Lecture: The Moment You Show Up, It's Fiction: Embracing Fiction Storytelling Techniques in Documentary
Thursday, Oct 27: 3:30 – 5pm
Noble Hall
Because of documentary film's associations with "fact" and "truth", we often overlook the form's reliance on the same techniques that storytellers employ in fiction. Likewise, because of fiction's connotations of "invention" and "imagination", we disregard the fact that fiction storytelling grows from the human need to make sense of our very real lives and the world around us. Audiences expect certain storytelling conventions when they watch a film, regardless of form--documentary or fiction. What are those conventions? How do they apply to both fiction and documentary? And what can both documentary and fiction storytellers learn from the ways that storytellers in each form employ these devices? Using examples from his own filmography as well as clips from films that have inspired his work, filmmaker Lou Pepe will discuss storytelling techniques as they relate to both documentary and fiction.
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