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“The Line Blurs” at DCTV
Tomorrow evening at 7:30 pm, DCTV will be hosting “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking,” a panel on the increasingly ambiguous division between fiction and nonfiction in filmmaking. It is a timely discussion, one that will probe questions as to whether or not a delineation between the two forms has ever existed, and why viewers and critics alike are bent on categorization.
The panel will feature filmmakers Josephine Decker, Keith Miller, Lynne Sachs and Caveh Zahedi, with Nathan Silver in the moderator’s chair. Silver, director of Soft In The Head and Exit Elena, shoots without a script, mining the people before him for characters and action. With his methods in mind, Silver was kind enough to shed some light on how he views his own work. You can expect more of the same tomorrow at the panel, which is free with RSVP, and hear from Nathan below.
When making movies, I’m always thinking about how to steal from my life, so I go back and forth about what label to stick on them. I called Exit Elena a “home movie” in the director’s notes. You’ll find that nearly every critic called it a “home movie” as well. This taught me that critics actually read your press notes. Look, I don’t know my movies any better than the audience or the critics, so who am I to slap a label on them? I know a lot about what went into the making of them, but in the end, the movies live their own lives. It’s like asking my mother to explain me: she’ll tell you that immediately upon entering the world, I peed on her, but what does that have to do with how I interact with this guy or that lady or you? It’s anecdotal. When it comes to this debate on how to digest fiction films that have documentary elements or documentaries that have fiction elements, I think it’s basically inconsequential and regards the process and not the movies themselves. So I decided to put together this panel to see how other so-called hybrid filmmakers feel about it. I also did it because I generally hate panels and wanted to see just how difficult it is to moderate one…
