Deep Listening in Documentary Filmmaking

Notes from a recent talk prepared for a session at Utah Valley University’s 2015 Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration:

Truth is, I’m a talker. Any of my friends will tell you.

We teach what we need to learn the most.

This is a process of growing into aspirations.

I started making documentaries because I wanted to talk. I Always thought of making as communication. We often frame it in terms of broadcasting.

We live in a time of self-publishing: status messages, tweets, YouTube, and so on.

What can we learn from listening?

Today I would like to talk about listening in a number of ways. Not just hearing, but the multiple meanings of listening as receiving and being shaped. The ongoing process of striving to have information and experiences enter your heart. I am going to address listening, specifically, as a tool for being present, gaining clarity, acting with clear intention, and arriving at simplicity.

I hope that what we talk about here will extend past documentary and that there will be a thought or two that you can integrate into your work or life. I’m directly addressing documentary, because that is the tool I use, but these ideas can extend into any field.

Being Present

"Usually when it is so simple we say, "Oh, I know that! It is quite simple. Everyone knows that." But if we do not find its value, it means nothing. It is the same as not knowing." - Shunryu Suzuki

Listening is the foundation of my approach to each stage of documentary filmmaking.

“Deep Listening is an ongoing practice of suspending self-oriented, reactive thinking and opening one’s awareness to the unknown and unexpected. It calls on a special quality of attention that poet John Keats called negative capability. Keats defined this as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” - David Rome and Hope Martin, mindful.org

I’m slowly learning that the best questions I can ask, as a documentary filmmaker (or really as a listener), are ones rooted directly in the present conversation. 

Sure, I prepare questions in advance for lulls and to give shape to an interview, but some of my best questions end up being ones like, “what do you mean by that?” “how does that work?” “can you explain that a bit more?” Or, in the case of the upcoming clip, the simple question “do you miss it?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIFParr5OY)

In any communication medium, you have a built-in listening tool. The camera, for me, is an excuse to listen, but so is a pen, a recorder, or any other tool you bring to the table. The device itself is simply the concrete excuse, but it stems from the impulse to be present.

“Letting go of the “web of me” is the first step toward seeing and hearing others more fully.” - David Rome and Hope Martin

Being present allows you to truly listen and ask questions from a place of empathy.

So often we hurry along in our conversations, quick to assume that we have understood. As long as we engage in conversations fighting to getting our next word in or simply focusing on our next question, it is difficult to have empathy.

Empathy, in my view, is the process of actively being shaped. You are intentional in opening yourself up to the lessons of the other person, without assuming that your soon-to-be-related story is the same thing. It’s not, but we have a hard time being mindful of that if we are not making consistent attempts to gradually and gently bring ourselves back to the present.

I’m far, far from perfect in this. The camera is the tool that helps me the most. It forces me to be quiet and listen. I’m rewarded for asking sensitive questions.

Clarity 

I’m learning that many of the best stories are already powerful long before you show up. The skill that is particularly and constantly difficult, is identifying those stories.

Because of that, I often see myself as a translator.

The challenge is using the medium to arrive at clarity. It’s as simple as, “what is really going on here?” “What is the essence of the story I’m attempting to tell?”

Clarity is a matter of taking away elements that obscure the real meaning. I agree with Robert Bresson who stated that, “One does not create by adding, but by taking away” or Leo Babuata who recently shared that, “Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identifying the essential. Eliminate the rest.”

Arriving at clarity empowers us to be intentional in our actions, regardless of the activity. If we are making a movie, it clarifies our themes, meaning, tone, and myriad other decisions. If you have clarity about what makes you feel good to eat, you are empowered to decline certain meal choices. And so on. 

Intention

I am generally an indecisive person, but the filmmaking process forces me to make decisions. It is pretty simple to act, but when we move forward with a clear vision of our intentions, it spirals to all of our decisions.

When I was making my first movie as a student here at UVU, I was lucky to be mentored by Scott Carrier, a regular contributor to This American Life. Looking back, I can now see that what Scott was consistently trying to do is force us to clarify our intentions. We’d meet to discuss the film and blurt out long, philosophical tangents as he sat patiently listening. In the end, he’d ask, “so, how does it begin?” “What is the ending?”

When you are imagining the act of creating, it’s easy to fall into a trap where of comparing yourself to the great masters of the past. The only antidote to the completely understandable onslaught of narcissism, is to begin building. Intention guides your steps along the way. In the end, I’m often happy if I can simply build something that performs its function. A bookshelf that holds the weight of books.

Intention is something I struggle to define and re-define with each project. It’s far from something I’ve mastered. It is a gradual process filled with mistakes. 

Simplicity & Wabi-Sabi

If I’m dedicatedly listening throughout my process, the end goal is simplicity.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci

“Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.” - Christoph Niemann

By simplicity, I mean a hard-earned understanding of the essence. It does not mean easy. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

I attempt, with each project, to arrive at a certain elegance or grace. By that, I mean the story feels like it was intended to be that way all along.

When I do it well, the intention is to make it look like it was easy, when in fact we spent hours upon hours listening and refining our understanding.

My thinking has been heavily influenced by ancient Japanese aesthetics.

One concept that has affected me, in particular, is wabi-sabi.

“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.” - Wabi-Sabi for Artists

"The simplicity of wabi-sabi is probably best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize. (Things wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn’t mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole. It also doesn’t mean in any way diminishing something’s "interestingness," the quality that compels us to look at something over, and over, and over again." - Leonard Koren

I’m fascinated by the ongoing pursuit of trying to recognize the beauty that already exists. Listen to the world and open your eyes.

When we truly listen, we open ourselves up to be shaped by the world. We come to understand underlying meaning. When we talk, after all of this, we feel confident in our intentions.

Interview with Eri Hayward, Subject of Transmormon

Eri was recently interviewed by Huffington Post writer Randall Frederick about our short documentary "Transmormon" and her life since sex reassignment surgery. Please find a few excerpts below. You can read the full interview on the Sexuality & the City website. 

There’s a touching moment in the film where you talk about feeling like “just an ugly boy.” Do you feel pretty now that you’ve had the surgery? What has your self-image been like recently?

It was something that I really struggled with. Being told that I was not as good looking as my sister or that I was “a good looking man” was not a compliment. Being told that I was a prettyboy or a girly boy was a compliment in my mind.

I struggled a lot with self-image and spent a good chunk of time trying to replicate what was fashionable, what is desired for women to do, applying tons of makeup to look “pretty.” I even struggled with an eating disorder, trying to find acceptance for my own self-image that I hated for so long, but have come to find that what is more important than being pretty is having a beautiful heart and having a healthy body. It was a long journey and required love and support from those around me and from myself as well.

With that said, there are still days when I think my shoulders are kind of broad and my boobs aren’t big enough but all in all I am happy with who I am today.

You talked about how you didn’t get along well with God as a child. You said that you were even angry with God because of the way you were made. Please tell me more about that.

I can’t remember my exact wording but yes, the relationship was complicated. Being told that the reason I am a boy was because God made me that way was not a brownie point in the eyes of a young trans girl.

I have since come to realize that while it has been a very difficult and a lonely struggle at times, everything that I experienced because I was made a boy has made me who I am today. For that I am grateful. It has strengthened my belief that things may not be how we think they ought to be, but that is only because we cannot see the big picture. Our part is to be good people and let God take care of the why and what is happening in the universe.

Interview with Director Torben Bernhard on "Transmormon"

"I think my approach with Transmormon was directly influenced by my personal faith crisis. In trying to healthily integrate the mixed experiences of my past, I’ve wanted to move forward without anger, but also without tidy censorship."

Torben was recently interviewed by Huffington Post writer Randall Frederick regarding our short documentary "Transmormon." They discuss filmmaking, producing Transmormon, life, empathy, and spirituality. Please find a few excerpts below. You can read the full interview on the Sexuality & the City website. Also, check out the final article on The Huffington Post. 

The film did an excellent job at respecting the faith of the Hayward family and I’ve found that filmmakers can sometimes go for the “cheap” shots which blame religion. What is the nature of your own spiritual life?

My own spiritual life has grown increasingly complicated. I tend to be more interested in questions than answers and that has posed some difficulty when it comes to my involvement with a particular faith. I’ve never said any of this publicly (and, in fact, I’ve been purposely ambiguous), but I struggled to hold onto my faith from the time I came home as a missionary for the Mormon church in Thailand. I remained going to church for years and made many efforts to hold on, but in the end, I’ve led a life relatively distant from any religious organization for about five years now. It’s very difficult. My family, on both sides, extend back to the Mormon pioneers and it was hard on everyone around me when I decided that it was no longer a good fit. It’s a very odd thing to feel alienated from something that so directly and dramatically changed my life. I still see myself as a naturally spiritual person, but I’m sure laying my beliefs on a table would reveal a semi-coherent mess.

I think my approach with Transmormon was directly influenced by my personal faith crisis. In trying to healthily integrate the mixed experiences of my past, I’ve wanted to move forward without anger, but also without tidy censorship. I think I employed some of the same lessons that have shaped my ongoing religious experience into the artistic approach of the documentary. I never felt like cheap shots had to be made while making this film, because the tensions were real and the juxtapositions stark enough to speak for themselves.

The second part of that last question brings me to the fact that there are changes taking place in Christianity right now to “allow” gays in the Church but trans people remain a rather divisive topic. The intersection of faith and sexuality can be problematic. How were you intentional, as a storyteller, about making sure both sides – faith and sexuality – were represented fairly?

Part of representing faith and sexuality fairly in Transmormon was first recognizing that they both played significant roles in the story and there needed to be space in the documentary to discuss both. I never saw the two dualistically, but instead part of a layered internal experience that took Eri years to fully unpack and understand. Her sexuality was real and the tension she felt regarding her religious devotion was as well.

The challenge for me was attempting to let both of these realities exist independently while illustrating that they meet in the body. The last interview I conducted with Eri, which is actually the last scene with her in the movie, was spent discussing this very intersection. I was so impressed and inspired by her final realization that she was giving her spirit what it needed.

Thoughts on Storytelling

By Torben Bernhard

Recently, I was asked to speak to a university social media class on the value of storytelling and listening.  It was a useful exercise in collecting a number of ideas knocking around my head for the past years. Hopefully you will find some value in them as well: 

• I use story as a means of clarifying my thinking. When I am working with clients, often their greatest setback is not that they lack an interesting or desirable product, but that they do not know what their story is. When they have a story, it may not be one that best describes their company and product. It’s difficult to create a clear brand, blog, logo, etc. when the author doesn’t know their story.
• To me, storytelling and identity are intrinsically linked, because we package our memories in anecdotes. So, if we have a difficult time telling the story, it means that we do not clearly understand the nature of the identity, or essence, at hand, whether that be individually, as a company, an idea, etc.
• "Storytelling is essential to human life. Telling stories — arranging the events of our lives into units with beginning, middle, and end so that we can understand them — is the primary way people create meaning for themselves, teach, and learn how to behave, understand their history. Conversation is itself a performance. We manipulate facial expression, gesture, voice tones, body language. We enact different characters. So our ordinary lives empower us “all” to be storytellers, to make that first step toward public performance of self and other characters." — Jo Radner
• "Memory is a poet, not an historian." — Paul Geraldy
• Stories train us to identify the essential and eliminate the rest. They are a filter for getting rid of extraneous details that bog down our messages. Stories teach us to be intentional in our thinking and ask ourselves the question, “what can go?”
• ee cummings once said, “like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.”
• He knew that precision creates movement, whereas inexactness slows movement. Any good magic trick or comedy act, which have their base in storytelling, are performed with an attention to the details and a close shepherding of the story. 
• The more we clarify our stories, the easier it is for people to find themselves in them. The easier it becomes to find ourselves.
• Stories are malleable. They can change and grow. There is a certain inspirational creativity inherent to storytelling. It tells us that, though facts certainly exist, we often mischaracterize stories for facts. When we recognize this, we see the road open up again and invite us to tweak our stories in service of betters ones.
• "Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives — the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change — truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts." — Salman Rushdie, Novelist
• Any good story needs a listener.
• I believe that the future belongs to listeners. With the overwhelming torrent of information that flows in a single day, it is much-too-easy for our story to fall on deaf ears.
• What different ways can we listen through social media? Listening stations, hashtags, retweeting and 'giving' more than 'getting.'
• Through listening, we have the potential to discover our tribe. For example, that is how I met Michael Margolis. He was obviously tracking tweets that used the hashtag storytelling, so he came across my post on David vs. Goliath and the Art of Storytelling.
• A friend of mine once said that digesting content is a process of aggregation, curation, and integration. First, we grab a bunch of data. Then we curate the most interesting stuff. Finally, if we are lucky, we make strides in integrating the information we curate.
• We are also able to keep track of how our particular story is being received through listening. If we pay attention to the statistics and, maybe more importantly, the conversation, then we are uniquely equipped to evolve our stories to accommodate our audience.
• As you know, social media is not a megaphone. Thought it may seem like it is, at times, the most fruitful exchanges, as in life, will always be the ones where people meaningfully reciprocate.
• Through listening, we have a unique opportunity to learn. We can shape our efforts by following and listening to experts who regularly broadcast tools and tips at no cost.
• On a less technological note, the exchange between the storyteller and listener is ancient and profoundly human, as we can easily note when we are forced to sit and just take in stories, like StoryCorp. It goes back to the campfire.

David vs. Goliath and the Art of Storytelling

By Torben Bernhard, Co-founder of OHO Media

I’m convinced that one of the most important and meaningful ways to rise above the social media stream is to know your story and know how to tell it. We need to, at the very least, be able to clearly articulate our purpose.

I think most of us usually feel like this first clip: unsure, concerned about coming off as immodest, and unable to reduce our story down to its most luminous moments. Sometimes we simply just don’t know what story to tell. It took me a long time to realize that I was not destroying narratives by refraining from sharing nuances. As an audience, we like those critical moments — the one’s that represent a decisive unfolding of destiny. Those often are the moments that contain the nuances without saying them. This is not to say you should oversimplify or that life is easily packaged and complete. On the contrary, it’s often messy and hard to categorize without feeling like you are superimposing structure. But, ultimately, this messiness can be shared and shared well through conveying the moments you deem most central to your story. 

Looking at old sculptures can be a helpful way of getting at this idea. If you had one moment to depict in the battle of David vs. Goliath, which one would it be? Is it right before the critical moment? During the toss? Right after? Art masters have decided this differently. Looking at various representations of the famous fight, you see a diversity of moments deemed “the moment” by the artist. What are the moments in our narrative? Which one’s would we set in stone to encapsulate our story? The apostles were good at this. Homer was good at this (both stories that have had a little bit of staying power). Thanks to Alex Caldiero, the subject of my last film who pointed me to this idea in sculpture, I’ve never looked at art or storytelling the same again. 

Choose your moments. Know your story. Share your story with others. 

Jean Painlevé's 10 Filmmaking Convictions

1. You will not make documentaries if you do not feel the subject. 

2. You will refuse to direct a film if your convictions are not expressed. 

3. You will not influence the audience by unfair means. 

4. You will seek reality without aestheticism or ideological apparatus. 

5. You will abandon every special effect that is not justified. 

6. Trickery will be of no use unless the audience is your confidant.

7. You will not use clever editing unless it illustrates your good intentions. 

8. You will not show monotonous sequences without perfect justification. 

9. You will not substitute words for images in any way. 

10. You will not be content with "close enough" unless you want to fail spectacularly. 

---

Image source: https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion_images/current/current_painleve.png

Notes on Simplicity

The pursuit of elegance and simplicity drives all of our work. For years, we have collected quotes and ideas related to these concepts, because we believe it is in striving for clarity that we begin to generate substantive media with a long shelf life. To truly understand the nature of our messages, we exercise deep listening. Through this process, we work to land on one or two sentences that distill the heart of the documentary, brand, cause, etc. The heart, of course, is what was there all along. It is matter of recognition, not contrivance. If we do our job right, the complexity of the process is erased in the product and the audience is left with a graceful piece of media that seemingly emerged organically. This is an ongoing post that we will return to, from time to time for inspiration. 

"Last night I began my novel. Now I foresee terrifying difficulties of style. It’s no easy business to be simple." — Gustave Flaubert

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." — Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." — Leonard DaVinci

Tips from Kurt Vonnegut:

1. Find a subject you care about.
2. Do not ramble, though.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Have the guts to cut.
5. Sound like yourself.
6. Say what you mean to say.
7. Pity the readers.

"Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." — Albert Einstein

"I think a lot of people see simplicity as the lack of clutter. And that’s not the case at all. True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, ‘Yeah, well, of course.’ Where there’s no rational alternative." — Jony Ive

That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” — Steve Jobs

"Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest." — Leo Baubata

"Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence." — Taken from a piece in The New Yorker by Christoph Niemann detailing the experience he had creating an app, Petting Zoo.

"From one thing, know ten thousand things." — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

"Usually when it is so simple we say, "Oh, I know that! It is quite simple. Everyone knows that." But if we do not find its value, it means nothing. It is the same as not knowing." — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

"Simplicity is at the core of things wabi-sabi. Nothingness, of course, is the ultimate simplicity. But before and after nothingness, simplicity is not so simple. To paraphrase Rikyu, the essence of wabi-sabi, as expressed in tea, is simplicity itself: fetch water, gather firewood, boil the water, prepare tea, and serve it to others. Further details, Rikyu suggests, are left to one's own invention.

But how do you exercise the restraint that simplicity requires without crossing over into ostentatious austerity? How do you pay attention to all the necessary details without becoming excessively fussy? How do you achieve simplicity without inviting boredom?

The simplicity of wabi-sabi is probably best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don't sterilize. (Things wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn't mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole. It also doesn't mean in any way diminishing something's "interestingness," the quality that compels us to look at something over, and over, and over again." — Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, pp. 71-72.

Isn't the same true of art? "Backpacking is the art of knowing what not to take." — Sheridan Anderson

"One does not create by adding, but by taking away." — Robert Bresson