Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary

About The Film

Info

Directed By	Pepita Ferrari
Actors	Paul Cowan, Werner Herzog, Kevin Macdonald, Errol Morris
Genre	Documentary
Run Time	97 minutes + over 4 hours of extras
Release Date	October 20, 2009
Studio	First Run Features

The world’s best documentarians reflect upon the unique power of their genre in this comprehensive and eye-opening production.

Featuring interviews with 38 directors and 163 film clips from classics such as GREY GARDENS and THE THIN BLUE LINE as well as recent work like DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE and TOUCHING THE VOID, CAPTURING REALITY explores the complex creative process that goes into making non-fiction films. Deftly charting the documentarian’s journey, it poses the question: can film capture reality?

Bonus second disc: Over 4 hours of additional content, with topics including: Becoming a Filmmaker; What is Documentary; Ideas and Inspirations; Getting the Shots; and more!

EI Editor Review

Editor reviews

Rating:

2.5

A great idea.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful

User Review

User Reviews

Reviewed by Jon Ted Wynne

Boy, was I looking forward to this film! “38 of the greatest names in documentary talking about every aspect of their creative process,” wrote one piece of promotional material. And that is true, CAPTURING REALITY: The Art of Documentary is precisely that. Who would have thought the end result would be so dry? I certainly didn’t.

Each filmmaker is given the opportunity to discuss virtually every aspect of documentary filmmaking from why they became filmmakers to the importance of sound. As a filmmaker myself, I was looking forward to drinking from this ocean of knowledge and gleaning insights and perspectives that would impact my own work and help me to appreciate the stellar accomplishments of these artists. Instead, I found myself coming to the slow realization that many artists (including most of those on camera here) are better at doing than explaining how to do.

Some of the interviews were simply not that interesting. Werner Herzog is never lost for words or insightful comments, but his voice has to be one of the most annoying ever recorded. His slow, measured monotone is a metaphor for how I perceived this film: ponderous, even boring in places.

The idea is brilliant. To bring so many of the world’s most accomplished documentarians together to talk about their process has considerable merit. And interspersing their interviews with clips from their films is certainly the right choice. It makes one want to see the films referred to—possibly the ultimate strength of this film. But apart from a few amusing anecdotes (such as a technical disaster involving a Nagra sound recorder which threatened to derail the career of one director before she even made her first film), most of the content is, in my view, pretty dull.

I expect CAPTURING REALITY will be enjoyed by film geeks and fellow documentarians more than the general public. Even so, being both a film geek and a filmmaker, that is no guarantee of universal acceptance, even among the fraternity. I expect opinions about the film will be sharply divided. Rest assured, although I was not impressed with it, I wanted very much to like—to love—CAPTURING REALITY. It just goes to show how hard it is to articulate the creative process and make it a compelling subject in its own right.

Perhaps if the filmmakers’ passion for making films was more evident in their interviews, the effect would have been more compelling. I was forced to conclude that a good interviewer/documentarian does not necessarily a good interviewee make.

The one saving grace about CAPTURING REALITY, in my view, is that a number of the subjects go on record to say how much they dislike Michael Moore’s films! For that, I give it an extra star!

Rating:

2.5

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