Self-knowledge the key to a good documentary

Photo by Caeri Dunnell

When international documentary maker, Michael Rabiger, reflected on the films he had made for the BBC, he realised there were common themes related to his own life experiences. One of the messages he imparted to students and lecturers during his visit to Rhodes is how to use life changing experiences to lead you in a certain direction. “Everyone is marked by certain experiences and you’ll keep discovering what those marks are. But they indicate quite clearly what work a person should do,” he says

Rabiger, a British-born American citizen, arrived in South Africa on Sunday, and is at Rhodes University to give a series of workshops to TV students and documentary makers. On Wednesday evening, in an open lecture entitled ‘Authorship, creativity and identity in the crafting of documentary stories,’ Rabiger stressed the importance of discovering one’s inherent artistic identity.

Rabiger is renowned for his book, Directing the Documentary, which is in its fifth edition and has been translated into 10 languages. It’s known as a bible amongst documentary film makers, and Rhodes TV and mobile communications lecturer, Alette Schoon, was inspired by it as a young film maker. “I found it really empowering,” she gushes.

Rabiger, in his quiet, unassuming manner, talks about how he left school when he was 16 and joined a big film studio as an apprentice, even though that mostly involved carrying cups of coffee to his seniors. “The apprentice part was simply that you were allowed to be there and if you could learn from watching, you learnt,” he says with a timid chuckle. Through a series of lucky breaks, he started editing and then he became a director. Rabiger made 21 films for the BBC, before he moved to the USA where he started teaching, studying and writing.

He also opened the Documentary Centre at Columbia University and says, “We had to invent a way of educating people and it turned out to be exactly the way that I would like to have learnt myself. Practise came first, theory came later: Exactly the opposite to the traditional way of educating people.” His job is to untap his students’ experiences, and allow them to use their temperaments to mediate what path they follow and the type of documentaries they create.

Rabiger is very aware of the complex situation South African film makers find themselves in. His message to them is “Keep the faith. You are as valuable as anybody in the country. You have a potential to change hearts and minds. You can’t do it with techniques; you can only do it with self knowledge and painful confrontation of yourself.”

Published in Grocott's Mail on 25 February 2011.