Online Response 4

"Documentaries...offer aural and visual likenesses or representations of some part of the historical world. They stand for or represent the views of individuals, groups, and institutions...setting out to persuade us to accept their views."

Nichols notes the maker of a documentary is often in a skewed power relationship compared to their subjects. Because of film’s inherent ability to represent things as they seem to be, presenting a sense of reality before the camera,   depictions watched by an audience may be perceived as reality. Hopefully, a doc filmmaker has made an effort to portray their subjects fairly, but what if their subject ends up feeling exploited or that they weren’t portrayed fairly?

Most documentarians obtain consent forms from their subjects which grant final (and in most cases total) power to use their footage and depict them in a way that serves the film best. People might feel at ease with how they have been depicted in a film, but they might also feel conflicted with their portrayal, as with the Siegels, the central characters in Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles. They sued Greenfield unsuccessfully, claiming she had slandered them and depicted them as crazy, greedy, and obsessed with consumerist wealth.  Greenfield prevailed in this case, the judge ruling she had not participated in any defamatory conduct.

Perhaps why they complained was not that they felt they had really been misrepresented, but that they hadn’t been represented as better than they were. In photography,  portraiture, and other visual arts, we laud the works that exceed our standard of reality, that portray things as better than they actually are, because that is how we would like to perceive them and ourselves.

In At Berkeley, Wiseman sidesteps some of these issues of representation by representing people for so long. With scenes of things like budget meetings that might last more than half an hour, it is incredibly compelling to perceive what Wiseman has put forth as the truth, perhaps because there is so much of it. What strengthens At Berkeley most, in my opinion, is his depiction of many of these people in different situations, giving us a chance to decide who they are for ourselves.