American Documentary

Film Review

By Pau Subirós

‘Dissemination’ rhymes with ‘frustration’. In the minds of many scientists, this coincidence is most significant. When watching a typical popular science documentary, many specialists believe the interviews are overly cut, the theories excessively simplified, and the recreations inaccurate, if not grossly erroneous.

Still worse, these same documentaries often generate frustration even among their creators, especially when they feel that the demands for clarity and simplicity have forced them too much into an explanatory style and language.

Documentary makers blame their woes on the dryness of scientific topics while scientists lament the trivializing nature of audiovisual media. And they end up delivering pieces to the public that they are unsatisfied with.

From my point of view, so much shared frustration is based on a wrong starting point, which is to think that popular science documentaries should just be festive and entertaining versions of the meticulously detailed articles published in Science or Nature.

This view poses painful demands to both sides: scientists are forced to lower their expectations of depth and accuracy, and documentary makers have to sacrifice their artistic freedom. A marriage will hardly be happy if each one has to give up what they value most in order to get married.

I believe that it all becomes more interesting if we forget about this conception of documentaries as decaffeinated substitutes for conferences and academic journals and start to see them as free voices that, because of their freedom, can offer original perspectives on scientific activity itself.

A good example of this approach can be found in the Catalan feature-length documentary Fauna, by Pau Faus, which portrays life in a lab dedicated to animal research. Since it doesn’t present grand theories, and its title doesn’t contain the words ‘mystery’, ‘wonder’, or ‘discovery’, some might not consider it a scientific dissemination documentary. But it is a documentary film that sparks interest in the processes of science, shows the ethical contradictions that arise during research, and leaves no viewer indifferent. It achieves all this through a skillful combination of documentary tools (patience, observation, and empathy) in combination with those of classical narrative (characters who have goals and face difficulties in achieving them). And also with a good dose of humor, ranging from white to black, alternately generating discomfort and smiles.

I doubt that Fauna is the film that those in charge of the lab would have envisioned as a popular science documentary about their scientific work. But I have the feeling that they are not frustrated with the result (which offers them an unexpected and valuable view of themselves). On the other hand, I am sure that the director is also satisfied with a film in which he has been able to explore the topic without sacrificing the expressive resources of his own language.

At their best, scientific documentaries become great intellectual and emotional stimuli for the audience. Their success does not lie in matching the expository precision of an academic article but in generating intense emotional connections with their subject and in stimulating the genuine curiosity that many so-called ‘dissemination’ documentaries only manage to anesthetize. When we don’t see it as a frustrating limit, ‘dissemination’ rhymes with ‘fascination’.

Fauna premieres on Monday, August 5.

About the Author

Pau Subirós is a writer, director, and screenwriter. He has directed a dozen documentaries and programs for TVE, TV3 and betevé, earning a Gaudí Award for Best Screenplay for the documentary La plaga [The Plague]. Discover more about his projects and achievements at www.pausubiros.com.