the chief difficulty that sinks many topic-based films: how do you keep your audience engaged rather than putting them to sleep? We are, after all, dealing with an essay (yawn).
And yet most first-time filmmakers instinctually gravitate toward topic-based films because they are excited about exploring an idea. Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin said that “at the core of all essay is an interest so intense that it precludes … filming it in a straight line…The essay is rumination in Nietzche’s sense of the word, the meandering of an intelligence.”
I’m want to offer editors and directors three specific strategies you can use in the edit room which I believe are in line with the contemporary trend in essay films–to reign in excessive “meandering” and keep your viewers glued to the topic until the credits roll. Today I present the first strategy, crafting what I call a “hybrid documentary”. Look for the next two strategies in coming weeks.
One way to make an idea-based film as gripping as a character-driven doc is to meld the two forms. But let me first distinguish what I am calling the “hybrid documentary” from the term “hybrid narrative film”.
The latter refers to a film that is part narrative (fictional) and part documentary (real life), which is not what I’m talking about here.
A so-called “hybrid documentary” weaves together two structural models. As structural experts like myself, Fernanda Rossi, Sheila Bernard Curran and (in the narrative world) Robert McKee have outlined, the character-driven aspect will follow a protagonist (or several) on a quest to achieve or gain something in the face of great difficulty.
The essay or idea-based aspect will present arguments that support a central idea.
Structuring the hybrid documentary is not an easy feat, so I recommend that editors create an initial assembly cut of each model before combining the two.
A great example of a commercially successful hybrid doc is Supersize Me, ranked the 9th highest grossing theatrical documentary release with more than $9 million in revenues.
As you’ll recall, director Morgan Spurlock attempts to stay in good health while eating only McDonalds’s food for an entire month. In the course of his various difficulties (vomiting, high blood pressure, impotency), Spurlock presents stunning evidence of the dangers of America’s fast food diet in the form of experts, lawsuits, anecdotes, research and other data.
The beauty of the hybrid approach is that you can construct an elegant, complex documentary (see Part 3) that demands both left-brained analytical engagement and right-brained emotional immersion. Done right, your viewer is held rapt.
Other successful examples of hybrid docs include Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, No Impact Man, and King Corn. Note that the last two are personal documentaries in which, like Supersize Me, the director/protagonist has the advantage of contriving a narrative arc (living for one year without leaving a carbon footprint, growing an acre of corn) upon which he can hang his intellectual arguments. Plot points pave openings for cerebral proof.
Next week I’ll be sharing stylistic strategies to make your essay documentary coming to life visually.
To learn more about how to structure an essay-style (or topic-driven) film in great detail, check out my online seminar, “The Ultimate Guide To Structuring Your Documentary” at:
https://newdocediting.com/products
For a limited time, buy “The Ultimate Guide to Structuring Your Documentary”, and you’ll also get my other two most popular courses for free.
