Theme filmmakers

Time is an increasingly rare commodity for filmmakers, especially during preproduction and editing. Yet time is often what enables a film to have depth, in terms of research, themes, and layers of storytelling it can enhance creativity. As a group, we need to resist the pressure to turn out documentary products, rather than documentary films. 

Theme is the most basic lifeblood of a film," says filmmaker Ric Burns (see also Chapter 17). "Theme tells you the tenor of your story. This is what this thing is about." As mentioned. Burns chose to tell the story of the ill-fated Donner Party and their attempt to take a shortcut to California in 1846 not because the cannibalism they resorted to would appeal to prurient viewers but because their story illuminated themes and vulnerabilities in the American character. These themes are foreshadowed in the film s opening quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, a French author who toured the United States in 1831. He wrote of the "feverish ardor" with which Americans pursue prosperity, the "shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it," and the way in which they "cleave to the things of this world," even though death steps in, in the end. These words presage the fate of the Donner Party, whose ambitious pursuit of a new life in California will have tragic consequences. 

Themes may emerge from the questions that initially drove the filmmaking. On one level. My Architect is about a middle-aged filmmaker s quest to know the father he lost at the age of 11, some 30 years... 

The theme of the radioactivity was initially addressed by filmmakers a few years before the Second World War. Many films were made, inspired by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent tensions between the two superpowers during the Cold War. These films reflected the anxieties of the population, such as the risk of nuclear war, the destruction of humanity or mutations due to radiation. Representations of... 

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