Documentaries were defined in this country as “educational films” for the longest time, largely because entire generations were first exposed to prosaic nonfiction films in grammar school. If that view still holds sway in pockets of the U.S. — and it does, unfortunately — we have Ken Burns’ historically valuable and ponderously formulaic PBS opuses to thank.
Michael Moore’s major contribution to documentary, beginning with Roger and Me in 1991, was emphasizing entertainment. Moore’s work lacks, shall we say, a certain factual and chronological rigor, but by jettisoning the genre’s air of solemnity in favor of an irreverent indignation he turned the masses onto documentaries and made the genre commercially and theatrically viable.
We’re now at a juncture where the great majority of feature-length docs explicitly aim to be simultaneously educational and entertaining. What’s missing from the scene, however — and it may have everything to do with our narrative-driven, spoon-fed culture — are ephemeral films that exist in a domain best described by another E-word: experiential.
Longtime San Francisco filmmaker Ellen Bruno is one of the foremost practitioners of this singularly evocative and empathetic style. She doesn’t tell stories, or follow a character’s journey over years or miles, or tease out both sides of a sociopolitical drama. In fact, she isn’t interested in drama at all, if you mean the traditional structural elements of goal, obstacle, conflict, solution, resolution and moral.
Bruno operates in the realm of poetry, which is assuredly the road less traveled of American documentary. Although she’s been making award-winning films for nearly two decades, Bruno’s status as something less than a household name is self-evident when you consider that most people still think of documentaries as a delivery mode for information, not an art form (German director Thomas Riedelsheimer’s Rivers and Tides notwithstanding).
