I’ve never been a big fan of the documentary; by and large I have found them to be rather dry and uninteresting. But I have been watching more of them since starting to write for DVDFile, so when the opportunity arose to have a look at Capturing Reality and get some deeper insight into how documentaries are made, I jumped at the chance. One might wonder at the logic of making a documentary about the making of documentaries, but I guess if you’re a filmmaker and the genre just really speaks to you, it’s sort of like proselytizing to the unwashed masses who don’t know just how great a documentary can be.

This is not a big, splashy movie. In fact, nothing really “happens”.  The filmmakers basically took 38 different documentarians, put each of them in front of a black sheet and had them recount various stories about their careers – how they got into filmmaking, what they love about it, what they think about structure and camerawork and research… to be honest, it was a little dry. But in and around these interviews were segments of the documentaries these filmmakers had made; and that was actually really cool for me, to have my horizons broadened a bit about the kinds of projects these folks are making. There were clips that might have been shot by Kubrick, by Hitchcock, by Spielberg – and of course clips that looked like they were hoisted from the evening news. I think the message they were trying to send is that a documentary can take any form, it just depends on the best way to tell the story at hand. 

And that’s where the art comes in.