I went to AFI library and found an interview with documentary filmmaker Donn Alan Pennebaker, whose name I remembered from the film ‘Don’t Look Back’ about Bob Dylan- I haven’t seen the film, though I am a huge Dylan fan!

In this interview Pennebaker questions the documentary form using his own work as example of films only ‘pretending to be documentaries’. As a filmmaker he has the hindsight to understand that films, even documentaries, serve as entertainment: ‘They are half documentary, half soap opera. The part that interests me is the soap opera’. Pennebaker seems to approach making documentaries, though he doesn’t explicitly state this, in quite a free and unique way. Instead of posing questions to the audience or choosing to inform them with his films he instead looks to show ‘the unpredictability of life that made them interesting’, he believed the best way to communicate his thoughts as a film maker was through ‘Poetry or whatever it is’. He also praises a ‘documentary’ film called Warrendale because ‘He (the filmmaker) had the wit to see it was a drama and to go for the drama in order to get that’.

The idea of documenting in a stylised way, in order to entertain excites Pennebaker and again links back to the idea of there being more truth in fiction than commercially produced, money driven, ‘information’ based documentary. He criticises documentarians who make ‘films about things people don’t know about’ and instead wishes to show an audience rather than educate, or spoon feed information to an audience. I think this is a good state of mind to be in when entering documentary production, to have an open mind ready in order to capture a slice of reality or develop a stylised piece of drama based on truths spawning from reality. Pennebaker sees the world as a canvas and suggests there are no rules in regards to documentary making, there is no right or wrong as long as the approach is unique and entertaining. ‘If they’re looking at the wrong things, where are the right things?’