JUST TALKING 17/3/2009
The directors Eva Weber (The Solitary Life of Cranes), Robert Russo (About Napoli) and editor Alyse Spiegel (Crude) discussed, among other subjects, the contemporary role of the documentary, competition from television and the future of documentaries during the economic crisis. The discussion took place on Tuesday, March 17 during the Just Talking sidebar event of the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival - Images of the 21st Century
Eva Weber opened the discussion, speaking about her film The Solitary Life of Cranes. This describes the invisible life of the city of London, its hidden shapes and secrets, as lived by crane drivers daily. She said: “The view of the city from on high is fascinating. The crane drivers see many of its secrets, which we could never imagine from down here”.
Then Robert Russo spoke. To shoot his documentary About Napoli he traveled from San Francisco to Naples in order to discover his roots through contact with contemporary Neapolitans. “Naples is somewhere in my family tree, but aside from my family connections I wanted to see a different Mediterranean culture which is very different from the way of life in the USA”, Mr. Russo noted.
Alyse Spiegel worked through literally 600 hours of material in order to edit Crude, which is about one of the longest trials in modern history. “This is a trial that has been going on for 15 years, against Chevron. The people of Ecuador have sued the company, claiming that it has dumped 80 million tons of toxic waste in the Amazon, resulting in an alarming increase of cancer cases”, Alyse Spiegel explained.
Speaking about the contemporary role of the documentary and the borders between information and art, Alyse Spiegel said that the criteria for each film are different and she continued: “The ideal for me is for the director to achieve a balance between art and the information he wants to pass on to his public each time. I don’t believe that you need to bombard your audience only with information, but to offer it meaningful, beautiful images”.
Commenting on how commercial documentaries can be during an economic crisis, Robert Russo stressed that documentary festivals should remain the home of experimentation, avoiding the narrow commercial confines of television as much as possible. “It’s hard to predict what will happen over the next few years. Documentaries and filmmakers are always in the middle of an economic crisis”, R. Russo noted. “Perhaps the financial crisis is a new challenge to artists to find new forms of expression. Maybe, without money, artists can manage to express themselves in different ways, more simply, getting better results. Commercial considerations for television documentaries are very restrictive and annoying”, Alyse Spiegel added.
Finally, speaking about the definition of success, Eva Weber stressed that for her, success does not depend on how well films do commercially, but on something more meaningful: “ One of the crane drivers, after the film’s screening, said that his family finally understood for the first time what exactly he does at work, after all these years. For me, this is success”
