Talkin' About Process

If you don’t already follow Zito Madu on social media, he is an absolute must-follow! I was first introduced to his work via his  soccer articles for SB Nation, but he is a lot more than just a soccer writer. His memoir, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza was released in 2024 and  is at the top of  my nonfiction reading list. I try to alternate between fiction and nonfiction, and currently I’m reading Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words.

Zito recently put out a thread on Bluesky breaking down AI art and his fundamental issues with it. Below is my favorite post in the thread, you should read the whole thing here.

I don’t think we fully understand yet how AI will impact the documentary niche (and the greater film industry) but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is the sentence: “I’m looking at art as the creative evidence of human creativity and depth”. That struck me as maybe one of the best definitions of documentary film that I’ve ever heard.

In the age of “Artificial Intelligence”; creativity IS the process, much in the way that “the medium is the message”. Art being made by AI is pointless because the point of art is the intangible human emotion and culture that informs the artist, and without life experiences one cannot make art. The very process of making the art (piece) is necessarily what gives it soul.

This process is what we non fiction story tellers fell in love with in the first place; that urge to become a documentarian is rooted in our obsession with the process. Getting to know our participants: figuring out who they are, what they stand for, and how it all adds up. What separates journalism from documentary is creative freedom but what unites the two fields is their shared common end goals. This isn’t trying to imply journalism isn’t creative at all but trying to highlight the lack of restrictions in documentary-making. We compare documentary to journalism a lot, many of the first documentaries are journalistic in nature and created by journalists. But I feel like there is a closer comparison with literature; ultimately, something is a documentary if the creator calls it one. The same can be said for poetry, but not journalism. The only other genre or artform that has the variety living within it that documentary does is poetry. Formless, rooted in personal truths, based on real life, but at the same time its own separate identity–an identity that may or may not be true.

Process with Documentary isn’t simply planning the shoots and story structure; but the spice, the je ne sais quoi, the special juice. It’s the learning something from the participants in your film both on and off-camera (and possibly changing the course of process you’re currently on). It’s the spending time somewhere new, whether in your city or across the globe. It’s the reflection we have to do as creators to make the final edits on a piece. For me, it’s really important that I’m able to meet my participants first without a camera. I actually want the participant to get to know me without the camera. When I’m making a documentary I am not making a promo or commercial for anyone, I’m trying to capture who they are when no one else is around. How in the world could I roll up with the camera from the get-go and expect them to just be normal and real?

“Evidence of human creativity and depth”

There is nothing more creative than taking moments in our real world and being able to re-arrange them into something new while staying true to the original moment, in my humble opinion. It’s easy to start with nothing and make something new, it’s not as easy to start with something real (not inherently creative; a moment in time) and make it something new. This is a really special aspect of Documentary.

When filming Super Village I struggled a lot early on with worrying about the footage and how it would be used. In vérité, one doesn't necessarily know how the footage is  going to be used. Let’s repeat that: we are filming a moment because we know it’s valuable, important, or meaningful in some way but we might not know how it will be used emotionally in the final film. It’s twofold, because a scene you filmed late in the process could make a killer establishing shot or cold open. But it can also occupy a different emotional space; an off hand comment made while doing a mundane task can be a warning of what’s to come in the film or it could be a moment of reflection. But in the moment it is just a random thought that came to mind while doing a different task. How many times does that happen to you in a day?

Figuring out our process is critical to our growth as artists, and my process is ultimately what someone is paying for when they hire me. Process is what separates documentary from journalism. We have to hold onto that, this distinction between documentary and journalism is  important and also a good thing. We need to continue to think about it, discuss it, and question one’s process as a documentarian. This doesn’t happen if machines are doing the work, after all what process is there to critique when one simply tells a computer to “recut a film”? The filmmaker needs to discuss why this scene comes first, or why that topic gets brought up in the end instead of beginning. Budgets and timelines are constantly shrinking but it feels like we really need to slow down, look around, and ask ourselves–are we doing this the right way? Is our process what we want it to be?

This constant reflection is one thing I love about documentary. There isn’t always a clear answer and that answer isn’t always binary. A documentary isn’t only good or bad, and its value isn’t necessarily tied to the quality of the image or sounds. Access out weighs quality, and the ability to gain access is distinctly human.