"It’s one thing to make a film; it’s another thing for a film to matter.”

- Nina Seavey, Director of the Documentary Center at George Washington University

Thanks to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Doc U made its first stop on the road in our nation’s capitol last Monday, December 5 at West End Cinema. Answering the question Can Your Doc Really Change the World?, this thorough panel included representatives from every aspect of inspirational storytelling. If anyone left unsure of some great examples of change-making campaigns from the world of non-fiction storytelling, we’re convinced they weren’t taking good notes.

After opening statements from IDA’s Executive Director Michael Lumpkin, Director of the Documentary Center at George Washington University Nina Seavey took the stage to introduce the panelists for the night’s event.

These panelists certainly covered the breadth of advocacy work, starting with Robert West’s catalytic organization Working Films. "Filmmakers make extraordinary sacrifices to tell their stories," West began, and the best way to ensure a rewarding return is to pair those storytellers with activists, advocates, educators and policymakers on the ground. This is precisely what Working Films does for filmmakers: relies on the power of the story to engage and move an audience while looking outside of the filmmaking world for a little help. His example was inspired by the film Including Samuel: with a little help from the filmmaker, Working Films helped organize a youth summit which eventually spawned I Am Norm, a campaign to celebrate differences among individuals.

This campaign eventually went viral, extending the life of the film while creating awareness for an important issue outside the world of one family’s story. "Collaboration between any filmmaker and a set of NGOs is what makes this happen," West explained. "We realized this idea of having one film carry the world is hugely impractical and not likely to happen." But a little collaboration can go a long way.

The panel then focused on the work of Ronit Avni, a filmmakers who also runs Just Vision, a nonprofit organization dedicated to telling the stories that you don’t hear on the nightly news of Palestinian and Israeli citizens engaged in nonviolence and conflict resolution work. Her goal is to tell these and other really powerful stories through documentary films. In her daily work, she sees so many documentary filmmakers who are documenting human rights violations but had not strategy, no clear vision for how to relay that to the public. That’s where her projects Budrus and Encounter Point prove to be shining examples.

Next, Adam Segal spoke about how to get your voice heard. His publicity agency The 2050 Group, based in DC, focuses specifically on issue-related work. Primarily behind the scenes, Segal has been working with filmmakers and films over the past 6 years to help raise the profile and help change the narrative in the national, state-wide and local media.

"Any informed filmmaker can become a leading national expert on the issues that the film focuses on," Segal emphasized. "It’s not that a filmmaker can overnight learn the skills of a doctor. Through the process of development and research, they can take on those corporate mouthpieces and take them on as co-equals in the national media. That’s what makes me the most proud to be a publicist. We take our relationships, experiences, knowledge of policy and apply that to the publicity work that we do."

One such film, The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier for the Civil Rights Movement, was featured in DocuWeeks 2011 and is currently on the 2012 Oscar Shortlist in the Best Short category.

Next, Angelica Das answered the question of how to get your great content out to the public as she spoke of her experience at the Center for Social Media. And no, we’re not talking about Facebook here—we’re talking about socially engaged media that can be used to investigate strategies and create campaigns. Believing that socially-engaged storytelling shout be strategic from the start, the Center for Social Media looks at audience feedback and the incorporation of emerging technologies. Probably her most important takeaway was to constantly reevaluate any campaign, much like software engineers constantly alter their design to better cater to users.

In the end, we’re really left to ponder whether we want to be advocates or filmmakers. It may be asking a lot, but the general consensus from the panel was that both are certainly possible.

Thanks to those of you who made it out to Doc U on the Road: Can Your Doc Really Change the World? Our next stop is in Brooklyn, NY on Monday, December 12, were a whole new group of influencers will tackle this very same topic.

See you at POV!

Doc U is the International Documentary Association's series of educational seminars and workshops for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers. Taught by artists and industry experts, participants receive vital training and insight on various topics including: fundraising, distribution, licensing, marketing, and business tactics.

Doc U on the Road: Washington, DC

In Association with:

Those of us who live in Los Angeles have probably started seeing “For Your Consideration” posters and advertisements everywhere, reminding us that Oscars is just around the corner. Indeed, the season for buzzing and arguing about Shortlists of potential contenders is finally upon us. And with so many great docs this year, it’s truly difficult to say who might land one of those available Best Documentary Short and Best Documentary Feature statues. So while you’re all busy speculating about who might win and regretting missing that 2-week run of that anticipated doc last Spring, the IDA has the perfect way to assuage your concerns: DocuDay 2012!

That’s right - the IDA’s all-day, back-to-back screenings of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary films is back at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, CA on Saturday, February 25. And even though the official nominees in each category won’t be announced until Tuesday, January 24, all-access passes to this event are currently on sale. Not only will you get to see some of the most honored and celebrated films of the year, you’ll also get the chance to meet the filmmakers and mingle with fellow documentary lovers and members of the IDA community.

Join IDA as a member today to save 25% on your all-access pass to this exclusive look at the best documentary films of the year.

For those of you in New York, be sure to save the date for our East Coast edition, scheduled to take place at The Paley Center for Media on Saturday, February 25 and Sunday, February 26.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Download our sponsorship package to learn more!

 After a torrential downpour that left the Cinefamily scrambling to clean up water damage, the original Doc U: Directing for the Documentary: The Interview that was scheduled to take place in November was ultimately canceled. But our committed panelists (and then some!) are back for a second chance on Monday, December 19. Same time, same location.

Special support provided by:

Editor's Note: Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion’s The Redemption of General Butt Naked has been nominated in the Best Feature category at this year's IDA Documentary Awards, to be held at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles on Friday, December 2. Below is an interview we conducted with the filmmakers in November in recognition of the film’s nomination.

Synopsis: The Redemption of General Butt Naked follows Joshua Milton Blahyi--aka General Butt Naked--a brutal African warlord who has renounced his violent past and reinvented himself as a Christian evangelist. Today, Blahyi travels the nation of Liberia as a preacher, seeking out those he once victimized in search of an uncertain forgiveness. Filmmakers Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion track his often troubling path up-close, finding both the genuine and disconcerting in Blahyi’s efforts, and raising questions about the limits of faith and forgiveness in the absence of justice.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Eric Strauss & Daniele Anastasion: Before becoming filmmakers, we each pursued interests in anthropology and international development. Later, we each came to see documentary storytelling as a way to creatively engage with similar themes. We both met and worked together years later at National Geographic, and quickly realized that we were drawn to the same kinds of stories.

IDA: What inspired you to make Redemption?

ES & DA: We met and developed our working relationship while producing a documentary for National Geographic Television about life inside a maximum security prison. The piece chronicled the lives of two gang members who were attempting to leave their criminal pasts behind.

During this time, we both recognized a mutual fascination with stories that deal with the perpetrators of crimes---what leads people to make flawed choices and how they live with their mistakes. We wanted to make a film that challenged audiences to examine their own ideas about the nature of evil, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation. We were drawn to Joshua Blahyi’s story because his claim of transformation tests those questions in a big way.

IDA: What were some of the obstacles and challenges in making this film? How did you overcome them?

ES & DA: Creatively speaking, the greatest obstacle we faced was Joshua Blahyi himself.

It’s extremely rare for a perpetrator like Blahyi to be so candid about his past and to let filmmakers follow him for so many years. Getting to know Blahyi was an intense and emotionally difficult experience. The fact that he can at times be likeable, yet also responsible for the deaths of countless people, is something that’s hard to reconcile.

Ultimately, we chose to tell the story in a way that reflected our own struggles and questions. Over the years, a few people encouraged us to give a clear answer as to whether Blahyi’s transformation was genuine. But that wouldn’t have been true to our experience. Our opinions of Blahyi were constantly shifting, and sometimes we didn’t even agree with each other’s assessment. There was so much complexity in what we witnessed that it became difficult to distill it down to a simple message. We wanted audiences to confront this complexity as well.

We made this film to raise questions, but we don’t pretend to know how to answer them.

IDA: What kind of cameras did you use for this film?

ES & DA: The Redemption of General Butt Naked was filmed over a five-year period. During that time, the technology available to us changed significantly. Our crew made five separate trips to shoot in Liberia and Ghana, using three different cameras. We began production shooting on a Panasonic HVX200, or P2, then moved to a Sony XDCAM EX1, and finally completed principle photography in 2010 using a Panasonic HDX900.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the process from pre- to post-production?

ES & DA: In many ways our vision--and the themes and ideas we hoped to question--have remained the same since we first discovered Blahyi’s story.

When we started shooting, we hoped to be finished after one year of following his story. However, we ran into funding challenges that made it difficult for us to return to Liberia as quickly as we had hoped.

One year stretched into multiple trips over five years. During that time, the narrative of the film was shaped by some very unexpected events: Blahyi’s decision to appear before Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), his exile to Ghana after the TRC’s final report, the disillusionment of his friends and family, and his return to Liberia in an attempt to reconcile with his past and present failures. Had we been able to raise enough funds to complete principle photography right from the start, we would not have captured these events over the long term.

IDA: As you've screened Redemption, how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been the most surprising or expected about their reactions?

ES & DA: Our screenings and audience reactions have been intense. We have always anticipated--and hoped for--a spirited debate about Blahyi, and the range of visceral reactions has not disappointed us. After one screening in Toronto, a local university student told us that he “kind of hated” us for making the film, for asking him to occupy such an uncomfortable emotional space. Then he engaged us for the next half-hour with extremely thought-provoking questions.

For many months, we labored with our editor Jeremy Siefer to set a tone in the film that neither affirmed nor denied Blahyi’s transformation, or his attempts at reconciliation. We wanted to present all of the contradictions and complexity that we experienced and allow viewers to arrive at their own conclusions.

What’s perhaps most surprising is when the occasional audience member doesn’t recognize the ambiguity, and instead thinks we’ve made a definitive case for or against Blahyi.

IDA: What documentary films or documentary filmmakers have served as inspirations for you?

ES & DA: Intimate, documentary character portraits like Bennett Miller’s The Cruise, Errol Morris’ Mr. Death, and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man were all powerful sources of inspiration, as was Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, which helped to inform our thinking on the aftermath of war and how those involved with violence cope on a psychological level.

With support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Working Films announces Reel Aging: Real Change, an initiative that will tie compelling documentary films and transmedia projects that explore aging to ongoing policy work and grassroots campaigns supporting older populations globally.

This four-day residency will include eight to ten media teams who, after three days of meetings to sharpen their strategies, will present their projects to NGOs, funders, government agencies, activists, and policy makers. These regional, national, and global leaders in the field of aging will listen to proposals by the resident media teams, hoping in the end to find a film or media project that fits well with their on-the-ground efforts.

Hosted in Washington, DC in collaboration with the Center for Social Media at American University, this assembling should kick off a collaborative campaign between the media makers and the global NGOs and policy makers.

Sound like something for you? Working Films is seeking applications from media makers whose projects explore the aging experience. Your project may be in at any stage of production or distribution.

Applications are due by January 6, 2012.

Not something for you, but maybe know a friend or colleague who might be interested? Please send a link to this piece to friends and colleagues and share on Facebook and Twitter.

These Amazing Shadows is the story of the National Film Registry. The documentary is scheduled to air on PBS December 29 as part of the Independent Lens series. PBS is also distributing the documentary in DVD and Blu-ray formats.

The 88-minute film was conceived, written, produced and directed by Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton for their company, Gravitas Docufilms. Christine O'Malley, whose work with Patrick Creadon includes Wordplay and I.O.U.S.A., also produced the film.

The National Film Registry is part of the Library of Congress. It was founded in 1989 under the auspices of the National Film Preservation Act passed by Congress the previous year. The mission delegated to the Registry is to restore and archive 25 motion pictures per year that have fit the criteria of "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant." Films are chosen based on recommendations made by fiction and documentary filmmakers, critics and fans.  

Films must be at least 10 years old to be eligible. Content varies from a 1893 black-and-white film of a blacksmith at work to Thriller, the long-form Michael Jackson music video by John Landis; classics such as The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz; the amateur Zapruder film documenting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and a treasure trove of documentaries, including Hoop Dreams, Harlan County USA and Salesman.

These Amazing Shadows integrates images culled from films in the Registry with observations made by 65 individuals, including Barbara Kopple, Steve James, Rob Reiner, Gale Anne Hurd, Christopher Nolan, Leonard Maltin, Debbie Reynolds and Dr. James Billington, who heads the Library of Congress.

The story behind the production of These Amazing Shadows is like the script for a feel-good Hollywood movie, where a seemingly impossible dream comes true. Paul Mariano was a criminal defense attorney, who served in a Northern California public defenders office for 27 years. Kurt Norton was a private investigator, who specialized in death penalty cases, frequently in collaboration with Mariano.

After Mariano retired from law, he and Norton formed Gravitas Docufilms and initially produced "mitigation videos" for defendants in death penalty cases. They later collaborated on Also Ran, a 2006 behind-the-scenes documentary about the special election that resulted in recalling California Governor Gray Davis from office in the wake of the state's energy crisis.

Documentary spoke with Mariano about the process of making These Amazing Shadows.

What inspired you and Kurt to undertake this ambitious endeavor?

Paul Mariano: In 2007, we read an article about the National Film Registry and the films selected that year. That sparked our interest.  We were both stunned by the statistics about films which were part of our culture that have been lost forever. Approximately half of the films made in the United States prior to 1950 no longer exist. As many as 80 to 90 percent of all American silent films have been lost forever. Those losses seemed unimaginable to both of us.  

How did you get this project into motion?

We contacted Steve Leggett, who is the coordinator for the National Film Preservation Board at the Library of Congress. I explained that we wanted to come to Washington to discuss an idea we had for producing a documentary about the role the Registry plays in our culture. He was extremely positive from day one, and was incredibly helpful from the beginning through the completion of our production.     

How did you begin production after that initial conversation?

We began by researching the origins and background of the National Film Registry and the National Film Preservation Board. We interviewed Steve and some archivists at the Packard campus in Washington, DC. That armed us with important insights about what they did, the passion they felt for their mission and why preserving yesterday's and today's films for tomorrow's audiences is important.           

You were drawing on an amazing trove of potential content. What was the process for choosing the clips that you used?

The American film heritage is an incredibly rich and diverse landscape. We wanted to accurately represent the tremendous diversity of films archived by the Registry. They include avant-garde and classic Hollywood movies, documentaries, home movies and industrial films. We chose clips from films that reflect that diversity, while telling stories about our people and culture, for better or worse.

How did you and Kurt decide whom to interview?   

That process began with Steve Leggett introducing us to John Ptak, Bob Rosen, Betsy McLane, Del Reisman and other members of the National Film Preservation Board. Some of those interviews led to introductions to actors, directors and other filmmakers, including Rob Reiner, John Singleton and Amy Heckerling. The interview process continued with Kurt and I persistently asking people who we felt could shed light on this important issue to share their thoughts and feelings.

Did you assemble people who are featured in your documentary in groups, or are these all individual interviews?

Kurt and I and our cameraman traveled to wherever they were. We did interviews in people's homes and workplaces, where they felt comfortable and relaxed while sharing their stories, thoughts and feelings. 

Did they choose the films and subjects on which they commented, or did you and Kurt ask them to address particular topics?

We had a topic we wanted to explore with most people we interviewed, but we allowed them to lead us into areas they felt passionate about.

Tell us about your collaboration with the cinematographer who recorded images during interviews.

Frazer Bradshaw was the cinematographer. He has an impressive list of credits. We had utmost respect for Frazer, and trusted his skill and judgment. That included him choosing the right angles and composition for augmenting words being spoken by different individuals. We told Frazer that we wanted These Amazing Shadows to have a filmic look. We asked him to shoot interviews from an off-axis angle, augmented with dramatic lighting that looks and feels right for the individual and subject. He did a magnificent job.

In what format was These Amazing Shadows produced?

The interviews were recorded digitally in high definition. 

How many hours of content did you record?

We shot somewhere between 100 and 120 hours of interviews.

Where has These Amazing Shadows been seen so far, and what are your plans for the future?

These Amazing Shadows premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was subsequently featured at festivals in Boulder, Cleveland, Ashland, Tiburon, Hawaii, River Run, Newport Beach, Seattle, Stony Brook and Indianapolis. There have also been screenings at theaters around the country. PBS is distributing the DVD.

What are you doing about archiving These Amazing Shadows?

The documentary and outtakes are archived on hard drives, which are stored at several different locations.

What lessons have you learned from this experience?

I have learned that filmmaking is truly the art form of the 20th and 21st centuries. Film tells us so much about our culture and history. Losing it would be like losing part of ourselves. Preserving films saves both our memories and cultural heritage. The incredibly dedicated people who have a passion for saving yesterday's and today's films for future generations deserve our unending gratitude.

Bob Fisher has written more than 2,500 articles about narrative and documentary filmmakers over the past 50 years. He has also written extensively about the importance of archiving yesterday and today's films for future generations.

The chopping sound of helicopter blades hovers over a black screen, feeling less like an entrance than a continuous perpetual drone, a cloud that does not lift. The soldiers of Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment are launching the largest helicopter offensive since Vietnam: 4,000 Marines countering the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. A group of soldiers kneels low in loose sand, their weapons in hand; they resemble a football squad posing for a yearbook photo. A young soldier smokes a cigarette, the background blurred out of focus in shallow depth-of-field: It is a quiet, contemplative moment, except for the ever-present, ominous whir of the helicopter blades. Men rush to load up the SeaKnight helicopters, running through a grey haze of stirred desert dust. Over a montage of soldiers crammed side by side, facing each other in the helicopter's carry and a harnessed-in tail-gunner covering the field below, the battalion commander intones, "Your conscience should be clear and your honor should be clean." The men land and set out as the helicopters fly away. The assault begins amid the rubble of a marketplace. You are so close you can see the rounds feeding into the assault rifles and hear the shouts of men over the chaos of ricochet gunfire all around them.

Photojournalist Danfung Dennis, embedded with the men of Echo Company, is capturing footage for his first film; he does not know what this film is going to be or what it's going to be about, but he has been here before. Not exactly this location, but in this situation. As a war photographer who has covered conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, famine in Ethiopia and political disruption in Kenya, he is accustomed to going places and seeing things most of us would prefer to hold at a distance. Having made the transition from still photographer to filmmaker, Dennis brought with him the same motivation that initially convinced him to document humankind's most brutal realities.

The result of Dennis' first foray into filmmaking, Hell and Back Again, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Jury Award and the World Cinema Cinematography Award. And Dennis himself has been awarded the International Documentary Association's 2011 Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award. Hell and Back Again is indeed a remarkable achievement; personal and deeply psychological, it merges and balances cinematic aesthetics with journalistic intent.

 "It was an evolution going from photojournalist to filmmaker," says Dennis. "I think I am still going through that process, and I don't think they are mutually exclusive.

"At first I thought I could shoot still and video at the same time," he explains, "but I quickly realized that it's two completely different thought processes. When you're trying to capture decisive moments [in photography], you have to stay very fluid, thinking of capturing the crescendo of a scene, whereas when you are creating a film, you have to look for those extended moments and try to bring the viewer into it in a much more full way. I am working with a lot of these ideas of immersion to convey emotion in the most visceral sense."

What unfolds through Hell and Back Again is a juxtaposition of the combat experience in Afghanistan with life in small-town North Carolina, as viewed through the eyes of Sergeant Nathan Harris, a returning soldier severely wounded just days before the end of his deployment. The camera reveals a man who is strong and confident, an exceptional leader in the field--and also lost, depressed and anxious at home with his wife as he recovers. The images throughout are graphic and disturbing, sometimes beautiful, but above all, intimate.

This intimacy derives from a level of access that every documentary filmmaker strives for and that Dennis achieved through his unique position and extensive experience, which provided him with crucial insight. "You have to request specific units, specific locations," he explains. "Otherwise, the generic embed is not very interesting. You'll just be given a tour of very positive stories for the military. But, if you dig deeper and you know where and when things are happening, you can be with the right unit at the right time."

When the soldiers returned, Dennis went to the homecoming. Sgt. Harris, however, did not get off the bus. Two weeks previous, he had been transported out of Afghanistan and was recovering in a US Naval hospital. Dennis made contact and was invited to Harris' hometown, where he was introduced to Harris' wife, Ashley, and their friends. Dennis recalls, "Harris would say, ‘This guy was over there with me,' so I was accepted into this rural Baptist community, and I essentially lived with Nathan and Ashley."

Back home, Harris was struggling with his own physical and mental recovery. "It crystallized," Dennis maintains. "The experience of war is not simply what happens on the battlefield, but what happens when you get back."

The situation a war photographer puts himself in is much akin to that of the soldier, both in combat and upon the return home. "No one really understood what I had just seen," Dennis says. "You come back from this world of life and death, the blood and dust, to one where everything seems almost mundane and trivial." Among the landscapes of drive-throughs and outlet malls, only Harris and Dennis could see and taste the blood and dust.

"He knew that I understood what he had seen," Dennis says, "and I think that's why he let me into that side of him. Most people won't reveal it. So by going through the same experience that he went through, he allowed me to document those dark, more invisible struggles when he got home."

In portraying this experience, Dennis would abide by journalistic principles; he would avoid determining a conclusion, providing exclusively substantiating documentation. "As a photojournalist, I learned to bear witness and let events unfold in front of the lens truthfully and honestly," he explains. "I brought the same methods and ethics to combine them with the narrative of documentary film."

Perhaps if it were explicitly critical, Dennis would not only be stepping over the journalistic boundary, but also losing some of the power of his narrative. Instead, he appears to subtly question. "It's looking at what kind of world we live in back in the US: Big-box Walmarts," he observes. "Is that what we are fighting for? I don't think I give solid conclusions, but I think I try to raise as many questions as I can."

This objectivity establishes a trust between the filmmaker and subject. Dennis did not intervene in the story; he merely placed himself there as a witness. "I never actually sat down with Nathan and asked, ‘How were you feeling at this point? Did you have this memory come back to you then or there?' None of that. He simply had to trust me to tell a story."

Justin Ridgeway is a Toronto-based writer and art consultant.

Like almost all of the subjects he has explored in his sublime, handcrafted works over six decades of filmmaking, Les Blank is a master of an art that one must go off the beaten path to find. Even while he has been honored with retrospectives at lofty locales like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he still hawks his wares--DVDs, t-shirts, posters and pins--that he totes in a well-traveled suitcase.

Burden of Dreams, which he made with longtime collaborator Maureen Gosling, is perhaps the greatest film about filmmaking--or even the creative process--ever made. And yet, it's more than that. It immerses us as much in the Peruvian Amazon and the culture of its native inhabitants as it does in the careening imagination of Les' longtime friend, Werner Herzog. And it seems clear that the film played a role in helping the indigenous people of that region gain legal rights to their land.

A Poem Is a Naked Person is perhaps the greatest film about rock 'n' roll and American music that you will likely never see. This film about Leon Russell can only be viewed in a non-commercial screening in Blank's presence--the aftermath of a lawsuit between Russell and the producer. "He never did tell me why he didn't want it shown," says Blank. "I try not to mention the name of the film or the subject [in publicity] because he's sued me a couple of times to stop me."

These two opuses merely hint at the vivid cultural universe explored in Blank's body of work. Other musicians profiled in his films include Lightnin' Hopkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Lydia Mendoza, Tommy Jarrell, Flaco Jimenez, Boozoo Chavis, Mance Lipscomb, Francisco Aquabella and Clifton Chenier. And then there are films about garlic, gap-toothed women, a cowboy artist and, of course, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Legendary folklorist Alan Lomax, a friend and an influence of Blank's, called his short The Sun Gonna Shine "One of the three most important films on the South." Blank seems to have followed his own American muse and captured magic along the way (he was even a camera operator on Easy Rider).

Blank is a soft-spoken, deferential, visionary wayfarer. Throughout his body of work is a consistent, gold-standard high-wire act; he is fully present with the subjects and yet completely out of the way in the final film. The result is a rare breed of intoxicatingly intimate anthropology that brightens not just a corner of the world rarely seen by outsiders, but in most cases a defining and largely underappreciated element of American culture.

Blank is currently at work on two long-term labors of love, like all his films--one about the late, legendary British documentary filmmaker Ricky Leacock and the other about Alabama outsider artist Butch Anthony.

Blank once said of the people at the heart of his films, "I become them."  Documentary recently spoke to the 2011 IDA Career Achievement Award honoree about that process, his career and whether or not Herzog really ate his shoe.

Did you originally think you were going to work in narrative features?

Les Blank: That was my plan from the very beginning. When I saw Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal, that sealed the deal. I decided then and there that I wanted to be around the making of films that had this impact, that were, spiritually and emotionally, deeply involving the very fiber of your being. Even if I couldn't make that film myself, I wanted to be in the presence of people who were making it, and help them with their vision.

And where did the shift to documentary take place?

While at USC, I took a course in documentary film and was very inspired by this whole medium. All I knew about documentary was what I had seen as a kid. They had short subjects and films called Bring 'Em Back Alive, where they would go into the jungle and catch these large pythons and things. This to me was thrilling, but I didn't think of being a filmmaker. It just seemed [like] too much magic, and I didn't know where to begin. There weren't film schools I knew of at the time, so it never was a consideration. But then an ethnographic filmmaker came through town and showed a film to our class about the people of the Kalahari Desert called The Hunters. The filmmaker, John Marshall, followed this group of men who were out hunting for their village, and if they failed to come back with an animal then everybody would starve to death. I thought, "To be able to make a film like this would be a great way to live one's life."

When you started out, did you feel that doing the industrials or working on the military films was contrary to your politics?

My main goal was just to learn filmmaking and eventually do something creative with filmmaking. So I learned the technique of shooting--and because the people I worked for were very cheap, I ended up doing all the work, like the sound recording, the camera work, writing the narration...Once I learned my craft, it was no longer very tolerable. In fact, I was about to lose my mind from the inanity of it all. And it starts coming out in some of the films I did, like Chicken Real, about the chicken industry.

The films I like are bottomless; you can't really prove the exact depth of their feeling. And there's vitality to the subject, like the Lightnin' Hopkins film. All I can do is grab at essences of what I think is there, but I never feel like I've gotten to the bottom of it.

With The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins, the format was kind of organic-things flow out of something, there's really no reasonable arrangement of sequences and substance, it's just all merged from one to the next. It's more like music. It took a while to arrive at this style.

From Les Blank's 1969 film The Blues According to Lightin'Hopkins. Courtesy of Flower Films

But do you feel like in making that film, you discovered some of your own style, since that seems to be reflected in your other films as well?

Yeah. I think having seen how this can work, I have used this approach in other films. Not always successfully, but it worked especially well with the Lightnin' film.

So Werner did genuinely eat his shoe?

He ate every piece of that shoe, except for the sole. He figured you eat chicken and you throw the bones away, so therefore he could throw the sole away. I took a piece just to see what it was all about, and I couldn't get it down. My vomit reflex kicked in.

I asked him to come to my office the next day just to see if he was still alive and try to wrap up what it was all about, and that's how you got the speech. He was looking real ashen, but he was still standing and he talked about how the modern world needs new imagery, that stale images were going to cause us to die off like the dinosaurs. 

It was the experience of making Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe that gave me the courage to go with him down to Peru [to film Burden of Dreams]. I realized he had star quality, and that if I could get back alive and sane, I would have an interesting film, no matter what happened. But the trick was getting back alive...and sane.

I was thinking of Americans whose body of work offers something comparable to what you've done, and Alan Lomax was the first person to come to mind. Do you feel like he or his work was a big influence?

That's true. I greatly respect his work, but I felt he had kind of a narrow approach to making art, or to expressing the scene in the way I was doing. For instance, he told me that a good ethnographic cameraman would never use a zoom, never shoot short takes. They would get a wide-angle lens, put the camera on the tripod, turn it on the subject and step away. The scene should be interpreted by people who knew what they were doing. The subjective viewpoint of the cameraman would just muddy up the waters. I told him he was nuts. And we would argue over things like that.

That's a crucial kind of debate you don't hear so much in documentary any more. Visual anthropology has died out a lot since then. Now, unfortunately, it seems like you're more likely to hear a debate over whether to use animation, rather than how to be accurately or ethically ethnographic.

Yes.

There's always seemed to be an American folklorist aspect to what you're doing. Is that conscious, or not so strategic?

I tend to film things I find fascinating or interesting. I guess those are things that folklorists also look at. I really don't have guiding principles. I just drift to what I find interesting and also what I think audiences will like to see. I try to find a fresh way of looking at the world around me and making some sense of it--hopefully something positive, something lasting that the world would want to see 100 years from now.

Taylor Segrest is writer and co-producer of Darwin (2011). He is currently at work on his next film, a narrative feature about the most tragically forgotten rebellion in American history. He is also a contributing editor for Documentary.