Timid Empathy

My latest documentary -- about a progressive arts/faith-based school in New Jersey -- contains a shot in which its students lead a reggae version of the birthday song. Three seconds long, maybe four. Some of the children are wearing dreadlocks as you might put on any wig to assume a dramatic role. The school distinguishes itself in the inclusive diversity of its student body. Yet in this one shot, no African-Americans are among the song's performers.

The shot fronts a section about teaching music through joy. Indeed, wild enthusiasm is a hallmark of the performance, with nearly the entire upper school participating with loud voices and clapping.

I was enjoined by one funding client to run a rough cut by a specialist in multicultural sensitivity -- the assumption being that, because the film's donors and creative crew are white, we might not possess the necessary sensitivity ourselves.

So, I showed it to the multicultural affairs officer and held my breath, hoping she wouldn't suggest any changes to the content of the film in the perilous interim between visual lock and audio mix. "Leave it in," she said. "It's joyous. The school's all about the welcoming examination of other culture's through the fine and performing arts. Go for it."

Okay, she came to the same conclusion I did. But I didn't trust myself. And I didn't trust the five other smart people to whom I'd shown it. Perhaps the distrust of self is a sign of empathy. Or perhaps it is an indemnification, an abdication of voice. Now if members of my audience bristle at kids with fake dreadlocks I can claim I had the film vetted by an African-American expert and shoulder less responsibility for my art.

I am pulled like taffy between vigorously loving my neighbor and honestly sharing who I am with the bold voice of prophets.

Liberal Arts Filmmakers

At this point in a grueling edit, I feel with every cut as if I've lopped off a finger. In today's ten-hour workday, I trimmed 21 seconds from a time line. Twenty-one seconds. I policed "ums" and "ahs" from 8 to 6, tightening the "A" roll like a strand of cat-gut across a tennis racket. It is painful place to be in the post-production. And yet, I would rather be throwing away gold to sculpt 26 beautiful minutes than gilding dross in the strain to fill a mediocre hour.

Meanwhile, my assistants labored as animators. Rachel populated a map of the hemisphere with trees; Taylor created a cutaway of an active volcano. These tasks required research into geography and geology, respectively. Perhaps student filmmakers think themselves lucky of they avoid classes in those subjects. Yet there we were, in a dim dungeon of editing suites, needing nothing so much as knowledge of the continent's population centers and the upward path of magma.

A string of such moments (in the most recent week of this project alone) affirm the liberal arts as the best preparation for a life of media production. Yes, one could attend any number of technical training institutes to master the discipline's soft- and hardware. But a holistic sense of form's fit with content, a researcher's ability to navigate fact and rhetoric -- these seem to me hallmarks of "big picture thinkers," the skillset that may distinguish artists from craftsmen or technicians.