I appreciated that the McClane book has brought up something that I noticed during a lot of my reading and during our class discussions: nearly all of the esteemed documentarians are white men… So the question is if these minority groups are still making films but have less of a profile or if they are simply not creating films to begin with? McClane says that out of the 13,400 members of the Director’s Guild of America, only about 7% are female directors. In 2003, white men directed more than 80% of US television epsidoes, while African-Americans only directed 43, or 5% and Latinos only 14 or 2%. This was not completely shocking to me because in my mind, documentary-making is a lot more “open-minded” than television, and I wish that McClane had provided specific statistics on documentary directing, but the point is still valid: the history of documentary film is built upon white men.
This ties back to a Gender and Stem course I took in which we discussed how science is never “objective” because it comes from the point of view of the scientists and is therefore limited by that scientist’s inherent biases. Thus, if a scientist is a white man, he is coming from a much different background and set of experiences than an African-American woman. This seems to hold true for filmmaking as well. I really like that in the documentary Wattstax (1973), director Mel Stuart used a crew made up of as many black filmmakers as he could find to pursue the “insider’s perspective” of the mores and problems of urban black Americans in the mid-1970s. If filmmaking included more people from different gender/racial/ethnic backgrounds, I do believe that the content and authenticity of documentaries could become a lot more dynamic. The main order of business then is how to make documentary-making more accessible to non-white men?
Also, if this book had been written by a man, would this topic even have been brought up?