I just finished The Eagle Huntress. I enjoyed the first parts of the film but eventually got perturbed enough to actually stop the film to check that it was indeed a documentary. After reading some articles I learned that the film was considered controversial because it's claims turned out to be untrue and it was accused of staging scenes. Spoilers: She was not the first female eagle huntress, she wasn't even the only eagle huntress at the festival as the other female contestant was just cut out of the film. They made it seem like she was being discriminated against for being a girl when the reality was that the festival had embraced her warmly, which seems like a fucked up thing to do to that community. Any girl can become a huntress, and the main character actually didn't have any interest in becoming one till a photographer that staged a photo suggested it. They basically completely manufactured the core drama of the film out of whole cloth. They turned a whole community into villains to service a political narrative from a completely unconnected place.
It left me wondering what exactly are the limits before a documentary just becomes a fiction? It reminded me of the old Disney nature films where they did things like send a bunch of poor lemmings over a cliff to manufacture a scene. It turned out lemmings don't even do that, but the staged scene became reality. The same way the people who watched this film were left with an impression of the Kazakh eagle hunters that was inaccurate. They serviced their story line at the expense of their subject.
It's a shame because it feels like more and more documentaries are doing this. (Maybe this is always the way it was and I'm just noticing.) I would have preferred to have seen the actual story of what happened at that festival and that culture than some made up story, even as entertaining and uplifting as it was. I would have liked to have learned more about the girl. It feels like at times that the subjects have turned into just costume and setting.
Documentary film makers are making themselves too much a focus of their films at the expense of their subject as well imo. I get that it's important to tell a story for a filmmaker but in the case of a documentary it feels like truth should be the primary goal and the filmmaker should be almost invisible. Just how much of a filmmakers voice should be expressed in this genre? A documentary still has to try to make some kind of point or tell some kind of tale doesn't it? Is it's primary duty to entertain or to inform?
Submitted January 20, 2018 at 08:54AM by B0NERSTORM http://ift.tt/2BgV4NH
