Perspectives on Documentary Filmmaking Essay

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Subjectivity and Story in Documentary:The Barkley Marathons: Where Dreams Go to DieIn their manifesto “Beyond Story,” Alexandra Juhasz & Alisa Lebow declare, “We need documentary. We need it to help interpret the world.”[footnoteRef:1] The authors condemn cinematic, fictional storytelling as inherently polluted by commercialism. Conventional commercial filmmaking, they say, takes individuals out of the communities which produced them, thus alienating them from the economic, social, historical, and other material forces in the eyes of the audience. In other words, documentaries have a political power to convey truth that conventional cinema does not by rooting narratives in fact rather than story. In stark contrast, Trinh Minh-ha, “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” argues: “There is no such thing as documentary… Truth and meaning: the two are likely to be equated with one another. Yet, what is put forth as truth is often nothing more than a meaning.”[footnoteRef:2] In other words, although documentaries purport to convey absolute truth, in fact, they convey a very specific version of that truth and should not be confused with objective reality. [1: Alexandra Juhasz & Alisa Lebow, “Beyond Story: An Online, Community-Based Manifesto,” World Records, vol. 2, no. 3 (2018): 1.] [2: Trinh Minh-ha, “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” in Theorizing Documentary, (New York: Routledge:1993), 90-91.]The 2018 documentary The Barkley Marathons: Where Dreams Go to Die, directed by Ethan Newberry encompasses elements of what Juhasz and Lebow both celebrate and despise. On one hand, it is very much not a Hollywood documentary.

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It is produced by a very small filmmaker, taking advantage of the new availability of YouTube as a way to disseminate content. It is about a relatively obscure sport (ultra-running), chronicling one of the most difficult events in the sport. The Barkley Marathons is such a…

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…Laz has over the runners is also portrayed as if he is a wise man subjecting them to a great challenge of their endurance, even though he seems to have little regard for their safety in terms of how he designed the course and his arbitrary rules which are very different even from more conventionally run ultra marathons (Barkley’s runners are not allowed to use GPS watches, for example, to enable them to find their way in the strange woods). The viewer is encouraged to embrace and accept this rather than to question the value of the sports or adventure quest. The documentary presents many real facts about running the race—including how the runners navigate the terrain, fuel with food, and strategize—but this reality is still filtered through a very specific perspective, to idealize the race and a sport where people place themselves at risk for….....

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