Liliana Sulzbach and Carlos Roberto Franke’s film is a documentary about the art of documentary. They speak to approximately ten documentary makers from Germany and Brazil, exploring the individual methodologies and motivations. There are two ways of looking at this project. On the one hand it would make a great learning tool. There’s a clear focus on the role of documentary as a tool of social activism, something which unites the filmmakers from both countries. Brazil is a country with multiple social issues and the presence of the Amazon represents an ongoing challenge to Brazilian filmmakers: how to interact and document this vast territory which is constantly under hidden attack from the forces of capital. All the German fillmmakers appeared to be addressing social issues, such as the origin of cheap clothing in the West or the mining industry (one director who had made a film about Bauhaus seemed like the exception brought in to prove the rule). Any student contemplating the range and reason for their potential enquiry would benefit from watching El Metodo. On the other hand, the film adopts a studiously asceptic format. It is composed from talking head interviews with the subjects interspersed with clips from their films. The playfulness of Varda or the dramatic interventions of Morris or the idiosyncrasy of Herzog is eschewed in favour of a wilfully limited use of the format’s aesthetic capacity. In a film which made a point of enquiring into the motivation of documentary filmmakers and how this tied in with their ambitions, the filmmakers’ own technique comes under scrutiny and one questions why they have chosen such an orthodox, conservative approach to relate their point of view.
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