Open Response 4 - Ethics and Documentary

This week, in our reading from Nichols, we read about the way that ethics crosses paths with documentary narrative. The point was made that documentary filmmakers have a responsibility towards ethical behavior, since they are dealing with real lives, and real behavior. However as was discussed in the reading, this responsibility has also been used in potentially negative ways for positive goals, such as in The Land Without Bread.

This reading discussed several sociological studies that are famous for their lack of ethics. These included the Milgram experiment, and the Stanford University Prison experiment. While reading about this, I also thought of the Tea Room Trades experiment, where an experimenter tricked people into trusting him with elicit behaviors, and then followed up a year later with questions about these elicit behaviors. All of these experiments are reasons that sociological and other research has to go through Institutional Review Boards, which decide if this experiment is going to be ethical or not. While it is definitely a responsibility of the researcher to design ethical experiments, there is also a floodgate that makes sure that the Milgram experiment will not happen again. However, in documentary film, there is not a litmus test or floodgate that makes sure that the documentary was ethical. Sure, donors and investors can withhold funding from the start, but who can say what the eventual message or tone of a film will be or portray. The filmmaker is the only one who has true responsibility over his subjects. In addition to this, I think that it is sometimes easy to forget the problems that a group has had with ethical representation. For example, not many people remember the problem with Disney and the lemmings, and Disney is one of the most revered movie making companies in the world.

In the critiquing of a large institution, I think that the observational documentary mode is the most ethical way to go, at least in At Berkeley. This documentary completely allows the viewer to make their own decisions about the things that they are viewing, without the commentary of a person telling us how we should feel. Although the filmmaker has control over the sequence of the things that we see, the fact that we only hear words from the people who are directly involved with Berkeley makes a bug difference in representation. I think that the style of At Berkeley is the most ethical way to handle institutions or groups of people that we may not fully understand without passing judgement or being insensitive to their opinions.