Documentary Director in Front of the Camera as a Way of Building Symbolic Capital Through Storytelling
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Documentary director isn´t always seen on the screen, but it isn´t anything entirely rare as well. In my paper I will explain how different approaches to documentary storytelling work when the director decides to ´perform in front of the camera and how these different approaches influence public image of the director which could be crucial for building of his symbolic capital (as Bourdieu sees it) and later can influence decision-making process of film funds. With the use of discourse analysis, I identify four different styles Slovak directors used to be present in their movies. The study was made on all Slovak feature-length documentaries with the focus on movies of last decade when this approach to storytelling was much more present. Out of hundred feature-length documentaries I have chosen ten with the strongest presence of directors in the storytelling either in personal voice-over commenting on what we see in the movie, or in direct presence on the screen, where I identified three different positions: position of the director as an investigator of political affairs, position of the director telling his personal life-story and the director showing his skills in staging and influencing the reality he is interested in. Later, I confront those different positions, or roles as discourse analyst J. P. Gee would call them, with critical discourse on directors who use them and with evaluations of the projects submitted to Slovak Audiovisual Fund by these directors, in order to tell how choosing of these practices influence their public image and if it helps them to be more successful in application processes. |
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