Mikael Opstrup: The documentary Narrative 3

Remark to Ib Bondebjerg by Mikael Opstrup

Thanks for Ib Bondebjergs comment on my ‘Den dokumentariske fortælling’ which I guess can be translated to ‘The documentary narrative’. However it misses my approach to the matter.

Remark to Ib Bondebjerg by Mikael Opstrup

Thanks for Ib Bondebjergs comment on my ‘Den dokumentariske fortælling’ which I guess can be translated to ‘The documentary narrative’. However it misses my approach to the matter.

First of all my view is the creators point of view, it’s an attempt to clarify the elements the documentary creator works with. It is not a genre classification. Secondly I deal with the narrative structure – not the format or the aesthetic solutions.

Making a documentary, the director needs to know whether the story is constructed by the theme or the narrative.The first one being the journalistic driven documentary program and the second the narrative driven documentary film.

By journalistic driven I mean that the next possible scene in the film is decided by the theme, the purpose being to deepen and improve the knowledge of the theme. In the narrative driven documentary the next scene is defined by the story you’re telling. Let me give an example: in ‘The Monastery’ it is just as impossible for Pernille Rose Grønkjær to include an informative scene about the roots and history of monasteries in Russia and Denmark as it is for Alistair Maclean to include a scene that describes the political role of Greece in WWII in ‘The guns of Navarone’.

The creation of this narrative documentary is what my poetic ‘The documentary narrative’ is about. A genre that is defined by the complementary conflict between re-telling reality and reconstructing it artistically.That – for the creator – contains an insoluble contradiction and it is the successful solution of the insolubleness that is the artistic core of documentary film making. And that fascinates me so much.

This point may not be so interesting from the point of view of the product – the documentary film that is finished. But from the creating point of view it is the key question.10 years as tutor at pitching workshops around Europe; 4 years as production adviser at The Danish Film Institute and 15 years as documentary producer has confronted me with an endless number of projects where the major struggle for the creators has been to find the creative narrative that is included in the actual reality the film apparently is about.This is the core of the director’s work when developing the project at the early stage and with trying to explain it to film consultants and commissioning editors.

On top of this comes HOW you choose to tell your story once you have found out WHAT the story is: do you include dramatizations; interviews; a strong narrator; poetic montage etc. But that’s another story…

Mikael Opstrup

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Allan Berg Nielsen
Allan Berg Nielsen

Allan Berg Nielsen started the first documentary cinema in Randers, Denmark way back in the 1970’es. He did so at the museum, where he was employed. He got the (16mm) films from the collection of the National Film Board of Denmark (Statens Filmcentral). He organised a film festival in his home city, became a member of the Board of Directors of the Film Board, started to write about films in diverse magazines, were a juror at several festivals and wrote television critiques in the local newspaper. From 1998-2003 Allan Berg was documentary film consultant (commissioning editor) at The Danish Film Institute, a continuation of the Film Board. Since then free lance consultant in documentary matters.

abn@filmkommentaren.dk

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