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Documentary filmmakers set a placemat for you at the kitchen table. They mean to serve life up as it is, and—conceding that just telling the story changes its colors somehow—sometimes they virtually succeed. |
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As the documentary movie camera evolved, documentary evolved. |
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The documentary serves up "facts," meaning thoughts about the world we see that we incubate in the world we imagine. As mirages do, facts retreat as we advance towards them. "But are not all Facts Dreams as soon as we put them behind us?" nineteenth century poet Emily Dickinson wonders, asking what documentarians often ask about documenting reality. |
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With footage created not in studios but on battlefields, the baby's bedroom, landing decks, streets, and cafes, documentary filmmakers seek to achieve what Joseph Conrad writing in 1897, the first year of the movie age, declared to be his purpose as novelist. "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see." |
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