Reinhold Jaretzky, Author and director of documentaries and TV reportages. Member of the Commission for the New ZeLIG
When I interviewed Woody Allen in autumn 1998 at the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Munich, some ZeLIG students happened to be in town. The idea arose to ask the great man who had given the name to the film school in Bozen to sign the poster of the tenth anniversary of the film school. At the same time this would make the director aware of this South Tyrolean mark of appreciation. Woody signed but he ignored the hint of the school name in his inimitable melancholic absent manner. Woody Allen‘s Zelig is a fictional work which enigmatically plays with documentary as a form. Seemingly a documentary, but a fiction film in reality, this ambivalence shaped the mood of the ZeLIG school before its new direction as a proper school for documentaries. You sat through the compulsory exercises only to throw yourself finally at script development, dialogue and scene shooting. At that time documentary was the ashen-coloured Cinderella as against the promising world of fiction. When ZeLIG finally opted for documentary, the realism of what was possible entered the school and everybody who applied knew what to expect.

Wondrously the dichotomy of aristocratic and prosaic film art remained in the collective values of the ZeLIG students. Now the (artistic) documentary was the most prestigious whereas the TV documentary was partly smiled at with sympathy, partially despised as a trivial product. It’s not difficult to understand the attraction of the classical documentary: the author/director is a creative autocrat who collects material he’s interested in by following his curiosity and fantasy und and edits it into a narrative which is only bound by “his” perspective. The visual aesthetic, paces, rhythm, tendency, thematic weighting and so on, are all subject to his point of view and taste. The work offered to the public is – if successful – the condensed reality view and reality experience of the author. This is not the case for TV documentaries. Here, the measure of all things is not the author but the addressee, the viewers, who should be reached in as large numbers as possible. Quite often the editorial department prescribes tight formats, in order to guarantee uniformity and high recognition value and to bind the viewers. The author/director has hardly any chance for self-expression in these projects; he has to prove himself as a skilled craftsman who can create a product as dreamed of by all feature departments: a documentary which simultaneously uncovers, enlightens, informs and entertains and which can be found in mainstream as well as niche channels, as it achieves high ratings over long periods and ideally can also be sold abroad.

What sounds like heaven and hell describes the reality of a market where each documentary maker has to find his place. Therefore a school for documentary cannot avoid hell which in reality is a place for commercial and yet very diverse and also creative documentary projects – after all, training in documentary making is not a workshop for poetry. ZeLIG has always attached great importance to preparing the students to what happens after the diploma. How to carry on filming after being independent of the school and its equipment? It is unquestionable that a school should offer a large space to the creative and experimental fantasies of its students, that is to offer all didactic and technical possibilities to the type of “radical film poet” or “docuidealist”, which serve to realize the creative will in the form of individual documentaries. And this despite the depressing fact that television has very few slots for such individual expression, and that the commissioning editors who remain faithful to such an aesthetic are mostly at the threshold of retirement. This reality also means that film funding mostly makes the financial contribution of TV channels a precondition. Nevertheless – and this is part of the self-image of ZeLIG – artistic documentary must remain at the core even if these elaborate projects often involve great personal sacrifice, when such a film only reaches a festival audience and the author has to resign himself to self-exploitation with regard to the profit for his performance.

But since documentary film work can indeed provide a secure living, and film students (if they wish to) have a right to a practical plan for living, it is right that ZeLIG also cultivates documentary with a focus on the TV market. There is indeed a hunger for features in the editorial departments since it has been shown that they can achieve astonishingly large audiences. The demand for authors who are able to serve such a format is accordingly high. “Craftsmanship” is a category which describes the qualifications of these authors.

In contrast to artistic documentaries, TV documentaries must exist without stylistic experiment, without mystification, exaggerated “ritardandi”, and so on. The remote control is the weapon of the viewer which he uses when he feels overtaxed or senses a lack of entertainment. The pact with the viewer demands popular means guiding them – like the voice-over narration hated by film students, and so unpopular because it takes away from the aesthetic aura of the work and seemingly sinks to a journalistic level. Especially remote from pure documentary are the docu-dramas so sought-after on the international market which by means of re-enactment strive for a fusion between documentary presentation and feature-film-like entertainment. Over the last ten years an enormously wide spectrum of documentary narratives has developed between the classic hardcore interview documentary and the semi-scenic docu-thriller. It doesn’t only have a wide variety of applications but also offers the talents and preferences of the students a truly rich choice. It is to ZeLIG’s credit constantly to keep an eye on the reality of the documentary market. Documentary-maker is indeed a profession with a growing perspective for the future.