The Role of Habits in Documentary Filmmaking and in the Recognition of Documentary Works

Abstract

It is generally agreed that documentary refers to reality. I argue that documentary is the cinematic form that elevates human beings’ experience with reality to an artistic level, and that the documentary work may be conceived as a proxy of the perceiver’s existential experience. Habitual practices related to recognizing authentic reality and its constraints underlie the filmmaker’s commitment to not violating it, and behaviors exhibited accordingly inform practices. Habits, such as seeing the past through pictures and asking questions to understand other people’s thought, have creatively evolved into cinematic techniques such as the use of filmic or photographic archives and interviews. The habit of deferring to experts for genre categorization determines that, due to their authority, the acceptance of challenging works facilitates genre transformation. A better understanding of processes that engage human beings with existence may help to comprehend documentary filmmaking practices, and vice versa.