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| Module 11 | | Studying Social Issues or Topics
through Documentary |
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Documentaries can also be used in the classroom to study various social issues or topics. Viewing a provocative documentary about a particular issue or topic can often stimulate discussion on that issue or topic. Given fair-use copyright rules, you can use copies of many of the PBS documentaries for one showing (see Module 12 for information on copyright rules from PBS), although please check on variations between different program’s policies. And, as we have argued throughout these modules, students could also view various on-line clips, although they don’t substitute for the original.
| In using these documentaries, as is discussed in Module 12, it is important that you embed their viewing within some larger purpose for viewing. You need to provide some background frameworks or perspectives about the issue or topic portrayed in thedocumentary . It is also helpful to having students reading related essays and fiction that provide a range of different perspectives and historical background on an issue or topic. For example, if you are studying the issue of family conflict as portrayed in some of the previously mentioned documentaries, you may have students reading some short stories about family conflict.
| Click here for teaching units based on various teen issues related to PBS Frontline documentaries.
| Finding relevant documentaries. You
can use any of the general movie search engines to search by topic
or issue:
| Internet Movie Data Base
Rotten Tomatoes
Amazon.com: Documentary
Or you can use the following sites:
| History documentaries
National Society of Social Studies Teachers [ programs/videos worth watching ]
Education Media Foundation [ a site employed throughout these modules that includes video clips/videos on topics related to media representations, gender, advertising, and media corporate control ]
Viewing Race Project, National Video Resources
PBS: In the Mix [ issues of concern to adolescents ]
PBS: Flashpoints [ issues of civil liberties, First Amendment rights, and security after 9/11 ]
Center for Independent Documentary [ for more specified documentary distributors ]
MediaRights.org
Cambridge Documentary Films [deals with social issues (includes video clips) ]
Documentary Education Review [ a major site with lots of documentaries organized by themes/topics ]
Museum of Broadcast Communications: DocuFest [an interactive on-line site for classroom use ]
The Example of Social Class
| One example of an issue that could be studied is social class and how difference s in class shape people’s self image, attitudes, and practices. As discussed in Module 4, the PBS program, People Like Us, provides a useful introduction to the issues of social class. It includes clips of people discussing their own experiences with social class, as well as background material on ways of defining class differences.
| One useful documentary series for studying social class is the BBC-produced “UP” series directed by Michael Apted.
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42-Up on RottenTomatoes.com
42-Up on metacritic.com
Apted, M. (2000). 42-Up. New York: The New Press.
Beginning in 1964, Apted filmed a group of 7-year-old British boys and girls representing different class backgrounds, creating the first documentary, 7-Up. Then, every 7 years, until they were 42 years old, he made another documentary about the same group, with the 42-Up version appearing in 1998. The series documents the influence of social class on these participants’ lives, particularly in terms of their education and careers, suggesting the high degree of predictability associated with the British system. Most of the upper-middle-class participants attend private school, elite universities (Cambridge or Oxford), and achieve lucrative careers. One of the interesting exemptions is a Cambridge graduate who ends up teaching math in a poor London school. Most of the working-class participants struggle in their careers, although they define their satisfaction with life particularly terms of their family roles and connections.
| One of the effective techniques employed in the series is that in each new 7-year version, Apted include clips from the previous versions to show changes in the people’s development over the span of 42 years. It also shows how those changes are very much defined in terms of cultural attitudes linked to the larger British class system.
| Another documentary related to class is American Movie (1999), by Chris Smith, which portrays a young amateur filmmaker, Mark Borchardt, from a working-class Wisconsin background who is attempting to make a horror film. It portrays the ways in which, despite his economic struggles to survive on an early-morning paper delivery job, he finds the time and support to make his film. It also represents an example of a production in that the director lets the action unfold as Mark encounters repeated set-backs in making his film. (Click here for video clips/trailers.)
| A FilmEducation unit contrasts this film with Roger & Me:
(scroll down to find title)
| Unlike Michael Moore’s feature length documentary, Roger & Me (1989) about General Motors shutting a car plant in Flint, Michigan, American Movie does not have a crusading, investigative edge or agenda. Smith has an interest in his characters, finds them empathetic and tries to convey this to the audience. There is no axe to grind, there are no unpleasant truths to be unmasked. Roger & Me is an example of cinema verité — Moore is very present in the film and seeks to ask direct questions of his subjects. American Movie conforms more to the traditions of Direct Cinema with its apparent non-interference by the director. “We felt by just working as a team with me doing camera and Sarah doing sound, we could get much more intimate footage than if we went in with a full film crew.” (Chris Smith, Director). Working as a two-person crew for camera and sound, Smith and his producer, Sarah Price, were not seen as an intrusion by any of their subjects. As Smith points out, Mark had been making films with tiny crews for most of his life and so everyone involved was used to the idea of being filmed. To that extent, behavior is spontaneous and authentic. “I’m responsible for any behavior you see up on the screen and Chris did not manipulate it in any way.” (Interview with Mark Borchardt, IndieWire online magazine).
In using documentaries to examine some of the social or cultural issues you currently address in your curriculum, you can have students consider the different perspectives portrayed in the documentaries that suggest the complexity of these issues.
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