The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has provided the IDA with a generous grant in support of Doc U - a series of hands-on educational seminars and workshops for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers.

"We are very appreciative for The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' ongoing dedication to documentary filmmakers," explains Michael Lumpkin, IDA's Executive Director. "This funding will allow the IDA to take Doc U on tour once again. There is such a high demand for Doc U, so we are really excited that The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to fund the program again."

Last year, IDA took Doc U on the road to three cities - New York City, Washington D.C. and Boston. The tour, featuring filmmaker Julia Bacha, was also supported by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The next Doc U tour will be implemented this year, in fall or early winter.

Next Doc U set for Monday, June 13 at The Cinefamily in Los Angeles: DOC U: FINE CUT - Exploring the Director/Editor Collaboration.  For ticket info, visit the Doc U event page.

Monday, June 13, 2011 at The Cinefamily

Save the date for June 13 and plan to join producer/director Robert Kenner (Two Days in October; Food, Inc.), as he engages with Kate Amend, ACE (Into the Arms of Strangers: The Long Way Home), Kim Roberts (Food, Inc., Waiting for Superman) and Victor Livingston (Shakespeare Behind Bars, Crumb) in an exploration of the rewards, and challenges, inherent in the director/editor collaboration.

TICKETS NOW ON SALE, CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION.

Doc U is made possible by generous grants and contributions from our donors. Special support provided by:

Call for Documentary Entries:
duPont Awards at Columbia UNIVERSITY

ENTRY DEADLINES: July 1, 2011

Call for Entries: Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards.
Honoring Outstanding Documentary & Long Form Journalism

WHAT MAKES A DUPONT WINNER? The duPont Jury honors outstanding journalism. We look for excellence in reporting and evidence of commitment to important stories.

ELIGIBILITY Programs must have appeared on air, on line or in theaters for the first time between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011.

ENTRY DEADLINES Entries must be submitted by July 1.
Enter at: dupontawards.org

Cinematographer Haskell Wexler on fiction, film, and foreign policy at IDA's DOC U: Straight Shooting - A Conversation with World-Class Documentary DPs held April 25, 2011
LISTEN NOW!

Haskell Wexler is an academy award winning Cinematographer responsible for films like American Graffiti and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But he was also an underrated director of documentaries touching on topics like sleep deprivation, torture, and the infamous Weather Underground. This past month he discussed his work with a panel of cinematographer at Cinefamily's Silent Movie Theater for a discussion on cinematography put on by the International Documentary Association. Here, he speaks with panel moderator Richard Pearce. FROM 89.3 KPCC/Public Radio

The IDA Community is
Cordially Invited to the Preview (FREE) Screening of
Arabia 3D in IMAX

 

The California Science Center and MacGillivray Freeman Films cordially invites you and 3 guests to attend a preview screening of MacGillivray Freeman's Arabia 3D in IMAX - Tuesday, May 24th at 7 p.m. To RSVP, please reply to jhinrichs@macfreefilms.com with your name, IDA affiliation, screening date and number of guests. Please respond no later than May 20. Attendance is limited and will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.

California Science Center IMAX Theater is located at 700 Exposition Park Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90037. 

As an 11-year old in 1958, I watched the Disney film White Wilderness. We see a cute little bear cub lose its footing on a steep, snow-covered mountainside and fall faster and faster until it's tumbling down totally out of control. It eventually stops falling after banging hard into rocks. The audience laughs because we assume it is totally natural and authentic and it's funny in a slapstick kind of way–at least at first. In fact, it is totally staged top to bottom, including the use of a man-made artificial mountain and captive bear cubs.

When I was a teenager growing up in England, Life Magazine carried a prize-winning sequence of photographs showing a leopard hunting a baboon. It was dramatic and thrilling. The final picture showed the leopard crushing the baboon's skull in its jaws. Later it was shown to be all staged with a captive leopard and a captive and terrified baboon.

When I first got into television in my early 30s, I brought home a film I had just completed to show my wife, Gail. She especially liked a close-up scene of a grizzly bear splashing through a stream and asked me how we were able to record the sound of water dripping off the grizzly's paws. I had to admit that my talented sound guy had filled a basin full of water and recorded the thrashings he made with his hands and elbows. He then matched the video of the bear walking in the stream with the sounds he had recorded. Gail was shocked, offended and outraged–and called me "a big fake" and a "big phony-baloney." I had made a documentary after all, which led her to expect authenticity and truth.

What ethical issues do these three stories illustrate? First, audience deception through staging and manipulation. Second, cruelty to animals. And third, a more subtle ethical issue but a vital one nonetheless: Do wildlife films encourage conservation?

Animal harassment and cruelty have been pervasive in wildlife filming for decades. This harassment can take the form of everything from simply getting too close to wild animals and disturbing their habitat to deliberate violence. In the old days, if a filmmaker wanted to capture a hunting scene of a bobcat chasing a rabbit, it was standard practice to get the shot by the use of invisible filament around the rabbit's neck or leg to artificially slow it down. Luckily, such overt abuse is now uncommon. However, many on-camera hosts like Jeff Corwin, Bear Grylls or the late Steve Irwin still grab and harass animals in order to create entertainment.

Unfortunately, however, the physical abuse of animals is only one of several major problems in the wildlife film industry. Far too many producers have resorted to creating "nature porn"–productions focusing solely on the blood, guts and sex of the animal kingdom. Graphic footage of shark attacks and feeding frenzies might make for thrilling entertainment, but it is irresponsible. Programs like Untamed and Uncut and Man vs. Wild depict animals as menacing at a time when these animals face constant threat. By misleading audiences and inspiring fear and terror, these TV programs are effectively discouraging conservation.

When filmmakers depict wild animals as murderous and evil, they make it all the more difficult to convince the public of the need for protecting these animals. Sharks, for example, face dire threats from the pollution of their habitat and the disgusting practice of shark finning for shark fin soup. If viewers think of sharks only as killers, they are much less likely to act to protect and conserve them.

Concerns over ethics have been with us throughout the history of wildlife filmmaking. But it was a tall, eccentric Englishman, Jeffery Boswall, who began a systematic study of the issue starting in the 1970s. Boswall, born in 1931, spent nearly three decades as a producer for the BBC Natural History Unit and is one of the industry's most probing and illuminating thinkers.

In a 1988 paper on wildlife filmmaking ethics, "The Moral Pivots of Wildlife Filmmaking," Boswall asserted that anything that made an animal behave unnaturally–for example, baiting it or giving it food it does not normally eat--constitutes audience deception. He points out that introducing one animal to another it does not normally interact with–for example, a wolverine and a python--is deceptive. So is having the film crew behave in a way that disturbs an animal's behavior–for example, frightening a bird off its eggs by moving too fast near its nest.

Other deceptions include the temptations to exaggerate, overdramatize and sentimentalize. Boswall describes the common sin of anthropomorphism–or attributing human characteristics to animals–as "a kind of lying" because it teaches audiences to misunderstand the real nature of animals.

His definition of audience deception is sweeping. In his mind, it includes pretending that a recording of a bird's song was made at the same time as the pictures for that scene. Or recording the flapping of an umbrella and pretending it's the noise made by a bird's wings. Boswall claims that even music can introduce a lie. If you accompany footage of animal behavior with music that suggests that the animal is behaving in a human way (for example, by making it look as though the animal is dancing or feeling romantic), then "you are deceiving the people who are experiencing the film."

Though these all qualify as deceptions in Boswall's mind, they are not all necessarily bad. Boswall believes it's up to individual filmmakers to decide where to draw the line–but warns that audiences might be surprised to know where filmmakers have been drawing it recently. Even strongly conservation-minded filmmakers sometimes bait sea creatures with chum (an oily mix of fish bait and blood), which can lead to unnatural feeding frenzies, or use bright spotlights to film lions hunting at night, which give lions an unfair advantage. And if you see a bear feeding on a deer carcass in a film, it is almost certainly a tame bear searching for hidden jellybeans in the entrails of the deer's stomach. The candy gives the impression that the proud carnivore is feasting on a fresh kill.

Let me now relate another story–this one about Randy Wimberg, a highly capable and experienced cinematographer. A few years ago, he was with his dive team at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific filming wildlife in an area known as Shark Pass, which has a large congregation of reef sharks.

Crew members built a cage to protect him from danger, but they removed some of the panels to give the camera an unobstructed view. The plan was for Wimberg to be in the cage while someone in the nearby support boat threw chum into the water to attract the sharks.

He climbed into the cage and was eased out on a tether about 15 feet from the boat. When a deckhand threw in the chum, reef sharks quickly showed up in large numbers. Some of the chum drifted into the cage. Wimberg watched helplessly as frenzied sharks began crashing into the cage, tearing at chunks of food caught in the wire mesh. Soon, more than 30 sharks were competing for food that was either stuck to the cage or drifting through it.

Suddenly, a shark shot right through the gap and exited out the other side of the cage, grazing Wimberg as it passed. He tried to remain calm, the camera still rolling. He was frantically batting away sharks with his camera, but there were too many of them and too much chum.

Another shark shot through the gap. To Wimberg's horror, it didn't pass smoothly out the other side. Instead the shark ended up in the bottom of the cage and started thrashing wildly. Wimberg tried to curl up in the corner of the cage to escape the frightened animal. He knew that the shark felt very threatened and would use the only defense it had–its teeth and jaws.

Wimberg desperately attempted to push the animal up toward the exit with his camera, but that didn't work. He decided his only chance was to get himself out. As he edged toward the opening in the cage, his teammates in the boat saw what was happening and began raising the cage to the surface. And before the shark could get in a position to bite, Wimberg scrambled out of the cage and into the boat. The shark was released unhurt.

What went wrong? Well, there's one thing I haven't told you: The producer had positioned another cameraman in a protective chain-mail suit about 20 feet below the shark cage to capture all the action. In fact, Wimberg's brush with disaster became a high point in the film. My interpretation of this incident is that it was all about getting the money shot. The producer knew that the more dramatic the action, the more successful the film would be. This is why the producer kept telling the deckhand to keep throwing in more chum. Wimberg's life was endangered for the sake of getting exciting footage to help push up the show's ratings.

Two other points: First, the film's audiences were misled. They didn't know about the chum, so many viewers went away thinking that such frenzied feeding behavior happens naturally. And two, the cause of conservation was ill served. At a time when shark populations are plummeting worldwide, sharks were being unfairly portrayed as ferocious attackers.

You could argue that what went wrong in the incident with Wimberg is fairly obvious, but making ethically correct choices in wildlife filmmaking isn't always obvious. Consider the following six scenarios:

First, suppose you are making a film about chimps. You know that violence (or any extreme behavior) fascinates people and that chimps sometimes hunt for prey, such as other primates. You know that viewers will be shocked, even horrified, by the bloodthirsty brutality of the chimps, and the ratings will be big. Yet you also know that meat makes up only about two percent of the chimpanzees' diet. Mostly they feed on fruits, leaves and other plant material. By serving up a series of hunts, your film shows a far more violent picture of chimpanzee nature than is actually the case. It gives a wrong impression. Is the film unethical?

In my view, this may not be unethical, but it bothers me. I'd say don't make the film only about the hunts. The film has to be more balanced, even though the ratings might suffer.

Second, imagine you are a producer and you want a shot of a spider eating a fly. It's obvious you have to stage it because you don't have the money to wait around for weeks for it to happen naturally. But how far will you go with staging? For example, you also want a shot of a boa constrictor eating a monkey. Do you stage that as well? In other words, capture a boa constrictor, capture a monkey, put them in an enclosure and film the resulting predation? It's routine predatory behavior and happens all the time, and your film will promote conservation. Do the ends justify the means? Is it ethical to stage it?

I'd say, definitely don't do this. It's cruel and unacceptable, but you'll pay a price in lower ratings.

Third, imagine you're in Africa with Jeff Corwin and your goal is for him to find a rare lizard, not seen for 25 years. This is to be the climax of the film. You search for days with no luck, but finally the rare lizard is found–not by Corwin, but by a local African tracker who barely speaks English. You put the animal back where it was found, and let Corwin "discover" it and act surprised for the camera, thus capturing for your film an emotional highpoint. Is that bit of acting by Corwin unethical?

I'd say we shouldn't lie to audiences. Corwin should interview the tracker about his find even though the film may now have a reduced emotional impact and lower ratings.

Fourth, suppose you are in the field filming komodo dragons. You've heard that a komodo dragon was seen swimming out to sea to feed on an unfortunate goat that had fallen off a local boat and was drowning. It's the first time a komodo dragon has been seen swimming and hunting at sea and it would be a real coup to reproduce the behavior for the camera. Getting this sequence for your film would bring you a great deal of prestige, help your career and help pay to send your daughter to college. Are you willing to put live bait (a goat) in the water to help you get the shot? If you do, would you tell the audience, or keep it a secret?

I would say that putting a live goat in the water to seduce a komodo dragon to hunt is cruel and unacceptable.

Fifth, continuing with the last scenario, imagine that although the cameraman captured the sequence using a pole-cam (a camera on the end of a pole, so the cameraman doesn't need to be in the water) to add jeopardy to the "making-of" piece at the end of the film, you as the editor have been asked to cut together shots of the komodo dragon swimming with shots of the cameraman filming underwater–to add a sense of danger to the sequence. The shots of the underwater cameraman were actually filmed in another location with no komodo dragons in the water, so the sequence you are being asked to cut is untruthful. Is this type of deceit acceptable?

I'd say don't do this, because it's lying; if you do it, be open about it.

Sixth and finally, suppose you're filming tigers hunting an antelope, which is extremely difficult to see. You come across a young antelope that is lying quietly in the grass having been abandoned by its mother. It's the final afternoon of the shoot, your budget is exhausted, the weather is closing in, you have totally failed so far to obtain any money shots, and you are very worried about your job. You also know that there is a tiger only 500 meters away. Is it ethical for you to herd the young antelope towards the tiger knowing that without its mother, it will die anyway?

I'd say don't do that because you can't be 100 percent sure that the antelope has been abandoned by its mother.

These are tough questions, especially if you are a filmmaker with a family to support and a retirement to save for. What can we learn from the stories I've described and from those six dilemmas? As I've already indicated, there are three ethical issues with wildlife films:

First, Are audiences deceived and misled, and if so, does it matter? When does legitimate filmmaking artifice become unacceptable deception? I'm thinking here of fake sounds, the use of CGI to manipulate images, and captive animals that appear free-roaming. Recently, I saw amazing footage of a cougar hunting down a bear cub. It looked genuine and not fake in any way, but in fact, it had all been carefully scripted and shot with trained animals from game farms.

Second, Are wild animals harassed and disturbed during filming, and does it matter? Recently, I learned of a filmmaker who darted a hyena and then slit its skin open to implant a GPS transmitter underneath so he could track it and thus film it more easily.

And third, is conservation advanced by these films? Do they matter? It would be facile and misleading to claim that The Cove hasn't yet stopped the killing of dolphins in Taiji, Japan; Food Inc. has not yet led viewers to change their eating habits; and The End of the Line has not yet reduced over-fishing in our oceans–facile and misleading because where you stand on that issue depends on where you sit. If you're a dolphin in Taiji about to be butchered, then you might well think the film has failed to advance conservation. But if you're a viewer moved by the film to demonstrate outside the barbed wire surrounding the cove where the slaughter takes place, and the press is covering you and more attention is being brought to the issue, then the film may seem like a success in terms of conservation.

When I first got into wildlife filmmaking, I naively thought that the number of people watching a program told me something about the conservation impact. Of course, it doesn't. Ratings (or the box office results) and conservation impact are very different. I also naively thought that everybody viewing the program would be influenced in some way, but most people watching are already card-carrying environmentalists whose views are not changed by the program.

What made me question the conservation achievements of environmental and wildlife films is hearing producers claim smugly that their films have done great things for conservation, but when asked for evidence, point to a few admiring e-mails that they received–which may have been written by people already dedicated to conservation. Or they point to impressive ratings or box office numbers, as if the number of viewers is synonymous with conservation.

Raising awareness is good, but hard results are what really count. If dolphins in Taiji are still being slaughtered at the same rate, it's fair to raise the question: What good did The Cove do? Yes, there was more awareness after it won an Oscar, but has the film actually produced conservation results?

One approach is to pose that question to the viewers who made a film a box office success. After all, if one viewer changes eating habits after watching Food, Inc., then that viewer has a legitimate right to claim that the film advanced conservation. But it gets tricky. Many viewers who are moved by a film may rate it highly in conservation effectiveness terms, but have to admit, when pressed, that actually nothing changed in their lives because of it. They may have found it to be a richly rewarding but temporary distraction, and after a few hours basically forgot about it. If they didn't take any action, then nothing has changed. They were simply entertained.

I fear that environmental and wildlife films don't advance conservation as much as they could or should. If films are really to make a difference, then they must be one component of an overall campaign involving many different media platforms and social action. I'm delighted that entities like Participant Media, Working Films, The Good Pitch and ITVS encourage documentary filmmakers to make activist outreach and partnerships with NGOs an essential component of their distribution process.

Without wildlife films, people would have little knowledge of wildlife, but whether such programs actually promote conservation is still open to debate. Too many films fail to mention conservation, and some even imply an anti-conservation message by demonizing animals and encouraging us to fear and hate them.

Filmmakers have a responsibility to promote conservation because it is the morally right thing for them to do, especially since they exploit the resource to earn a living. Besides, filmmakers have a vested interest in conservation: It's impossible to make wildlife films when animals have gone extinct.

In sum, film has such unique potential for impacting public opinion that it is irresponsible to rely on sensationalized, inaccurate, destructive programming. The ethical questions related to wildlife filmmaking are not simple, but we must at least openly confront the issue of ethics instead of constantly pushing for nothing but ratings, no matter the cost. Wildlife filmmakers have a responsibility to depict the natural world accurately and in a way that will inspire people to preserve it.

Chris Palmer is a professor, speaker, author, and an environmental and wildlife film producer who, over the past 30 years, has led the production of more than 300 hours of original programming for primetime television and the giant screen film industry. In 2004, he joined American University's full-time faculty as Distinguished Film Producer in Residence at the School of Communication. There he founded (and currently directs) the Center for Environmental Filmmaking. His book, Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom, was published in 2010 by Sierra Club Books and has been widely praised.

In accordance with the received wisdom of our times, every human artifact or utterance--including every nature film or so-called "factual" film--is, at its core, a personal statement: a polemic that is intended, whether consciously or not, to persuade the recipient to take what its author regards as the right course of action, one that is mandated by the current cultural climate. Because both nature and factual filmmakers are generally quick to take issue with this thesis, they probably deserve to be labeled as primitive artists--creatives who, by virtue of their indifference to the forces that shape their work, unwittingly reveal more about the ethos of their age than is disclosed by the work of more "sophisticated" and self-aware artists.

It is this ingenuous quality--the assumption that they are not artists at all, but objective reporters, documenting the world as it is--that can be said to unite the nature filmmakers with their brothers and sisters in the factual (or "nonfiction") camp. And despite the occasional attempts by both sides to do so, neither group can claim the right to wave the banner of objectivity, proclaiming itself to be ideologically "clean." Instead, both schools may be considered to share a broadly humanist agenda, advancing through their works the model-of-the-moment for proper human behavior. That is, even the driest of nature films (picture an account of the mating behavior of pronghorns) or factual films (envision a video on safe practices in the workplace) can be viewed as an agitprop piece--a film that, if deconstructed, speaks volumes about the cultural milieu that dictated its content and form.

So, if they share so much in common, what then divides the two documentary camps? Why do the nature filmmakers and the factual filmmakers studiously avoid one another--staging their own conferences, festivals and symposia and handing out their own awards?

The obvious distinction between the tribes is their choice of subject matter. Products, no doubt, of different patterns of nature and nurture, the filmmakers from the two schools elect to use different sets of props to put forth their philosophical positions. While nature filmmakers employ wild creatures as stand-ins for humans (the selfless lioness who fiercely defends her cubs, the brave baboon who risks his life to save his troop), factual filmmakers choose actual humans as role models (the blind musician who masters the cello, the handicapped gymnast who earns a gold medal).

But that is not to say that each camp is free of its own internal fault lines. While factual filmmakers fall into specialized camps that more-or-less get along (I refer to the camps of the science filmmakers, the social-issue filmmakers, the arts-and-culture filmmakers and the environmental-issue filmmakers), the nature school encompasses at least three distinctive cliques. And between these cliques there exists, at best, an uneasy peace.

Since the late 1920s (cf. the camera safaris of Osa and Martin Johnson and Frank Buck's Bring 'Em Back Alive movies), nature films have used every trick they could find to remind audiences of the wonders and horrors of the natural world--a world that is, on one hand, a living Eden to which we might aspire to return and, on the other, a jungle raw in tooth and claw, devoid of all civilized values. While over the years, the techniques of production have radically changed, nature filmmakers continue to spin the same basic fables. The blue-chip filmmakers--romantics endowed with the luxury of time and money--paint pictures of an earthly Paradise ("With the return of the rains, life resumes on the great Serengeti. And, with the rains, a new generation [cut to a stotting gazelle] discovers a world of limitless promise").

At the same time--and sometimes in the subsequent program on the same cable channel--another branch of the clan paints a darker vision, pitting fresh-faced adventurers against the world's deadliest varmints ("A little closer and Huey will have him [cut to a terrified snake, flicking its tongue]! Or else he will have Huey [cut to commercial]) !"

In defense of the modern-day beastmasters, they are heirs to an ancient tradition. Recall, for a moment, the bear-baiters of Elizabethan England, the bull-runners of Pamplona, the serpent-handlers of Appalachia and the bronco-busters of the American West. All of these rites of human dominance play to our fears of the beasts that menace our lives--not just the beasts who lurk in the wild but those who bully us in the schoolyard, lord over us in the office or terrorize us in the cave. Like a good dose of Dexter, a half-hour of old-fashioned one-on-one with a killer croc can go a long way to reassuring us of our place in the grand scheme of nature and in the competitive world of the workplace.

Though the tooth-and-claw tribe is a tough, libertarian breed, seemingly situated at the farthest remove from the faction of the factual filmmakers, at least one of their number managed to jump the divide. Stan Brock, who may be remembered as the muscular vaquero who manhandled giant anacondas for Marlin Perkins' Wild Kingdom, today heads the humanitarian organization Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit that airlifts medics into forgotten corners of the globe. In his new role, Stan continues to conquer fear, but the embedded message in his videos has changed. While in the past a viewer might have said, "If Stan can wrestle that snake, I can manage my kid," now a viewer, watching Stan in action, might say, "If Stan can parachute into Papua New Guinea with a stethoscope in his pack, I can at least volunteer at the blood bank."

There is a third group of nature filmmakers, a group that, compared to the romantics and the libertarians, shares many of the sentiments that Stan now espouses. This group--the activists--is driven by an urgent need to do what they can to stop the tide of destruction that threatens the wild. And they vent this need in their films ("And so, perhaps for the last time, the boobies gather on the shore. Their future, like the future of all mankind [cut to a booby gazing out to sea], rests in our hands"). Though by their nature the activists are more at home with indignation than are the romantics, they share with the romantics the vision of an unspoiled Eden, one to which, in their fondest dreams, we all might yet return.

Because it casts grizzlies as role models rather than villains, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man fits comfortably into the nature-activist camp. And because it casts humans as role models, Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth fits comfortably into the factual school. The line between these films is the line between those films whose primary goal is to persuade us to model our lives on the lives of wild creatures and those films whose primary aim is to persuade us to pursue a specific course of social action.

In reality, of course, crossovers exist--schizophrenic productions that aim to have it both ways. To this group belong those nature programs that devote the bulk of their time to painting a portrait of the private world of some compelling wild creature, only to devote their closing minutes to the desperate efforts of a field biologist to save the creature from extinction. An audience, exposed to such a film, would be justified in wondering which of the film's heroes to root for. Am I a jaguar, running the gauntlet of perils in a tropical forest, or am I a researcher, conscientiously collecting samples of jaguar scat? At best such a film may provoke a useful response; but at worst it risks causing unwanted cognitive dissonance. 

While all three of these groups--romantics, activists and libertarians--may be spotted together in Bristol, Jackson Hole or Missoula, hoisting beers in the bar and trading tall tales from the field, there is little love lost between them. To the true romantics, the libertarians are amoral opportunists who play to the public's worst fears and urges. And to the hardcore activists, the romantics and the libertarians are equally dammed. For, in their view, both groups squander the opportunity that has been placed in their hands to arouse public outrage and strike a strong blow for the wild. And yet, no matter how annoying it may be for these tribes to spend time together, they share a common toolkit: the set of technical resources, without which they could not practice their art.

Though in the pursuit of their goals, the majority of factual filmmakers need little more than light, compact and eminently affordable cameras, nature filmmakers of almost any stripe are dependent upon an equipment list that includes long lenses, high-speed cams, time-lapse cams, crittercams, robotcams, cablecams, remote-controlled cams, gyro mounts, aerial rigs, jib arms, cranes, blinds and dollies--an arsenal that dwarfs, in weight and cost, the toolkit of typical factual filmmakers. To stay up to date on these tools of the trade, nature filmmakers rely on their own technology confabs. And a general disinterest in this specialized gear provides ample reason for factual filmmakers to stay away from such sessions.

Not only that, but few factual filmmakers are likely to relate to the typical subjects under discussion at Bristol, Jackson Hole or Missoula. Why, for example, would a committed documentarian, dedicated to exposing social injustice, need to know how to program a camera to peer into the private lives of penguins, or how to train a goose to follow an ultra-light in flight? And why would a nature filmmaker, who specializes in close-ups of bugs, need to sit through a panel discussion about securing funding from cultural foundations or spend time learning the skills required to score a slot at Sundance?

Furthermore, while few individuals (Michael Moore and Ken Burns may be exceptions) have earned a tidy income from the production of factual films, the nature genre has spawned more than a few genuine millionaires. And that is because nature programs (which are usually not culture-specific) generally enjoy a much wider reach than factual documentaries. While the global audience is likely to be strictly limited for a program about the plight of the homeless in Detroit, an eager audience around the world is likely to tune in to watch the antics of a family of meerkats in Africa).

Unfortunately, both sides of the Great Documentary Divide tend to view the other with suspicion. For their part, factual filmmakers, while envying nature filmmakers for the license fees they collect, may be inclined to dismiss them as escapists--dreamers who have turned their backs on social commitment and the need for social change. On the other hand, it is the risk of such condemnation that may make nature filmmakers wary of factual filmmakers.

Though it can be argued that the ultimate focus of both is the human condition, for the reasons suggested above--including subject preferences, technology requirements and separate markets--nature filmmakers and factual filmmakers seem destined to stay in their separate camps. But at the very least, through an open dialogue between us, we may hope to gain a better understanding of one another and an appreciation for the many ways we may choose to tell the same important story.

Barry Clark has worked as a writer and producer of nature films of the activist and romantic stripes, and in addition has produced social, political and cultural-issue documentaries. He is currently engaged in the production of a film that explores the challenges and life choices of the common people of Saudi Arabia.

Jerome Foundation Accepting New York City Film and Video Program Applications

The Saint Paul-based Jerome Foundation is now accepting applications for its New York City Film and Video Program on an ongoing basis. In addition, the program no longer limits applicants' budgets to $200,000 or less. Budgets of any size are allowed and will be given the same consideration. Applicants with small budgets are welcome and encouraged to apply.

The film and video grant program is open to individual film and video artists who reside within the five boroughs of New York City and who work in the genres of experimental, narrative, animation, and documentary production.

The program awards production grants to emerging artists who make creative use of their respective media and whose work shows promise of excellence. Only applicants who have total creative control of their projects qualify for support. Applicants are usually identified as the director but may also serve as producer, writer, editor, etc. Artists may apply as individuals or as two-person teams with equal responsibility.

The foundation is most interested in funding projects in their early stages. Requests for productions that are more than half completed are eligible but represent a lower priority.

The program does not support installation, new media, or interactive work, which are subsidized through other foundation programs. It also does not support commercial, industrial, informational, or educational work. Full-time students are not eligible to apply.

Grants ordinarily range between $10,000 and $30,000 per project.

Applications may be submitted at any time during the year. Applicants should allow up to seven months for review.

Visit the Jerome Foundation Web site for complete program information, the application form, and an FAQ.  Click here for the APPLICATION GUIDELINES.