Miranda's disastorous date

So i'm watching 'sex and the city' and this guy Miranda is dating is a documentary filmmaker. So clearly he gets my attention immediately. After they watch a docu about World War II he says something that I could have said a few weeks ago.

He says something like "its amazing how a documentary film can capture the emotions of pain and suffering - something that narrative films can never achieve." I'm sitting their grinning - the kind of grin you have when you understand some one and at the same time you know that you know better :) He goes on to say that narrative films are "bogus". A few weeks ago, i could have thanked him for articulating my feelings.

I had a natural affinity with documentary films when I first got initiated into this genre. It made me feel things - and I knew then that this is what I want to do! After watching narrative films all my life and encountering documentaries only when I came into my first year of undergrad college (at 18), I didn't appreciate narrative films anywhere as much as documentaries. I had an instant understanding of the importance of this particular medium. It just made a lot of sense to me. Without realizing it, I began to look at the narrative form as inferior to the realism of documentaries.

Cut to six weeks back from present - a class i attended called "Directing the Actor". I had an experience that made me change my mind. The problem with my earlier ideas and that of Miranda's date (the filmmaker) was our narrow concept of "reality". Documentary films do not by definition mean reality - in fact, when a documentary filmmaker approaches her subject, she interferes in the subject's reality and thus alters it. The reality of the subject's life ceases to exist when the filmmaker intervenes. So who is to say if what we see in the film is real or not?

Contrary to what I believed earlier, I feel now that the possibility of achieving the purest form of reality is more with the narrative form than it is with documentaries. In the narrative form, an individual writes a script based on their own realities or the realities that they have observed of others around them - basically from their own life experiences and interactions. If the scriptwriter is honest with their work, they will create a script that has certain truths in it. Now the most crucial role of creating the reality on screen is of the actors. The director has to ensure that she is able to push the actors to be true in the moment and feel their characters and situations. It is a lot of work and involves a lot of people in the process of creating reality - but it sure is possible.

This is not to say that all narrative films create reality and all documentary films don't. There sure is a lot of crap being made in our world - and most of it is "bogus" :) The point that i'm trying to make is that the responsibility of creating reality lies solely with the filmmaker - no matter what form of filmmaking she employs. By reality I do not mean only serious reality as in the "pain and suffering" that our friend mentions to Miranda - reality refers to all human experiences that we as humans can relate to. And we may not consciously know it, but all films that touch our hearts and make us FEEL succeed in doing this one most important task.

For all Karan Johar fans: sorry for wasting your time..hehe..