A Post about Storytelling, Documentary, and errant Teenagers

            There is a pretty neat web site (and there are many worth your time and effort) called Transom.org. The website is a collection of interviews, reviews, manifestos, workshops, and the like, all geared towards the advancement and understanding of public radio. This past week I got to read the manifesto of Ira Glass, who is the host, creator, and producer of the radio show This American Life. It was interesting to consider how Glass’s ideas on documentary compared with my vision of the documentary imperative. Something that is also interesting to consider is my involvement with mentoring some high school students as they work on their own audio documentaries about political issues in this past election and how these three ideas collide together at this juncture.

            Now, much of Mr. Glass’s manifesto deals with telling documentary stories using the radio as the primary medium and how to construct a story. This is necessary and pertinent because that was the main discussion the last time I was with the students. Stories and narratives are very important because stories are a way to relate information to an audience. As a believing, active, Mormon, I have read the Bible, and I remember in the New Testament there was a fellow from Nazareth that happened to be apt at telling a parable or two. And these stories weren’t just yarns told for amusement, there was a weight, a stance, and a truth melded into the narrative. So it can be easy to trace why I think that a narrative might be especially useful to address pertinent issues and to express opinions without drawing unduly earned ire. However, reading Ira Glass’s manifesto and my experiences with the students has run into some difficulty, not only with each other, but in my own philosophies concerning story and documentary.

            One of the things that I read in Ira Glass’s manifesto that troubled me was how he defined story, or rather, what a story is not. There isn’t any kind of malicious intent behind this, but I felt that Glass treated his version of documentary like a script. As a documentarian and  screenwriter I recognized many of the terms Glass used in discussing how stories are chosen for This American Life; things like raising the stakes and major dramatic question. I know these are valid points and  these points are very well thought out/presented. However, these same points didn’t match up with my interpretation of documentary at all. Yes, I agree that story does make something interesting and there are implicit messages within stories. But can’t something be appreciated without an intermediary attempting to streamline and polish the subject?

            I utilized a couple of texts, both filmic and literary, as I considered the difference between Mr. Glass and myself. First, I think of Fred Wiseman’s La Danse, a documentary film that follows the Paris Opera Ballet through the production of 7 ballets in a season. The film has no narrative arc, it observes almost the entire company from top to bottom. There are characters, but not ones which we explore. But at the same time this is compelling and interesting cinema, there is no need for a narrative arc or a raising of the stakes to act as a mouthpiece for what the film is about; the Paris Opera Ballet. This isn’t the only example of a documentary being about more than a story.

            A second text that comes to mind when considering the idea that stories are needed to drive documentaries is Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. This is a literary example in which there is a narrative arc, but the arc is of so little consequence that it is essentially non-existent. It could be argued that this is a fictional example of an unfocused narrative, but I prefer to think of it as a documentary exercise in digressive/oral story telling. The story of the title takes a back seat to the narrator’s meandering and exploration. Twain was attempting to appreciate the tradition of oral communication in a local setting in script form. The point I am trying to make here is, where Glass sees the germ of an idea or a dead end interaction that is not pursuant of a gist I see a non-traditional narrative waiting to be told.

            But then again my own beliefs and ideas about documentary are challenged as I enter the classroom setting to try and get these high school students to produce an audio documentary. How would I explain to them the philosophical nuance and acceptance that documentary can include fictional narratives without seeming hypocritical or confusing the hell out of these high schoolers? Perhaps the only way to address this issue is to realize the differences and the gap of talent between Ira Glass, those two authors that I mentioned earlier, and the kids I am mentoring now. I would consider Ira Glass a competent story teller, he has made himself a name, a successful radio program, and lots of financial gains. But, I wouldn’t consider him a master at either story or documentary, at least not like Fred Wiseman nor Mark Twain. And by that same token, the students I am mentoring aren’t Ira Glass; yes they are passionate about their subject, they tend to be somewhat technically competent, and are sparsely, intrinsically, versed in what a story is (a beginning, a middle, and an end). But for all their vim and vigor they are also over-reaching, distractible, and teenager-ly people who are struggling with other desires than being critical students within a pedagogical system. So I reconcile myself with this scenario and with my personal philosophy by realizing that these students need the landmarks that Ira Glass presented and discussed in his manifesto in order to introduce themselves to the world of documentary and to become more practiced story tellers. Yet I would hope that they would one day be able to continue up to the level of critical individuals, perhaps even to the level of budding documentarians who may one day see that for all of the good intentions of storytellers like Ira Glass, there is much more to story and documentary than meets the eye.