Alexander Street Press held its customer appreciation breakfast Sunday morning, this one celebrating its 10th anniversary as a provider of large-scale digital collections to libraries. As breakfast speaker, the company brought in Patricia Aufderheide, director and founder of the Center for Social Media at American University.
As documentary films have become more important tools for discourse and debate, they have increasingly been scrutinized for accuracy. Was Fahrenheit 9/11 accurate in its indictment of the Bush administration's policies? Are filmmakers bound by a code of ethics to make their works accurate transcripts of reality? Aufderheide described a recent CSM study in which 45 documentary filmmakers were asked to describe incidents that forced them to make difficult ethical decisions. The study, Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work, found that there is no shared core of best ethical practices.
However, each documentarist felt his or her work had integrity. There were some common agreements over values: Most did no harm to their subjects, at least the vulnerable ones (whistleblowers, but not corporate moguls). They gave viewers an honest picture (though not necessarily accurate in the details or chronologically precise). And they maintained responsibility to the project, the contractor, and their own vision.
Some of their ethical choices might seem odd, Aufderheide said. For example, Ken Burns considered it acceptable to show a generic, unnamed photograph of a 1920s-era child in a montage when he knew there was no childhood photo of his subject available—as long as it did not identify it as his subject. On the other hand, a wildlife documentarist has been haunted by his desperate decision to allow his animal wrangler to break the leg of a rabbit during a shoot in which they wanted to show a predator capturing its prey; his excuse was that they had missed the shot twice already and it was their last opportunity at the end of the day.
Aufderheide hopes that documentary filmmakers will engage in a wide-ranging and deeper conversation about ethics in order to develop shared standards.
